HECS System Changes: Impact on Students

This paper examines the impact of changes to Australia’s student financing system on various hypothetical students who choose the Government’s proposed deferred payment options, HECS-HELP and FEE-HELP. The present values of their HECS repayments under the existing (2004) system are compared with the present values of repayments under various alternative systems. These alternative systems relate to increasing the HECS charge by 25 per cent for HECS-HELP students and introducing a fee paid with a debt of $12,500 per year for FEE-HELP students. For HECS-HELP students it is found that the impact of an increase of 25 per cent in the charge is likely to be small. For example, we show that for ‘average’ males and females, an increase of 25 per cent in the HECS charge will result in a much smaller true financial cost than this. Further, graduates earning relatively low incomes are protected from the 25 per cent increase in the HECS charge by the higher repayment thresholds and they (especially female graduates) will pay substantially less HECS compared with the current system. High income graduates, however, will experience true price increases which are considerable and of the order of 20 per cent or more. For FEE-HELP students, not surprisingly, the present values of HECS repayments are substantial given debt accumulations of$12,500 per year for a four-year period of study.. However and importantly, it is found that many low-income graduates will not fully repay debts of this amount. As well, because debt totals are to be limited to $50,000 per student it is possible to model the effect of the need for some to pay a proportion of the charge up-front, and it is clear that in this case FEE-HELP adds very substantially to a student’s payment obligation and is also arguably very regressive. A commentary is offered on ways in which the proposed 2005 changes to financing might be improved.HECS, higher education, financing

Darwin\u27s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction

In Darwin s Plots, Gillian Beer writes that \u27On the Origin of Species is one of the most extraordinary examples of a work which included more than the maker of it at the time knew, despite all that he did know\u27. Published in November 1859 with a print run of 1,250, Origin shook Victorian Britain. Its conclusions seemed inescapable. Life on earth was not the six-day product of a divine creator, but the outcome of random evolutionary process. Its impact was immediate and immense. Man \u27was born yesterday - he will perish tomorrow\u27 declared the Athenaeum. In later life Thomas Hardy declared himself one of its earliest acclaimers, and George Eliot and G. H. Lewes began reading it immediately, concluding within two days that it made \u27an epoch\u27. The next year, in The Mill on the Floss, as Tom Tulliver shoots peas at a blue-bottle, the narrator observed that nature \u27had provided Tom and the peas for the speedy destruction of this weak individual\u27. Through Origin, mid-Victorian concern with kinship, descent and inheritance, God, creation, origins and the place of humanity in nature found new expression, formulated new questions, and wrestled with disturbing and turbulent possibilities. The year 2000 has seen a timely second edition of Darwin s Plots, with a foreword by George Levine and a new preface by Beer. Since its first publication, the \u27Darwin industry\u27 has burgeoned industriously. Darwin has become, once more, central to cultural and scientific debate: fine biographies such as Janet Browne\u27s Voyaging and Adrian Desmond and James Moore\u27s Darwin have appeared; his Notebooks were published in 1987; and in 1985 the first volume of his letters and a register and summary of the fourteen thousand known letters to and from Darwin (now online).\u27 Darwin\u27s Plots explores the genesis and language of Darwin\u27s evolutionary ideas, and their relationship to stories and myths within our culture, revealing that Darwin\u27s story was new and transforming, going against the grain and upturning dominant cultural assumptions, but also that it was a multilayered narrative that was deeply embedded in the social and intellectual developments of its time. The final section draws out the implications of evolutionary theory for narrative and for the composition of fiction, providing analyses of George Eliot\u27s and Hardy\u27s imaginative responses to Darwin which are not only compelling but indispensable to our understanding of these writers, and of the development of the novel more generally in the late nineteenth century. Throughout, it raises issues which are no less vital to current debate and interpretation of Darwin than they were when he first challenged his contemporaries. The nineteenth century is no longer the last century; the twentieth century now separates us from it, a significant rival for the attentions of students that is likely to win in the \u27relevance\u27 stakes, as the moving image competes with the written word on undergraduate syllabuses. But nineteenth-century culture - and the science which stands at its centre - is essential to our understandipg of the present. Beer begins her new preface \u27Darwin has grown younger in recent years\u27. And so he has; he is again at the centre of debates on what it is to be human, and on the role of science in understanding what we have come from, where we are going, as the Human Genome Project ripens, and biology is called upon to explain almost every aspect of social existence from social inequalities to health, sexuality and crime. This fascination with biology began with the Victorians

