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Setting the scene
Teaching is by far the hardest and challenging job I have ever held – long hours, constant resistance to learning from your charges, finding different and exciting ways to spruce up your content to motivate or inspire. I worked out in my first year that I was averaging well over a 60 hour week and getting about $10 per hour (that’s right, it was better pay at Macca’s).
But in the end you are doing a valued job, you are passing on knowledge, teaching young people to become thinking, contributing, maybe even leading members of society. That has its rewards.
You are constantly training to deliver the best outcomes you have. The taxpayer expects you to be imparting/providing the best educational experience you can. So with that in mind, imagine that despite all this training, your hard work, the hours you spend working out how to achieve these outcomes – an unqualified, untrained extremist from the community comes in and undermines you by, telling your charges that what they are taught is wrong.
Well that’s what’s happening in some Queensland schools:
PRIMARY school students are being taught that man and dinosaurs walked the Earth together and that there is fossil evidence to prove it.
Fundamentalist Christians are hijacking Religious Instruction (RI) classes in Queensland despite education experts saying Creationism and attempts to convert children to Christianity have no place in state schools.
Students have been told Noah collected dinosaur eggs to bring on the Ark, and Adam and Eve were not eaten by dinosaurs because they were under a protective spell.
Critics are calling for the RI program to be scrapped after claims emerged Christian lay people are feeding children misinformation.
About 80 per cent of children at state primary schools attend one half-hour instruction a week, open to any interested lay person to conduct.
Many of the instructors are from Pentecostal churches.
Read more
There is an interesting double standard here. As a teacher I have to be circumspect about how I answer or talk about the topics of religion and politics in my classes – but these educational vandals have no such restriction, they are free to defecate all over the curriculum and others beliefs. I mention others beliefs, because these fundamentalists are a subset of the Christian community, their beliefs about the world and about education, about reality are not shared by the wider Christian community.
But for some reason the Education Department in Queensland sees fit to let these small minded zealots in to undermine their own curriculum. To my mind the Government and the Education department in Queensland is failing in its duty to protect thee children.
Now I would like to see RI scrapped in state schools, but failing that I would like to see some restriction and monitoring of what is taught in these classes and penalties when the boundaries are breached.
I recently reviewed Little Brother by Cory Doctorow which features the Department of Homeland Security(DHS) data mining information gathered through electronic travel systems similar to Go Cards to catch “terrorists”. In Little Brother, the DHS causes widespread chaos as they peer into the lives of everyday commuters, information becomes a tool of an oppressive, unchecked, politically motivated police force.
Now while the Queensland Police Department is not like the fictional DHS in Little Brother, I will point reader to the Fitzgerald Inquiry and police corruption in Queensland as evidence of the reality that a state police force in a liberal democracy can be corrupted quite easily.
The Issue
It has been revealed that Queensland police are able to access Go Card users personal details without court orders. Translink has revelled that they have only had 46 requests from police in the past 12 months. Most being to help find missing persons or locate lost or stolen cards (source). It has also been claimed that police have also been using the information to pinpoint witnesses to criminal acts.
The Queensland privacy commissioner is now examining police use of the information and whether it complies with the guidelines surrounding the exceptions Police departments get under the privacy act. She has also suggested that Translink be a bit more up front about notifying the consumer regarding the use of their information(source).
Australian Council for Civil Liberties president Terry O’Gorman complained that commuters were not told police would have access to Go Card data when the system was introduced:
"People identified by the Go Card data can be forced by police by subpoena or … the CMC to become witnesses against their will," he said. "Many people might not want to run the risk of being hunted down by associates of an accused … in that situation they just want to be able to choose whether they become witnesses."
Mr O’Gorman said he would de-register his Go Card and urged others to do the same.
"It’s one government department in bed with another, there’s no oversight by a privacy commissioner because we don’t have one," he said. "We have a very weak Privacy Act that sets out privacy principles but no one to enforce it.
"We are sleep-walking in a surveillance society."
[Source]
The information about police use is there; hidden in that privacy waffle that 98% of us overlook as we tick boxes and signoff on something that has been cleverly designed to make our life/travel better or easier. You could argue, and some have, that we should all become a little more responsible for maintaining our own privacy.
On the other hand we are bombarded with disclaimers and notices when signing up for any number of things. The language is hardly what one would call plain English – though in the case of Go Cards the text is reasonably good. The implication of handing over information requires a good degree of thought and some practical knowledge to ascertain the possible consequences/use or misuse of that information.
Combine this requirement for considered thought with systems that are designed to make your life easy and a company that promotes its use and most are going to forego the hard thinking. I can’t see this situation getting any better with our appetite for and reliance on technology.
Your thoughts? Are you sleepwalking?
