Teaching about it is being opposed by the same people, for the same reasons, using the same tactics.

Except for Ian Plimer, of course, who has changed sides for reasons which defy logic, common sense or anything resembling scientific justification.

Education Advocates Enter the Climate Tempest – ScienceInsider.

Today our Prime Minister announced with a fanfare that she was going to break one of the promises which brought her to power in the 2010 election. She had promised Tasmanian independent MP Andrew Wilkie that her government would implement real and effective reform of the poker machine industry. Now the political landscape has changed, so she has announced that she will not keep that promise, and Wilkie has withdrawn his support from the government. No-one should be surprised at this – it is what our politicians do. But is is sad. It will ensure a larger war chest of funds for the ALP in the next election, but those funds will be at the expense of considerable misery for many Australian families.

Strangely, no prominent ALP figures have spoken publicly about the need for Australian politicians to make promises which they later decide not to keep. Liberal party politicians have been much more honest about this, with former Prime Minister John Howard admitting frankly after the 1996 election that politicians make ‘core’ promises (which they intend to keep) and ‘non’core’ promises (which they don’t), and current Opposition Leader Tony Abbott’s surprisingly honest admission that not everything he says should be taken as ‘gospel truth’.

No-one in Australia would want the manifestly corrupt US system of government to be imposed on us here, but surely we can somehow find a better way that this? I believe that the only answer is for us to elect more independent and minor party members of parliament. Whether they are from the right, left or centre, they will ensure that our political leaders are held accountable, and not surrounded by sycophants who will agree with whatever they say or do, not matter how corrupt or dishonest it may be.

Electing independents and minor party members of parliament to the house of representatives and the senate will give us the opportunity to have greater scrutiny of the political decision making process. It will be ugly, and the apparatchiks and rusted-on supporters of the major parties will hate it, but it give us a more accountable than what we have now. And maybe, just maybe, it will give us politicians who keep their promises slightly more often than we have now.

Animation by James Hutson at Bridge8

The animation fits nicely with  this piece from BBC news online which outlines 10 predictions in 1900 that came true … and a few that didn’t.

There are few things we can be very confident about in the future. We can be sure that our communication technologies will continue to get smaller, faster, more powerful, and more widely accessible. But there are so many uncertainties about international trade, transport, the economy, climate, and even the nature of our society that we cannot be sure of what the world will look like in even a couple of decades, let alone another century. And the one thing that just about everyone agrees on is that the rate of change is accelerating.

The consequences of this for educators are widespread. The one thing that we cannot and must not do is put our heads in the ground and pretend that technological change is not happening, or worse, that we know exactly what the world will be like for the students currently in our care. It is incumbent upon us to use the technologies that are available to us now, and to assist our students in developing the skills that they will need to adapt and benefit from the future. Flexibility, collaboration, the ability to research and evaluate information from a wide range of sources, and an openness to exponential change – these are among the most important skills the citizens of the future will require.

We cannot be sure what challenges and opportunities the middle decades of the 21st century will offer up to the young people who are currently in our schools. But we can be certain that they not be the same challenges and opportunities that we and our parents faced in the latter decades of the 20th. It might not be “utility fog“, but then, is that really any more outlandish than Maxwell Smart’s shoe phone in 1969?

The last 24 hours have seen a great example of how social media can bring about change.

Early in the day, news broke that weight loss brand Jenny Craig was sponsoring the Kyle and Jackie O show. Kyle Sandilands, the co-host of the show, is notorious for his sexist and abusive comments about women, most famously referring on air to a female journalist as a ‘fat slag’ and a ‘piece of shit’. Many people were surprised that Jenny Craig would choose to sponsor such a person, and to have him and his show as part of their advertising strategy.

Over the course of the day posts on the American and Aust/NZ Facebook pages showed the reaction of Jenny Craig customers and other members of the community. The comments were about 90% negative towards the sponsorship decision, with the remainder being equivocal, eirenic (‘can’t we just all be nice about this’), or finding some ironic humour in the situation. A similar reaction was seen on Twitter, using the hashtag #jennycraig and addressed to the @jennycraig and @jennycraigAusNZ accounts..

The Jenny Craig Aust/NZ people  spent most of the afternoon defending the decision, with such specious arguments as “we are not supporting Kyle, we are advertising dawn to dusk on Austereo and his program is just part of the schedule”, but respondents were having none of it. They also tried to deflect the arguments with “What would you say to Kyle if you had the chance”, but that also fell in a hole.

Mid afternoon I proposed that the whole thing might be a publicity stunt, and that early in the evening (in time to make the morning papers) the management of Jenny Craig would see sense (and rediscover their integrity) and withdraw the sponsorship. That is exactly what happened. I wondered at the time if I was being too cynical, and there are others asking questions today about whether the whole thing was a publicity stunt. If it was, I doubt that it was worth it – the positive publicity from reversing it hardly outweighs the negative publicity generated by the decision in the first place.