The Twenty-Sixth George Eliot Memorial Lecture: A Troubled Friendship

Edith Simcox is now usually remembered, if at all, as the woman who recorded in a secret journal (\u27Autobiography of a Shirt Maker\u27) her passionate and physically unrequited love for George Eliot. Yet to her contemporaries Simcox was well known as a philosopher, a distinguished translator of intellectual works from German, an incisive journalist reviewing important works written in French and German as well as English, an ethnographer, and a political activist. She was, under the pen-name \u27H. Lawrenny\u27 one of the founding contributors to the Academy in 1869 and appeared for the first time in her own person there as Edith Simcox in March 1873 shortly after writing (still as \u27H. Lawrenny\u27) her important essay on Middlemarch in January. Her acquaintance with George Eliot began that year. Simcox\u27s Natural Law: an essay in ethics (1877) was praised in Mind, 11 (1877) as \u27the most important contribution yet made to the Ethics of the Evolution theory\u27 (p. 552). Her co-operative of women shirtmakers not only produced excellent shirts for a decade but largely fulfilled the dream with which they had set out of \u27a strictly self-supporting clothes-making factory, where women should do all the work, and divide the profits among them\u27 (\u27Eight Years of Co-operative Shirt-making\u27, Nineteenth Century, June 1884, p. 1039). She composed the Constitution for the Second Socialist International. What then were the incentives of her friendship with the more conservative Marian Lewes? One undoubtedly was that Marian Lewes was George Eliot, the famous novelist, whom Simcox deeply admired; another was that behind the powerful figure of the novelist lay a woman not quite at ease with herself. Understanding their relationship during the 1870s may shed light on George Eliot\u27s late work, as well as on the struggle which engaged Simcox to find a discourse that can include sexuality and socialism, insights and inhibitions. And because friendship produces a third figure, an interlocked self that cannot be reproduced in any other circumstances, this uneven and troubled relationship changes both women. The faltering voice in the exchange below is that of George Eliot, Marian Lewes, trying to explain to her passionate friend Edith Simcox why she has \u27never in all her life cared very much for women.\u27 Edith Simcox, on the contrary, never cared very much for men. Hence their dilemma and the fascination between them. Then she tried to add what I had already imagined in explanation, that when she was young, girls and women seemed to look on her as somehow \u27uncanny\u27 while men were always kind. The \u27uncanniness\u27 of George Eliot interferes repeatedly in her relations with other women, despite her life-long equal friendship with Barbara Bodichon

Community building and virtual teamwork in an online learning environment

In the world of OTIS, an online Internet School for occupational therapists, students from four European countries were encouraged to work collaboratively through problem based learning by interacting with each other in a virtual semi-immersive environment. This paper aims to explore the issues that there was little interaction between students from different tutorial groups and virtual teamwork developed in each of the cross cultural tutorial groups. Synchronous data from European students was captured during tutorial sessions and peer booked meetings and evidence suggests that communities of interest were established. It is possible to conclude that collaborative systems can be designed, which encourage students to build trust and teamwork in a cross cultural online learning environment. </p

The Reader as Author

"The Reader as Author" explores how readers become co-authors of the literary experience, through the imaginative act of filling gaps or, indeed, through their resistance to authorial propositions. The “virtual witnessing” in Charles Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle and the companionable tone of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books—testify to the broad range of literary genres that invite readers to interact with and react to “author” texts beyond the initial writer’s control

