At the last election KRudd and the ALP promised laptops to all High Schoolers in Year 9 and above. Some states just took the money and gave it to the schools and they bought what they needed.

NSW had their own mind.

They held out, for more money and a better programme that included infrastructure and support.

What they ended up going for was each school to get their own industrial strength wireless network covering the whole school, on site support of at least one person possibly even two if big enough, extra software [Adobe was a big winner with Premier (and Photoshop) elements getting a look in along with other things]. And instead of a laptop the students will get a netbook [Lenovo S10 to be precise]

I can't decide if they did the right thing or not - at the moment, I am leaning towards "yes".

From a technical viewpoint I think that they have done it right. Just chucking laptops at schools in isolation was going to be a disaster - our school worked out it would cost about $40,000 to $60,000 in infrastructure just to get things up and running and that does not count ongoing support, maintainence and replacement due to damage - the DET plan gets all that covered by the Federal government.

Educationally??? Not so convinced - the juries are out on the education value of one for one laptop programmes, with some research suggesting little to no difference.

Of course, on the ground it's all a bit chaotic and no doubt not quite the nice flowchart drawn in Visio.

Wireless was delayed, support personnel are delayed, netbooks are coming out in dribs and drabs, software is not ready [even though we will be given some netbooks to start doing some planning and familiarisation with] and almost all the questions we have are either answered in the negative or we just aren't told anything [hmmm that is actually SOP with the DET]

Which for a project that went from tender in Jan to sending out seed hardware in July it's not that surprising. The DET has actually managed to do a damm fine job of turning a complete disaster into just a normal one.

Plus each staff member is getting one - which for the DET is a complete change of policy practice - they have always been very much against giving staff anything of their own.

[Footnote: they will run Windows 7 - yep Windows 7!! The 7100 Release Candidate is on the ones we got today. But I am guessing that the final SOE will have the full release version of Windows 7 on them. Which must make us one of, if not the first, large scale deployment - I hope that meant we got a good deal.]

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Skype is pretty cool.
Truely.
I love technology and Skype is very technological.
And it's cheaper than paying for phone calls and the like :)

Saturday night I chatted to my mate in the NT for over 2 hours and tonight we chatted with Miss Be from Bollege for an hour and a half - it's not the same as sitting in my room together just chatting about stuff [like we used to do last year when we were all at Bolleg] - but it's pretty close and the best you can do when one is in Toongabbie, one is in Macquarie Park and the third is living on Elcho Island.

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Church is not supposed to be passive.

To be true to the biblical foundations then you can not include passivity in your definition of church - and if you do then you have got it wrong. Totally. 100%. Absolutely. Wrong.

And if that scares you, or, 'but what about people who don't want to participate' suck it up princess do you think Jesus died on the cross, suffering unimaginable pain - physical, emotional, spiritual - just so we can sit on padded chairs in air conditioned, colour co-ordinated comfort - participating only in a very narrow way following all that the music leader tells us too and otherwise just sucking it all in like goldfish. And as for the rest of the week - not living one single moment as if we are the people of God - THE CHURCH!!!!

Rubbish.

And you know - about reading the bible - I can't believe how completely hopeless we are at doing it. The bible is the word of God, painstakingly copied and handed down over thousands of years - people have died to bring it to us. Was it really just to enable Zondervan publishing to create an orgy of options to choose from? Was it really just so that we can own 4 of them and read one of them maybe once a month other than when we were at the weekly meeting [well, others read it for us] or maybe again at bible study? Did God inspire people to write it and then protect it just so we can go "well, really I'm not much of a reader"

NO ONE CARES what you think you may or may not be - know who you really are.

People have done all sorts of crazy things in the search for God. Most christians just have to reach under their bed or some other place and dust off their bible and open it up and read and - well - HELLO!!!! There is God. The creator of the universe. The sustainer of the universe. The one who brought salvation to a complete mess like me and like you and countless other messes throughout History.

And we don't bother to read it - not even a little bit. How pathetic. It really burns me up that it took me so many years to get into good bible reading habits and it burns me up that I lost that habit during last year and only this last month finally got back into a daily habit of reading from the bible.

IT IS AWESOME to read the bible!!

and one other thing - I hate announcements.

There, I said it.

I hate them. Completely 100% in every way. They are boring. Boring. Boring. They breed passivity. They breed irresponsibility. If I care about my faith community then I will read the calendar and talk to people and if I know what's coming up I will make sure my friends know about it and they will let me know about things they know about. If I can't be bothered enough to keep track of things that are going on in the faith community I am a part of and include others - or they can't be bothered enough to include me - then why are we bothering and what chance do we really think we have of doing anything important!!

And for some places it's week after week of breathless video production about HOW GREAT IT WILL BE TO BE IN CHURCH!! Meh. If it is that good why do you have to keep on telling me?

And anyway - church is not that thing you do once a week in a building called The Church - church is much much much more than it - it happens all the time right around us - AND WE ARE SO BLINDED WE HARDLY EVER NOTICE THAT IT IS GOING ON - and very rarely participate in it.

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UteGate - been interesting watch this one unfold.
Was a bit worried at first but slowly and surely all the bits are coming out.

I can't help wondering if the ALP set the Lib's up with this one.

The MTA said that they saw nothing strange about the way Rudd's Mate Grant was treated. Since there no disinterested parties I am deciding that what they say is true from their perspective - but they may not have seen everything.

Very few people know all of what happened - in fact probably only God really knows what happened - and - more importantly what was in peoples hearts.

Lessons?
- when people leak you things it may not always be true
- don't get too excited when someone hands you a smoking gun - or at least make sure you check it's empty first
- declaring everything is still the best way - even when telling people "this guy knows the PM" could be misconstrued as applying pressure

I feel for Mr Grech - I'm not sure what he did but when those who are normally faceless attain a public face it's never fun for them. And even if he did bring all this upon himself through what he did - he is in a very tough spot.

I wonder how many sneaky announcements about other things have been made while all this carry on has been carrying on.

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