Summer Holiday Reading

Because in my memory of childhood there is always the smell of bubbling tar, of Pinke Zinke, the briny smell of the sea. It is always summer and I am on Scarborough Beach, blinded by light, with my shirt off and my back a map of dried salt and peeling sunburn. There are waves cracking on the sandbar and the rip flags are up. My mum, brown as a planed piece of jarrah, is reading a novel by John O’Hara… Tim Winton   I believe that if... Read More

Reading…

I can still see the poster on my own childhood primary school classroom wall: Kids who read succeeed The Conservative politician and current British Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove, has recently said that, ‘children should read 50 books a year’. Who could possibly disagree? In my (not so) humble (on this issue) opinion our Australian community has very low expectations of how much a child or teenager should read. The issue... Read More

David Crystal – texts and tweets: myths and realities

Thanks to Ben Jones for alerting me to David Crystal’s recent talk. Like you, I have many of his books on my shelf and find his insights into language, especially the English language, sage.  Read More

Life-long learning in "twenty-ten"

I’ve decided to pronounce the year “twenty-ten”. Not sure what the popular wisdom on this matter will be but I suspect most will continue with the “two thousand and…” that we have been using for the first decade of the 21st century. “Twenty-ten” sounds like the never-arriving future is here - and I like that! It is a minor matter. What is more important than these semantics, from my POV, is personal... Read More

The New Media Literacies

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Once Upon a School

Dave Eggers delivering a TED talk on what a community can do to educate young people.  Read More

Sugata Mitra shows how kids teach themselves

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