echnology is just a tool.

In terms of getting the kids working together and motivating them, the
teacher is most important. Bill Gates
There can be infinite uses of the computer and of new age technology, but if teachers themselves are
not able to bring it into the classroom and make it work, then it fails. Nancy Kassebaum
New technology is common, new thinking is rare. Sir Peter Blake
Teaching in the Internet age means we must teach tomorrows skills today. Jennifer Fleming
It is important to remember that educational software, like textbooks, is only one tool in the
learning process. Neither can be a substitute for well-trained teachers, leadership, and parental
involvement. Keith Krueger
Any teacher that can be replaced with a computer, deserves to be. David Thornburg
Teachers need to integrate technology seamlessly into the curriculum instead of viewing it as an add-on, an
afterthought, or an event. Heidi-Hayes Jacobs
We need technology in every classroom and in every student and teachers hand, because it is the pen and paper of
our time, and it is the lens through which we experience much of our world. David Warlick
It is not about the technology; its about sharing knowledge and information, communicating efficiently, building
learning communities and creating a culture of professionalism in schools. These are the key responsibilities of all
educational leaders. Marion Ginapolis
Education is evolving due to the impact of the Internet. We cannot teach our students in the same manner in which
we were taught. Change is necessary to engage students not in the curriculum we are responsible for teaching, but in
school. Period. April Chamberlain

Speech, science and spying

Over the last 40 years, satellites have become increasingly powerful and able to
perform many different roles.
Most of the spacecraft launched by Europes Ariane-5 rocket are used for
telecommunications TV, digital radio, internet, video and telephone. They are
usually owned by large international companies.
Most other spacecraft are owned by governments and space agencies such as ESA.
Many of these are used for scientific research.
Over the last 25 years, ESA spacecraft have flown past comet Halley, gone into
orbit around the Moon, Venus and Mars, and explored the distant Universe. In

2005, the Huygens probe landed on Saturns moon, Titan. In 2014, Rosetta will
become the first spacecraft to orbit a comet and land a probe on its surface.
SOHO and four Cluster spacecraft have shown how the Sun works and how it affects
our planet. The ERS satellites and Envisat have studied every aspect of the Earth, from
ice caps and oceans to the ozone layer and land use.
A new series of Earth Explorer missions was introduced in 2009. Satellites such as
GOCE, SMOS and Cryosat will improve our understanding of planet Earth and how
human activity affects the natural world. A family of Sentinel satellites will soon be
launched to study the land and oceans in great detail.
Our everyday lives have been changed by the Meteosat weather satellites. In the next
few years, Europe will launch a 'constellation' of 30 satellites, called Galileo, for
navigation and finding of precise positions anywhere on Earth.
The United States, Russia and some European countries also operate military satellites.
These are used by armed forces for communication, warning of missile launches and
spying on movements of enemy forces.
Good morning. It is a pleasure to be here.
Thank you to both Jason Yetton and Phil Coffey for your introduction and for inviting me here to
speak this morning.
Introduction
At the risk of sounding cynical, it is easy when reflecting on the changes to Australias education
policy over the last decade to be reminded of Prince Tancredi's observation in The Leopard,
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusas great novel on 19th Century Sicilian life: if we want things to stay
the same, everything must change.
Too frequently education policy makers have sought to reinvent curricula by adding more and more
courses and giving existing courses increasingly exotic names. But what has this actually achieved?
A level of confusion, certainly. For instance, what does digital technologies actually mean and what
is the difference between design and digital technologies when it comes to the Australian
curriculum?
As Phil Callil recently pointed out in his review of the technologies curriculum, the term digital
technologies is not well known in the education systems of Canada, Finland, Singapore or the UK not to mention the IT industry itself.
A second, and perhaps more important question to ask is, have educational outcomes actually
improved? If we turn to international performance tables such as PISA (Programme for International

