Australia's Digital Revolution - Part 2 - the 1 percenta

Following on from my recent blog post on the Australian Labour Party Digital Revolution (Part 1) - this week in Parliament, the Minister for Education had the gall to get up in parliament and make the statement that the Australian government would invest directly $650,000 for teachers professional development and that a further $11.25 million in funding would be provided to states and territories for professional development. Whilst these two figures together seems impressive we need to have a look closely at what this represents - in short the Australian government is providing less than

1%

for professional development for teachers out of the total of $1.2 billion for the revolution.

Further to this our government is going to provide a further 3% ($32.6 million) for curriculum resources and a making available 0.9% ($10 million) to support the computers in schools. Compare this with the figures from my previous post, we need to "tell'em they're dreaming".

The other thing I also find interesting is that the statement has been made that school will be given $1000 for a computer, if they can access a computer for less than this amount then the school can use the additional funds for deployment costs. Now most state and territory education departments have taken over control of the tendering and allocation process - will the schools see the additional funds to help with deployment, will we as a tax paying public see how and where our state/territory governments provide these computers and spend any additional funds?

The issues around this revolution are disturbing and we need to speak up.

You can view a previous statement on this topic from Julia here...

Comments

[Tony]

An update to this post with a link to a news paper article titled "Cost shock puts School PC's at risk" - http://tinyurl.com/5kehe6

Thanks to Sue "sujokat" Tapp for the heads up.