Collaboration and teamwork: immersion and presence in an online learning environment

In the world of OTIS, an online Internet School for occupational therapists, students from four European countries were encouraged to work collaboratively through problem-based learning by interacting with each other in a virtual semi-immersive environment. This paper describes, often in their own words, the experience of European occupational therapy students working together across national and cultural boundaries. Collaboration and teamwork were facilitated exclusively through an online environment, since the students never met each other physically during the OTIS pilot course. The aim of the paper is to explore the observations that here was little interaction between students from different tutorial groups and virtual teamwork developed in each of the cross-cultural tutorial groups. Synchronous data from the students was captured during tutorial sessions and peer-booked meetings and analysed using the qualitative constructs of ‘immersion’, ‘presence’ and ‘reflection in learning’. The findings indicate that ‘immersion’ was experienced only to a certain extent. However, both ‘presence’ and shared presence were found by the students, within their tutorial groups, to help collaboration and teamwork. Other evidence suggests that communities of interest were established. Further study is proposed to support group work in an online learning environment. It is possible to conclude that collaborative systems can be designed, which encourage students to build trust and teamwork in a cross cultural online learning environment.</p

Sexual selection, automata and ethics in George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss and Olive Schreiner's Undine and From Man to Man

This paper brings together two related areas of debate in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The first concerns how the courtship plot of the nineteenth-century novel responded to, and helped to shape, scientific ideas of sexual competition and selection. In The Mill on the Floss (1860), George Eliot strikingly prefigures Darwin's later work on sexual selection, drawing from her own extensive knowledge of the wider debates within which evolutionary theory developed. Maggie Tulliver's characterisation allows Eliot to explore the ethical complexities raised by an increasingly powerful scientific naturalism, where biology is seen to be embedded within morality in newly specific ways. The second strand of the paper examines the extension of scientific method to human mind and motivation which constituted the new psychology. It argues that there are crucial continuities of long-established ethical and religious ideas within this increasingly naturalistic view of human mind and motivation. The contention that such ideas persist and are transformed, rather than simply jettisoned, is illustrated through the example of Thomas Henry Huxley's 1874 essay on automata. Turning finally to focus on Olive Schreiner's Undine (1929) and From Man to Man (1926), the paper explores the importance of these persistent ethical and religious ideas in two novels which remained unpublished during her lifetime. It argues that they produce both difficulty and opportunity for imagining love plots within the context of increasingly assertive biological and naturalistic accounts of human beings

Once a feminist: Lynne Segal on Grace Paley’s The Little Disturbances of Man

The following contributions came in response to a request, sent to a number of key figures in feminism today, to write on a text that had been formative for their thinking as feminists. The chosen text could be a theory, a novel, an artwork, a performance, a poem: one that had stimulated, or even revolutionised, their ideas. As we hoped, this project has created a selection of texts central to our many and different experiences as feminists. I used to say that Margaret Drabble's The Garrick Year was the story of my life, in my early twenties, as if I was just a creature of time and circumstance. I read The Garrick Year sometime between October 1965, when my first child was born, and the end of 1967, before my marriage disintegrated. Like the heroine Emma Evans, I married a successful actor, had a child, and followed his career—which in the novel led Emma to Hereford for a summer season of plays

'Countries in the Air': Travel and Geomodernism in Louis MacNeice's BBC Features

In the middle stretch of his twenty-two-year BBC career, the poet and producer Louis MacNeice earned a reputation as one of the ‘undisputed masters of creative sound broadcasting’, a reputation derived, in part, from a huge range of radio features that were founded upon his journeys abroad. Through close examination of some of his most significant overseas soundscapes – including Portrait of Rome (1947) and Portrait of Delhi (1948) – this article will consider the role and function of travel in shaping MacNeice’s engagement with the radio feature as a modernist form at a particular transcultural moment when Britain moved through the end of the Second World War and the eventual disintegration of its empire