The City of Sydney international education plan commits to “enhance Sydney’s strengths as a leading education destination, by, “work(ing) with education providers on research and other projects of mutual benefit, such as using memorandums of understanding.” There’s more, much more, of the same @ f in Lord Mayor Clover Moore’s draft.

The feds have very quietly corrected equity stats in the Higher Education Information Management System. Apparently two sets of data published last September included errors, although what they are and how it happened is undisclosed. Information effected is participation and retention rates for domestic students categorised as NESB, disability, Indigenous, low SES and remote or regional. The Department of Education and Training apologies to people who come  across it on the HEIMS HELP site.

Geoff McColl is set to be the new executive dean of medicine at the University of Queensland. He is to move from the University of Melbourne, where he is professor of medical training and head of the medical school.

School education researchers are ambivalent about Labor’s proposal for an evidence institute for schools, with some suggesting it implies academics are not performing. This isn’t so so say Emma Rowe (Deakin U) and Trevor Gale (UniGlasgow, ex Deakin U) who cite QS rankings to claim, “Australia produces some of the best education research in the world.”

They also worry that the proposed institute could end up running party lines, warning; “the prevailing logic of teacher education policy is now clearly very ideological rather than based on the research evidence.”

And they suggest that the $280m Labor’s Tanya Plibersek promises for the institute would be better spent in schools. But not all of it, they also propose spending money to help academic research reach “schools and teachers,” who, they say,  “reportedly find it difficult to access peer-reviewed journal articles, due to the cost. They can also be difficult to locate and employ quite dense language. It is important to ensure that existing research is readily translatable to classroom practise for time-poor teachers.”

But perhaps not research from all education faculties . Despite QS, the Australian Research Council’s current performance rating scores Australian university research on education at 11 faculties below world standard, 19 at it, six above world standard and only two, the universities of Melbourne and Queensland, well above.

People lost libraries of books they loved when Sullivans Creek burst its banks and flooded parts of ANU last month; including DVC Marnie Hughes Warrington who reflects on the extraordinary event of four metres of water inundating parts of campus in the new essay in her chronicle of campus. No one died but books, loved for both their form and content, were lost to the flood. “Books are made by authors, of course, but they are sustained by readers in afterlives that stretch over millennia. When you wash away a book, it seems as if you wash away a person, even if it is not the only copy on earth.” But libraries will be created anew, not recreated, as collections and what readers make of them take new directions. The flood reminded Professor Hughes Warrington of another lesson. “Uncle Carl was right. Never underestimate the power of the creek.