I feel quite honored to be asked to be a part of a group from Hong Kong invited to give input as an overseas Aussie to the Australia 2020 Summit. This was something that the new primeminister, Kevin Rudd put in place a few days after taking office and, something that I see as being a good idea as well as a bit of clever politics.

Given that most of us did not have the chance to input to the summit, the best that we could hope to do was read the comments on the summary reports here.  As an educator, the one of most interest to me is the one titled “The productivity agenda – education, skills, training, science and innovation”

This is the one that I am being asked to give some input on. Like many places in the developed world, my native country is making a lot of noise about educating its citizens to be creative, connected and collaborative. Naturally, ICT is hearalded as a great enabler for these lofty outcomes. Deputy Primeminister, The Hon Julia Gillard MP, who, among other things has the federal ministry for Education as one of her portfolio responsibilities, gave this address at the recent Australian Computers in Education Conference. In it she refers to the Digital Education Revolution Better Practice Guide. I must say that I find very little here that is new as I referred to guides like this 20 years ago when I was doing my Masters research and writing applications for funding for my schools. I can only hope that we can shift the agenda a little more in this term of government.

Anyway, I have set up a wiki for sharing ideas here. It is an open wiki so if any of you reading this want to post a comment on it, feel very free to do so. As soon as I can set aside some time to write some ideas down I want to comment about teachers being valued and supported by their “colleges” for their overseas teaching experience. Currently, their is no such thing as an associate membership for my College, WACOT. This means I either pay the full $A70 per year for each year I am out of the country or let it lapse as I (and the majority of teachers in WA have I believe) and pay an additional $A100 or so in fees to go through the registration process again! And this is so that my teaching qualification awarded by the University of Western Australia, the most respected Uni in the state, can be certified as being appropriate for me to teach in the state of the same name! This needs fixing right away!

I would also like to try to set up some network of Aussie teachers outside of the big brown land. I my experience, these teachers are generally innovative, resourceful and highly valued but in no way connected to a community of other teachers at home. EDNA would seem to me to the be the best place to set up a link but it needs some offerings to allow teachers to buy in.

Check out the wiki later for more.

Comments, as always, welcomed.