Student Assessment) and TIMMS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science) it is clear that
we need to improve educational outcomes across both the ICT and broader STEM disciplines.
To remain competitive in an increasingly interconnected world we need to ensure that the curriculum
equips students for the jobs of tomorrow. We need to consider where future employment demand
will come from and the skills school leavers will need to compete in a world that has been
transformed by the Internet - where nearly every industry is now trade exposed.
This increased competition presents both greater challenges and greater opportunities. Many new
jobs will be created, many will be destroyed. The key for us as a nation, and for each of us as
individuals and especially as parents, is to ensure that here in Australia we are, in net terms, creating
new jobs and new businesses and new opportunities.
If we do not, if we do not become more competitive, then we cannot remain the high wage economy
we are with a generous social welfare safety net.
The key to all of this, of course, is that our education curriculum must equip students with the skills to
take advantage of these opportunities. This means that we need to move beyond teaching students
how to consume technology and instead focus on the creation of technology.
With the current rate of technology adoption in Australia, very few primary school aged children,
even at five or six, have not learnt the basics of how to use their parents tablet or smartphone. So
instead of teaching students how to be passive consumers of technology or how to use Microsoft
Word or other proprietary software, our educators should be teaching students how to create, how to
code.
As Barack Obama recently observed to young students in America: Dont just download the latest
app, help design it. Dont just play on your phone, program it.
The Australian curriculum review
To this end, the first year of the Abbott Government has been a significant one for Australias
education policy. Christopher Pyne is working to make the curriculum, particularly in the primary
years, simpler and less crowded. Last week he released the Governments review of the Australian
curriculum that in many ways is all about getting back to basics - a curriculum that is less cluttered
and more balanced with a greater emphasis on literacy and numeracy.
While the review has been met with broad support, specialists in the technology sector have raised
very real concerns that ICT has been overlooked. The Australian Computer Society, for example,
has warned that any delay to the teaching of coding would put students at a significant disadvantage
from their peers in the UK, while others have compared the importance of coding to that of literacy
and numeracy.

Now let me clarify a very important point: while I am certainly not suggesting that the authors of the
curriculum review, Dr Kevin Donnelly and Professor Ken Wiltshire would agree with many that
machine language and logic should be, for primary school students, an essential enabling skill like
literacy and numeracy, neither have those authors suggested that important IT skills such as coding
could not be incorporated into other areas of the back to basics primary school curriculum.
Teaching students how to code - to use computers to create rather than just consume - from
Foundation through to Year 8 could be appropriately incorporated into the mathematics syllabus, for
example. A leader in this area is the Australian Mathematics Trust based in Canberra. I commend
you to the work they are doing in informatics, a mathematics discipline, where students learn the
basic algorithms, data structures and computational techniques that underlie information and
communication, and demonstrate their learning through computer programming tasks.
It is also important to distinguish the recommendations of Phil Callil - the subject matter specialist
engaged to review the technologies curriculum - from the reviews broader recommendations. Callil
determined that key ICT skills taught as part of the digital technologies syllabus, such as coding and
computational thinking, should be taught from Foundation to Year 10. I agree with him and agree
that machine languages and logic are and certainly will be in the future almost as important as basic
literacy and numeracy.
Regardless as to whether the ICT or digital technologies syllabus - as it is currently known - remains
as a standalone subject or is incorporated into another syllabus such as maths, we need to ensure
that:

We are equipping students with the skills for employment in an increasingly competitive
globalised economy

We are improving the pathways for students to study IT from Foundation through to
secondary school and onto university

There is an increase in the percentage of school-aged girls participating in ICT and women
employed in the ICT sector

Teachers are supported to undertake professional learning in key areas of IT competency.

The current situation - declining participation in ICT
Australias Chief Scientist, Professor Ian Chubb made the point in his recent paper, Science,
Technology, Engineering and Mathematics: Australias Future, that about half of all US economic
growth in the last 50 years came from scientific and technological advances.[9]