Warning: some links contained within this post are possibly not work safe and contain mature content
Our Porn Ours Selves is…well I’ll let them explain in their own words:
Our Porn, Ourselves is a resource that aims to create an alternative and constructive conversation on the use of pornography by women, and in turn offer balance to the anti-porn feminist agenda.
In addition to their thought provoking blog they also had a Facebook page containing 3000 members. That page was closed due to a Terms of Use Violation. Natural justice dictates that you at least get a given a specific reason for the closure, perhaps notification the very specific terms or term you broke. Not in this case.
The story stinks of a concerted effort by those opposed to pornography by and for women to silence discussion.
What am I getting at?
Well here is Violet Blue’s (founder) letter to Facebook, she explains it better:
Hello,
I’m Violet Blue: bestselling and award-winning author, and educator who speaks from UCSF and UC Berkley (Boalt) to Google Inc. Tech Talks on my field of expertise — exactly what this Facebook group page was about.
My page did not violate any of the reasons stated for deletion. It was under constant attack by people who disagreed with our point of view, and constantly reported our posts and images, even though we were very careful not to violate your Terms. May I find out why the page was removed? It is my utmost priority to follow and uphold Facebook community rules and standards. With national media attention to the page, questions will be raised and I hope to be able to furnish answers. Especially with a higher minded page of over 3000 members seeking community and discussion around a topic that did not target any group, threaten anyone, or link/depict/suggest inappropriate content. In fact, I policed the posts hourly for spam and attacks on our members, of which there were many. We never posted obscenity in links or images, though innocent user photos seemed to be increasingly mysteriously removed.
I feel that our page was targeted, and that we did nothing to violate the community standards of Facebook, which we sought to uphold. Any help to find out why this has happened would be deeply appreciated. I do not want to be talking to press about this in the next few days and be left guessing. We sought a safe place to discuss sex culture in media, and that is all.
I sincerely hope we can resolve this. Salon and Examiner wrote about our page as a signifier of community organization around women’s empowerment, calling it a new movement for women’s rights. I could tell we were under attack by those who violently opposed our discussions and representation as a community intersection for enriched discussions about important women’s rights issues. This development is confusing and saddening.
This fostering of group community around female empowerment and the page topic stems from my work as a talkshow guest (Oprah), international conference speaker, and columnist for various national and international magazines and publications (Oprah Magazine, Forbes.com, MacLife, etc) and media pundit (Wall Street Journal, MSNBC, Esquire, Redbook, Wired, etc).
Please help me understand what I can tell media outlets asking about this, and the over 3K member we had in the page group.
Sincere thanks,
Violet Blue
I hope Violet gets an answer.
H/T to Ms Naughty
In shocking news just in - British Papal fans will have to pay to attend at least one of his concer, appearances.
The general public still has to fork out somewhere in the vicinity of $AUD 21 million for the 4 day Papal visit but any rabid ring kisser wanting to praise the pontiff will have to pay for the privilege.
Catholics will have to pay as much as STG25 ($A43) to attend one of the two public events in England to be led by Pope Benedict XVI during his visit in September, church officials said on Wednesday.
The charges – believed to be a first for a papal event – are for a prayer vigil in London’s Hyde Park on September 18 and the beatification of Cardinal John Henry Newman in Birmingham on September 19.
[ROBERT BARR July 29, 2010, SMH]
Shocking news! What is the world coming to?
The New South Wales Health Care Complaints Commission(HCCC) has issued a public warning about the misnamed? Australian Vaccination Network. The commission, after two complaints from the public, investigated the AVN finding that the group:
- provides information that is solely anti-vaccination
- contains information that is incorrect and misleading
- quotes selectively from research to suggest that vaccination may be dangerous.
[source]
The AVN was recommended by the HCCC to place a statement prominently on their website saying:
- The AVN’s purpose is to provide information against vaccination, in order to balance what it believes is the substantial amount of pro-vaccination information available elsewhere.
- The information provided by the AVN should not be read as medical advice.
- The decision about whether or not to vaccinate should be made in consultation with a health care provider.
The AVN failed to do so and a a result the HCCC has issued the following warning:
The AVN’s failure to include a notice on its website of the nature recommended by the Commission may result in members of the public making improperly informed decisions about whether or not to vaccinate, and therefore poses a risk to public health and safety.
The AVN’s response to the warning is apparently to wilfully misunderstand the warning.
In the end though, was the recommendation of the commission that onerous? The first point actually ask them to be honest about what their position is. The second in all fairness protects the AVN (legally)as much as it does the general public. The third suggests that they pass readers on to health care providers to make the final decision – surely the AVN ha a list of health care providers who support the views they push – after all there is a big debate in the medical community about immunisation right?
*sound of crickets chirping*
Will it stop the actions of the AVN? Probably not, but it’s a huge blow to their already rock bottom credibility.
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