I've just posted Concentration to the learning activities site.

The game includes a number of themes, including numbers, shapes and words. For the words theme in particular, there are also pronunciations, although unfortunately you'll need Quicktime with the Ogg plugin to hear them. This is mainly because the pronunciations are taken from Wiktionary, and Ogg is the standard format for sound files there. (I have nothing against Ogg, but it's not well-supported by media players yet.) Also, some of the words are missing pronunciations. I am wondering whether my voice is sufficiently up to scratch to fill in some of Wiktionary's gaps.

Despite taking the time to write the game, I don't know if games like Concentration have any ultimate educational value. I imagine it would be more likely to boost marks than video games such as GTA or The Sims, but only because those games involve practical problem solving, something that academic tests don't normally cover. As its name suggests, Concentration may help with attention and short-term memory. It certainly seems plausible --- there is some evidence games and activities like this can help delay dementia --- but I don't believe we have a good enough understanding of how attention develops and changes over time to make any strong claims.

In the case of the words theme, I believe that Concentration has the potential to help with spelling and pronunciation. At the moment, this version of the game involves finding pairs of commonly used words in English. When you reveal a word, you will hear the computer pronounce it. This creates a link between the visual and auditory forms of the word, if repeated often enough, which has the potential to improve both spelling and pronunciation.

Of course, there is more that I could do. One idea that I would particularly like to try is to use rhyming words, or words that have common prefixes, suffixes or infixes. Hopefully, this would not only reinforce the links the player makes, but would also reinforce common spelling rules. (When you think about it, English actually has a lot of useful spelling rules --- it's just that it also has a lot of exceptions.)

A little while ago, I started adding educational games to the Education Eye site. This is somewhat of a side project for me, so I don't get a lot of time to work on it, but I very much enjoy creating the activities and hope I can keep developing them for as long as possible.

Indeed, I'd like to be a little more consistent in updating the site with activities more regularly, either by adding fresh ones or improving existing ones. What `more regularly' means at this point, I'm not sure. I have one activity per week in mind for now, but I'll see how I go.

Being a programmer who likes new (open) programming technologies, most of the activities will use fairly bleeding edge web standards. And since I haven't got heaps of time for testing, that will no doubt limit the number of platforms supported. I also intend to avoid Flash and other plugins as much as possible (for various reasons I won't go into) which will make things even trickier. Despite these hurdles, my aim is to make the activities as usable and useful for as many people as possible.

The next game that I'll be adding to the site is Concentration, which I'll be blogging about shortly.

The Australian reports that nation-wide demand for university places this year has risen by 1.5%, reversing the trend of the last 2 years. Tasmania has seen the biggest increase in demand -- an impressively large 28.8% (now standing at 5,249 places). Victorian demand increased by 3.6% (now at 58,149 places).

Some states have not been a part of this increase, namely Western Australia and Queensland. Applications in those states fell by 3.2% and 2.7% respectively. It is interesting to note that Julie Bishop is pleased with the 1.5% nation-wide increase, but dismissive of the larger (in percentage terms) declines in these two states, referring to "strong job markets" in those states (implying, I assume, that all other states and territories have "weak job markets").

My own opinion is that these figures are not very impressive. All things being equal, demand for university places should rise each year simply because our population is growing. It would be interesting to compare these figures to the increase (or decrease) in the number of university age and mature age populations over the same years (2004-2006).

Craig Emerson, a Labor backbencher, has suggested that completing Year 12 should be compulsory for all students. Julie Bishop, John Howard and even Kim Beazley have all said they disagree.

Emerson cites some interesting statistics to back his claim, including the following:

• Early school leavers earn 20% less than those who complete Year 12, who in turn earn 20% less than those with vocational education, who in turn earn 40% less than university graduates;
• Those who want to leave early but stay on regardless earn 10% more over their lifetimes;
• After several years, 20 per cent of male early leavers were unemployed compared to 10 per cent who completed high school;
• After several years, 60 per cent of female early leavers were unemployed compared to 7 per cent who completed high school.