The outcome from this was most satisfactory, and it shows the power of social media to bring about change for good.

This Xtranormal cartoon contains some of the best quotes from the #pencilchat

Thanks to MiddleLevelEd for creating this cartoon

Facebook and YouTube continue to dominate. Can anyone involved in education seriously afford NOT to be familiar with these platforms?

Social Media Growth Australia – 2011 [INFOGRAPH].

Schools and teachers need to learn about social media and use it themselves, and they need to find creative, safe and effective ways of incorporating it into their educational programmes.

Why Students Like Social Media But Schools Don’t | Edudemic.

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 2,000 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 33 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Click on the logo below to see the conference website

Sessions in the conference run 24/7 for five days during the coming week, and most will be recorded so that if you miss a session (or it is at 2 am in your time zone) you can watch the recording later. The sessions are in Blackboard Collaborate (formerly known as Elluminate) and should be accessible to most people around the world on medium to fast internet connections.

There are some great keynote presenters, including Anna and Christopher Batchelder from Bon education, Howard Gardner from Harvard, Cable Green from Creative Commons, and Ewan McIntosh from NoTosh digital. And there is also a great program of workshops and papers from educators and other people involved in global education around the world.

I am not presenting at the conference this year, but I have been a member of the advisory group and I will be moderating some of the sessions on Tuesday-Friday morning in my time-zone, which is the middle of the night in UTC.

I encourage anyone who is interested in global issues, social justice, and education beyond your own borders and school systems, to check out this conference. I hope to see you there.

Here are the steps that I have followed in setting up such accounts, and which I would recommend to others planning to move into this area.

• Choose a Twitter name which clearly identifies your organisation. Keep it as short as possible (10-11 characters, preferably less).
• Take some time to set up your profile page, identifying your organisation (with a link to your website) and your aims/philosophy. Include your logo or an appropriate image.
• Make sure that your tweets are ‘public’ (there is no point in doing it otherwise), but check the box to be notified when people follow you (see below).
• Begin by following other organisations and prominent individuals who are in your field.
• Advertise your Twitter account in other media (e.g. print journals, newsletters).
• When people follow you, check out their profile. If they are members of your organisation or share your goals/interests, follow them back. If they are completely unrelated, block them. If they are vaguely related allow them to follow you but don’t bother following them back. If you are not sure, message them and ask why they want to follow your account. This will ensure that your followers are relevant to your aims. The credibility of your Twitter account is in large part determined by the people you follow, and the people who follow you (as well as the content of your tweets, of course). Relevance is much more important that number of followers for professional organisations (and the same is true of professional people).
• Choose a hashtag and encourage your followers and members of your association to use it. It might be the same as your Twitter name, or it could be something related (and shorter), but it should be recognisable as related to your core business. It is important to check that no-one else is using the hashtag (by searching for it) before you start publicising it.
• Re-tweet other organisations and your followers when they say something interesting, adding your hashtag if they have not done so. That will bring you more followers, and also raise the profile of your hashtag.
• The best way to start people on Twitter is at a conference. Advertise the hashtag, encourage people to use it, and have someone available to assist members/delegates with setting up Twitter accounts on their phones and other devices. Once you reach a critical mass of people using the hashtag (5-6 is enough if they are reasonably active, 10-12 or more is better) put up a Twitter wall on the screen at your conference between sessions (or during them, if the speakers are comfortable with that). Joyce Seitzinger has a useful list of twitter wall applications on her blog at http://www.cats-pyjamas.net/2011/06/twitterwalls-the-writings-on-the-wall/.
• Tweetups at conferences are also a good way of bringing together the people that are already using social media in your organisation.
• Twitter conversations (along the lines of #edchat) are also a good way of using Twitter to bring like-minded people together to share ideas and learn from each other.
• Tweet at least daily from the account, remembering to always use the hashtag. This shows potential followers that you have something to say, and that the account is going to be useful to them.
• Set up a Twitter newsletter using http://paper.li/ or a similar service. This creates a daily or weekly online newsletter which can be drawn from the people using your hashtag, the people you follow, or a selective subset of Twitter accounts chosen by you. People can subscribe to the newsletter by email, and it is a good way of showing sceptics the sort of information that can be accessed using Twitter.
• Set up some social media guidelines for your organisation. The industry standard guidelines are those published by Intel , and it is a good idea to consult them or adapt them to the needs of your own group.

• Managing the Twitter account should be recognised as somebody’s job. Whether it is a staff member or a volunteer, it should be acknowledged by the organisation that to establish a Twitter account and maintain it for a professional organisation should involve at least 30 minutes per day, and preferably 7 days per week. This commitment is likely to increase, not decrease over time.