We are engaging in general discussion now in Brisbane, which probably means it is easier to follow this via Twitter, rather than me trying to follow it all.

So, I guess this is where I sign off.

Phew! It’s all over! Live blogging is exhausting – not to mention trying to keep track of the twitter feeds, the Google Wave discussions and all the other activity going on! There has been a hive of activity here in Brisbane and I can only imagine the same (or more) has occurred in Sydney.

I think the Brisbane forum has been very successful and thank you to everyone who attended, whether in person or online. I’d also like to extend thanks to the wonderful speakers on the program today, Prof Anne Fitzgerald and Paul O’Keeffe for organising the forum, Pia Waugh, Senator Kate Lundy and our friends at the main forum in Sydney, other members of our research team – Elliott Bledsoe, Jessica Coates, Cheryl Foong and Jimmy Ti – for helping with taking notes, making tweets and taking photos, and finally Patrice Meixsell-Draper and the QUT AV services and technical services teams for assisting with the venue, wireless connectivity and audio recording of today’s events.

The final stream (Stream 5 – e-Community) was facilitated by Fee Plumley of the Australia Council for the Arts.

Fee described the Geeks in Residence program that the Australia Council is running – putting “geeks” within arts organisations to help them with their digital agenda.

The Geeks in Residence program is interested in three things:

1. What innovation can take place around artistic programming?

2. Audience development (marketing through digital – but this needs to be done strategically – must build community of users within the organisation) – need cultural change within the organisation – staff are taught to use networking in a productive way

3. General operations – something often overlooked in terms of how technologies can improve productivity

Fee also made the point very well that it is important to have clear and sensible policy around use of social networking in the workplace. You must let your staff engage with and network with their communities online. Talking about their work with passion to others is just as important as the actual work. Passion spreads the message further.

Discussion then turned (very strongly) to copyright. Fee made the following arguments:

The first thing we must do, alongside the NBN, is to re-examine the copyright system. All we have currently is blockades, because the old organisations are just working to preserve old industry and old business models. This may rock the boat – but the boat needs to be rocked.

We need to get Creative Commons, APRA, MEAA, whoever, to work together – to try a number of case studies of business and copyright models with difference content and different audiences – to see what happens. Sick of hearing “it can’t be done” and closed doors – let’s do it as an experiment! If at the end, the best answer is to shut down the process and fiercely protect the copyright, then “I will shut up”. We need to let new business models develop. We must demand that even though we are small and niche (“the arts”), we have an important part within the economic system. We need knowledge investment. We must question why we accept models from the past.

Other debate –

Fee Plumley: Artists need to stop feeling bad about asking for money. The subsidising system makes artists feel like beggars.

Elliott Bledsoe: Similarly, artists need to stop expecting other people (intermediaries) to ask for money for them.

Fee Plumley: There must be a balance across the whole space. We don’t just want commercially-driven art

In the e-Business stream we had an overview of the Peer to Patent Australia Project from Professor Brian Fitzgerald. I’ll let you see my earlier (more extensive post) for information about this project and I’d also encourage you to visit the website.

There was also some general discussion around some e-business issues, all of which were well covered via the twitter stream (#bbfqld) – so again, I will let you read the tweets there.

Stream 3 was on digital education.

First up was Linda Pitt, Manager, Discovery Programs, eLearning, QLD Department of Education and Training. Linda gave an overview of The Learning Place. I encourage you to check it out – they are doing some fantastic things.

The Learning Places works on the theory that a robust digital education infrastructure involves three limbs – digital pedagogies, digital content, and e-learning spaces. It is trying to give students a ‘real-world’ experience through online networks. It is encourage use of digital spaces (such as Second Life) and tools such as blogging. It helps to have people blog their teaching and learning experiences to share with others and grow from everyone’s experiences.

Some other points made by Linda:

• Smart Classrooms not only need bandwidth they need access to trained facilitators that can show students how to learn online (via @MichaelSmale)
  
  

• One of the biggest problems for the learning place is low bandwidth in most QLD schools – only have a small number of schools with definite broadband – this is poor

• We want teachers to be able connect with experts out there, and we want teachers and students and students and students to be able to connect with each other, no matter where they are.

Second up was Professor Greg Hearn, ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (QUT), Director Creative Workforce Program.

Main points made by Greg about new broadband technologies were:

• There is potential for a major paradigm shift in education

• We need innovation in all three layers (technology, content, social) to have real progress in education

• Some provocations for education –
  
  

o Is the music industry a model for the education system? Do we need new business and content models? What is the disruptive innovation that will bring about a paradigm shift in education?

o Should bots (online games) be adopted as the new primary school classroom?

o How do we harvest and accredit web 2.0 learning?

o Which is a more important budget item – the teacher or the IT infrastructure? They are roughly 50/50 at the moment – what should we spend more on?

o Who will be the gatekeeper of the virtual classrooms (that have no boundaries)

o Which physical facilities still add value in the education process?

Greg then moved on to facilitating discussion around some specific discussion points.

We focused on the two later discussion points of those provided to us by the main forum:

(2) Reality Check – what is holding us back?

• The digital literacy of the educators (may need retraining)

• One of the key restraints in our current education = regression in the mean i.e. we need to tailor programs to the less able students. One of the big changes that broadband can offer is bringing experts closer to students and tailoring education to the individual.

• How will we create the right environment for teachers to be able to handle multiple students using multiple technologies, at different levels and in different regions? – it will bust apart the system – it is a challenge – but we need to create digital support networks.

(3) Next steps – what needs to be done?