But alarmingly in Australia, when it comes to ICT and STEM - the disciplines that will equip
Australians with the skills to replicate the American experience - participation in the latter school
years and at university continues to decline.
This is despite significant growth in employer demand, particularly from outside the traditional ICT
sector, for graduates with training in computer science and related disciplines such as data and
information management.
Consider for a moment the example of the marketing industry, which is becoming increasingly reliant
on the use of data to better target products and campaigns and to deliver genuine insights to
customers. The leading marketing firms are utilising the skills of data specialists to set themselves
apart - to extract and interpret meaningful trends from vast and complex volumes of data.
Of course, all of this is being underpinned by the increasing ubiquity of the Internet - by the growth in
mobile devices and other Internet-enabled technologies such as sensor networks, but it nonetheless
highlights the growing demand for computer science graduates and data specialists, particularly in
industries outside the ICT sector.
Of Australias 600,000 ICT workers, more than half now work outside the traditional ICT sector, while
both the McKinsey Global Institute and Gartner predict that demand for data specialists will continue
to grow strongly. Gartner estimates that the demand for data specialists will reach more than 4
million jobs globally by 2015, with only a third of these positions likely to be filled.
This has created a troubling paradox. We now have a significant gap between the technology-driven
economy we have created and the skills that are not only required to meet the current demand but
also to drive future growth.
The OECD has observed that the number of students enrolled in a mathematics major in Australian
universities fell by 15 per cent between 2001 and 2007,[3] while the Trends in Mathematics and
Science Study (TIMSS) found that Australias performance in mathematics and science has
stagnated over nearly two decades.[4]
Commencements in tertiary ICT courses have also fallen sharply, with a 53 per cent decline between
2001 and 2011, while completions declined by 58 per cent over the same period.[5]
Compare this with China where 41 per cent of all degrees awarded by Chinese institutions in 2011
were in a STEM subject.This is between two and three times the proportion of STEM degrees
awarded each year in countries such as Australia, the UK and the US.[6]
These low numbers of STEM and ICT skilled students and graduates are frustrating industry who are
concerned about the lack of sufficiently skilled and qualified graduates able to start work in ICTrelated jobs.

Recently I spoke with Matt Barrie, Freelancer.coms charismatic CEO, who lamented the quantity
and quality of Australias ICT graduates. He told me that Freelancer was one of many Australian
companies that are desperate for Australian coders, engineers and computer scientists but
regrettably often have to employ workers from overseas as Australias tertiary sector is not producing
nearly enough graduates with the skills that enable them to start work.
What needs to be done to improve participation?
To turn this trend around, we need to improve the pathways for students to study IT from Foundation
through to Year 12 and onto university. IT, particularly coding and computational thinking, must be
given a more prominent position in the curriculum. As I have commented, this could be achieved
through the maths syllabus or as a stand alone subject, but regardless it is important that we move
beyond outdated discussions that focus on tech literacy and instead expose primary school-aged
children to tech creation through coding.
As a nation, we could probably do with fewer lawyers. But we absolutely need more system
engineers. We need more software developers. And we need more people that not only have
advanced skills in the use of proprietary software such as Microsoft Excel, but also understand how
computers work.
Greater engagement with industry, such as through public-private partnerships is another way that
we can increase the number and quality of IT graduates.
The Governments recent announcement of trials based on the US P-TECH model is a good step in
this direction. P-TECH is an education pathways partnership between IBM and the New York
Education Department where students graduate with an associate degree, along with the skills and
knowledge they need to continue their studies or transition directly into jobs in the IT industry.
Participating schools also pair students with corporate mentors who help guide curricula and provide
real-world insight into industry trends. Last week the Prime Minister committed $500,000 to a PTECH-style program in Geelong. Public-private educational partnerships like this are providing
students with a recognised qualification, while helping to prepare them for a career in IT.
We also need to monitor closely outcomes in the UK where last month the ICT curriculum was
replaced with a new computing curriculum. Unsurprisingly, students as young as five and six are now
receiving coding lessons.
Back in January, Michael Gove, former UK Secretary of State for Education, explained the changes
by observing that:
"ICT used to focus purely on computer literacy teaching pupils, over and over again, how to
word-process, how to work a spreadsheet, how to use programs already creaking into

obsolescence; about as much use as teaching children to send a telex or travel in a

zeppelin.Our new curriculum teaches children computer science, information technology and
digital literacy: teaching them how to code, and how to create their own programs; not just
how to work a computer, but how a computer works and how to make it work for you".[19]
I am pleased that as part of the Governments Competitiveness Agenda, the Coalition will invest $3.5
million through a coding across the curriculum programme to provide greater exposure to computer
coding across different year levels in Australian schools.
Rethinking our approach to IT learning is key to addressing the skills shortfall. Measures such as
merging scientific and creative thinking at primary school, or coding at primary school, lays important
ground for producing technology literate high school graduates - graduates trained to not simply use
technology, but to create, build and develop new technologies.
Women in ICT
The second change we have to make is to dramatically alter the composition of those participating in
STEM subjects and industries. In particular, we have to increase the number of girls and women
participating in ICT and STEM.
Although women fill close to half of all jobs in Australia, they hold less than 25% of STEM and ICTrelated jobs.
When I met with Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's Chief Operating Officer, in February she offered me a
telling anecdote about the participation of girls in STEM related subjects. Of 35 primary school kids
at a weekend coding camp, only five were girls. Of those five girls, Sandberg herself had enrolled
two of them (her niece and her niece's friend). According to Sandberg the percentage of women and
girls studying ICT subjects was declining and was now lower than it was twenty years ago - whereas
in most other disciplines and professions the share of female graduates has continued to rise.
The bottom line is that we need to encourage and expose women to the fantastic opportunities
created by studying and working in ICT. We need deliberate and directed action focused on
motivating women to pursue ICT subjects and careers and promoting female role models in
Computer Science who can tell their stories about the positive social impact careers in computing
can have.
Conclusion
Just as most students of mathematics will not become engineers or actuaries and most students of
English will never write a novel, so most children who learn how to code at school will not become
software developers.