Relative earnings by education level

If we assume that Emerson's statistics are correct, should completing Year 12 be made compulsory? The answer is a lot messier than most politicians would like. On the one hand, point 2 above suggests forcing a student to complete Year 12 will boost their lifetime earnings. On the other hand, if every student were to complete Year 12, that earnings boost would vanish: too many school-educated workers, and too few with technical skills.

This brings us to a distasteful conclusion. As a parent, you would want to do everything you can to see your child complete Year 12, but your advice to other children would be "it's your choice".

Articles:

• Craig Emerson's Speech (particularly starting bottom of page 22)
  
• Year 12 should be compulsory: Emerson
• Howard dismisses Labor's Year 12 plan
• School's out with teenage job rush

Yale University  will soon offer videos of some of its courses available for free, in an 18 month pilot project supported by a grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The project will also offer lecture transcripts in several languages, syllabi and other course materials. (Yale to Make Select Courses Available on the Internet; Yale to offer free web courses.)

There are several universities now offering course materials online in a systematic way.

UC Berkeley has been offering video webcasts for a wide range of its courses since 2001. Many of the videos contain closed captions, and the university also makes MP3 files (podcasts) of the lectures available. These resources are all available from webcast.berkeley. Another Californian university, UCLA, also offers occasional webcasts for its lectures.

MIT's OpenCourseWare project is now a couple of years old. It provides access to all kinds of materials from the university's courses, including lecture notes, online text books, applets, assignments and exams.

Rice University oversees a project, called Connexions, which aims to hold course materials under a Creative Commons license. Courses on the Connexions site are university-independent, and many of the courses can be read the way one reads a textbook.

Alongside these efforts, many universities allow their lecturers to post course materials online, though most of these materials are not well organised, nor accessible from a central university portal.

Australian universities. As for Australian universities, there doesn't seem to be any systematic effort to offer course materials freely online, although several lecturers do make their lecture notes available. Disappointingly, there seems to be a rush towards walling up course content for university students only (particularly with my own university). This is incredibly short-sighted, and at odds with the public funding that still makes up a significant portion of income for Australian universities. I truly hope that our universities will wake up to the wonderful opportunity for showing off their (course) wares to the world, just as the above universities have.

The OECD has released a report comparing the early childhood policies for 20 countries, including Australia. According to the blurb for the OECD report, 'early childhood policy' covers not just preschool education, but also child care and social and family policies.

The media has picked up on two points in particular, which are spending on preschool education and teacher qualifications in preschools. Australia fares badly in both cases. Apparently, we spend 0.1% of our GDP on preschool, the least of any of the surveyed countries. (I assume this combines goverment and private spending.) Also, only 57% of the staff in private preschools have a teaching degree, and 55% of workers in child care centres have a diploma. (A diploma in what? you may ask, but unfortunately I couldn't find any more details.)

Fiona Stanley is not happy with this situation, and neither is Julie Bishop. Both have called for preschooling to be made compulsory. (Preschooling is a state responsibility.) But is there really a problem here? And if so, is compulsory preschooling really a solution to the problem?

The OECD report discusses spending and teacher qualifications. But surely we are interested in the quality of preschool learning and care, and how these affect the development of our children throughout their primary, secondary and tertiary education and their success in industry. It doesn't seem obvious to me that there is a strong connection between, say, spending on preschools and later learning. First, while we know that early childhood experiences (at ages 5 and lower) are extremely important, we still don't really know how they impact later learning and development, or which experiences improve a child's prospects. Second, many parents may be educating their own children --- in which case preschool spending (and even teacher qualification) is irrelevant. As we can see, these two factors alone weaken the connection between preschool spending and later learning.

One final comment. According to The Australian's article, countries such as the US and Britain are spending 5 times as much (and Mexico 6 times as much) on preschool education (presumably in GDP terms). Are these countries' kids really 5 times smarter and more emotionally capable than Australian kids at the start of school?

Articles:

• Preschool spending lowest in OECD
• Preschool spending the lowest in OECD
• OECD Blurb - More OECD countries focusing on early childhood as key to education success
• Bishop joins calls for compulsory preschooling
• The World Today - Aust preschools get lowest rating in OECD report