• Why don’t we de-regulate the university curriculum and let students do the individual courses they want to take?

• Individuals will be better catered for in an open system

The second stream at #bbfqld was about e-Health.

The first presentation was from Alan Taylor, Director of [email protected], Radiology Informatics Program, Queensland Health.

Alan made the following points:

• There will be a huge demand for e-Health applications, including for health records, health monitoring, video conferencing etc
• Large investments in e-Health infrastructure will be needed.
• There is absence of broadband competition outside the south-east corner of Queensland.
• We need to understand the issues according to area and what are the issues for different people – health care providers, specialists, patients etc.
• Health care needs a range of special security and privacy measures appropriate to the context of use.
• Healthcare information needs a range of guarantees that information is available within stated timeframes
• Health care traffic is symmetric. Asymmetric “residential” type services are not a good fit. Healthcare traffic requires “quality of service”
• How will we know whether NBN is on track for healthcare needs? Questions to consider in assessing this – can we get competitive services throughout Queensland and can those services connect with each other? Can we get business grade services for health and government in both regional and metropolitan areas? Will the NBN services support symmetric traffic? Will there be sufficient bandwidth?

Importantly, Alan argued that we need to lobby for investment in Queensland. Funding for digital investment in regional areas absent in Queensland.

Alan also showed a video that demonstrated the different that technology makes to health in rural QLD. Crucially, it helps in making quick decisions about whether patients need transport to other facilities. It is about having up-to-date, accurate information, to make rapid, well-informed decisions. This enhances patient care.

The second speaker was David Hansen, a research scientist from CSIRO. David gave a number of thrilling examples of how CSIRO are using digital technologies in medical research – e.g. to map progression of Alzheimer’s, and many other things. I can’t really do the research justice by explaining in short-form here, but we will endeavour to make the slide set and audio recording available online soon.

General discussion report

Alan Taylor: We need the broadband, but we also need the smart people to get the right management of legal issues and proper business models to actually use the broadband and implement all the possibilities the broadband offers

Q: [Jessica Coates] How hard is training for people with digital technologies?

A: [David Hansen] – Generally you need a clinical champion to actually push the technology in the first place, but once people see the possibilities and how it all works, they generally get very excited about using it.

[Alan Taylor]: Most clinicians can see they need to do things better. Problem is knowing when they can use new technologies – will it save time and money? Will it expose them to risk of clinical malpractice?

The first stream to be considered in the Brisbane forum was Smart Infrastructure.

Associate Professor James Hogan from QUT’s Science & Technology Faculty presented first. He started with a succinct but important quote from Microsoft: “It is not longer possible to do science without a computer”.

James spoke about some projects in his field – namely, how smart infrastructure is being used to measure environmental health. Digital instruments (similar to “smart phones”) record environmental acoustics to “emulate scientific eyes and ears” in measuring environmental health. There are two such projects currently being undertaken – one to measure the sounds (and therefore the movements and health) of koalas at St Bee’s Island, and another to measure the sounds of Lewins Rail (a type of bird) in the Brisbane Airport surrounds. Broadband helps to take this scientific data from the field and share it with others faster and more broadly, to have greater impact.

The second speaker in this stream was Lucy Cradduck, a lecturer in business law at the University of the Sunshine Coast and a SJD candidate in law at QUT.

Lucy made some important points about the challenges facing us in rolling out the national broadband network (NBN). These include:

• Literacy: Access to information is about people being digitally literate – it is important that all people with capacity to access the NBN are fully digitally literate. If we do not have everyone able to understand, as well as everyone able to access, then we cannot move forward properly.

• Physical infrastructure: New networks need to be constructed in infill (mainly urban and regional) and greenfield (mainly regional and rural). There are unique issues in greenfield sites, in particular cost and how the cables are going to be treated. Will they be treated the same as other utilities? There must be proper interoperability between old networks and new. Upgrading existing hardware and software needs to be efficient.

So what steps do we need to make in moving forward?

• We need consistent policies across Australia on what must be provided for all not just Greenfield

• Specific issues for rural and regional Australia must be addressed

– We cannot create an “underclass of the NBN have-nots”

• We need to consider how to treat the cost of creating the network – who pays and when for access to the network?

[Note: I think (hope) that both James and Lucy’s slides will be made available online in the next few days.]

Group discussion record

Q: What legal issues does the NBN throw up?

A: [Lucy Cradduck] One big issue is net neutrality – making sure that the NBN is open, that the content and system providers do not control what material we can have access to. Currently, Telstra controls most (if not all) of the internet exchanges. But moving forward, the NBN should be completely neutral so anyone can use it; anyone can gain access.

Q: So what are the key net neutrality issues we need to be aware of moving forward?

A: [Brian Fitzgerald] Part of the innovation of the internet means you don’t try to predetermine the uses of the internet. One of the critical issues around network neutrality is how strongly you enforce the requirement of net neutrality. And how far do we let people tinker with the internet to prevent copyright infringement or for censorship or for a range of other reasons.

Anne Fitzgerald: Law is part of the infrastructure and the interaction between law and technology is fundamental for access.

Brian Fitzgerald and others: The law could be more customised for more digital environments.

In light of the comments that the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, has made this morning about extending broadband services across regional Australia, and linking broadband with economic growth and equality, I would like to share a comment made on the Brisbane forum website:

I must admit that as a “city-dweller” I had no idea things were this bad in rural Queensland. I do believe that fast internet = better opportunities for education, connecting with others, and much, much more. I have no knowledge about the physical logistics of extending quality broadband to rural Australia, but I do hope we can do something to improve the situation.