But the training in logic and the understanding of how machines think will enable them better to
engage in any and every course of life and career they pursue.
Our future, our prosperity depends on our being more innovative, more competitive and we simply
cannot do that unless we are as technically literate as the other nations with which we compete.
In a nutshell we need knowledge and imagination. The former on its own is a dull resource, the latter
on its own is a hallucination. Combined they will ensure an Australian future which is more exciting,
more prosperous than ever before.
[ends]

Science A Menace
Disadvantages of Science

to

Humanity

or

This is an age of science. Science has changed the face of the world. It gave electricity, electronics,
telephone, Aeroplane and several other things for the pleasure and comfort of man. It has minimized
the sufferings and increased the happiness of man.
Science has become a curse to humanity today. The evils that it has showered on man wash away
its advantages. Science is responsible for wars and deadly modem weapons like long-range remotecontrolled and radar-guided missiles, poisonous gases, biological weapons, warships, sophisticated
aircraft, atom bomb, hydrogen bomb and neutron bomb that can destroy the whole world in no time.
Such weapons are amassed by the developed nations in large numbers. Scientists are busy making
further advances in the field of armaments. The Star War Project developed by the U.S.A will carry
the struggle in the space and it will lead to large-scale pollution. All these result in causing havoc and
large-scale destruction. Large-scale deaths ruin thousands of families and destroy homes and
factories. All these cause widespread difficulties, unemployment and poverty.
Nuclear energy created by science has become a menace today. The nuclear power plants pose a
very serious danger. The Chernobyl blast in the former Soviet Union spread radiation all around. The
radiation after the blast affected plant life and animal life in many parts of Europe. Thousands of
people died and thousands are suffering from cancer and other evil diseases. Millions of people are
still ill in Hiroshima and Nagaski due to the explosion of atom bombs. When millions of people die of
starvation, more than fifty percent of the budget is being spent on war equipments. Out of mutual

fear and suspicion, India and Pakistan do this. The money which could have been used for feeding
the starving people is being spent to make the world a fire-cracker shop.
Pollution of different types is a curse brought about by science. Arms race and nuclear explosions
are polluting the atmosphere. The world is threatened with radiation hazard. Dreaded diseases like
cancer are spreading due to nuclear and other chemical pollutions. Thousands of bombs move
round the earth in artificial satellites. If they explode in space, the ozone layer would be disturbed
and the earth would suffer from direct radiation from the Sun. Ozone holes are formed due to certain
chemicals used in the cooling system and in the manufacture of plastic goods. The smoke and
pollution left by big industries is spoiling the whole atmosphere. The poisonous gas let out by
industries would ultimately pollute the ocean and kill the living organisms there.
Today any work can be done by machines. Thus industrialization and mechanization brought
urbanization, unemployment and unequal division of wealth. The rich became richer and the poor
became poorer. Manual labour is forgotten with the increased healthy competition as well as to
perpetual efforts. Once it becomes a habit, it enters all our activities. Games and sports inculcate in
us a sense of sportsmanship. We enjoy also the victory of our rivals and shake hands with them. It is
not the victory that counts, but how we played the game. It is on the games field that the young learn
to take victory or defeat in a sporting spirit. This is a lesson which is necessary throughout life.
The importance of sports and games in life was realized from ancient times as is shown by the origin
of the Olympics. Today, they are given importance from school and college level to the international
level. Sports and games have helped to promote good will among the nations of the world. Since the
aim of education is the all-round development of a person, sports and games should be given the
same importance as any other subject in the curriculum. Thus, it is clear that sports and games have
many physical, mental and moral uses.