Our contemporary education systematically trashes creativity and unwittingly punishes students for exercising their imagination.
- Associate Director Student Experience, Monash University
Since Marcel Breuer’s Wassily Chair of 1925 the formula for comfortable seating has been known: create a right-angle, open it up a tad, and tip it backward, so that the seat places the bottom lower than…
With technology changing the landscape of higher education, The Conversation is running a series “Re-imagining the Campus” on the future of campus learning. Here, Robert Nelson suggests university campus…
Here’s the truth, and if you’re British or Australian, you may not like it: when it comes to the suffix ize, as opposed to ise, the American standard is correct. I have no idea what cultural forces made…
What makes one space adorable and engaging? What makes another unfriendly and inhospitable? You might think that after two millennia of architectural discourse, we’d have ready answers. And not just answers…
Death has a special significance in the history of art. Whenever artists die, a kind of art dies with them. Painting will survive Jeffrey Smart (1921–2013) but the kind of picture that he produced is impossible…
This week Coalition MP Alan Tudge wrote a piece in the Australian Financial Review calling for an end to the 26-week academic year. In his article, he said students were spending the remainder of their…
Have you ever walked out of a class without having learned anything at all? Or maybe you were on the other end, watching your intricately planned lesson go off the rails because students didn’t prepare…
There’s plenty of debate over the future of sustainable urban planning. Is it outer suburban sprawl that’s unsustainable, or is it high-density inner city living that’s at fault? Brendan Gleeson recently…
For a long a time real estate close to the palace was socially desirable, and anyone with aspirations didn’t want to know about the rest. Today in Melbourne inner-city people are embarrassed to reveal…
Vladimir Umanets, who scrawled his signature on Mark Rothko’s painting Black on Maroon in the Tate Museum this week, is not the first artist to deface an established artwork. In 2003, Jake and Dinos Chapman…
FUTURE OF HIGHER EDUCATION: The rise of online and blended learning and the development of free online courses is set to transform the higher education sector. We’ve asked our authors how to remake the…
Plagiarism at university is a time-old scourge. Some would have us believe it can be sought out with ever-improving technology, and with more consistent vetting of student essays with the latest detection…
Art critic Robert Hughes passed away overnight after a long illness. He was 74. His wife Doris Hughes said in a statement that he passed away peacefully at 3.40pm (5.40am AEST) in New York, with her by…
The impending closure of art history at La Trobe University has drawn sharp criticism from academics. They have pointed out that students enjoy art history: it is economical, has enduring value and demonstrably…
Australian universities compete with providers all over the globe. The stakes are high and it is hard to ignore world rankings. In The Conversation recently, however, University of Southern Queensland’s…
WHAT IS AUSTRALIA FOR? Australia is no longer small, remote or isolated. It’s time to ask What Is Australia For?, and to acknowledge the wealth of resources we have beyond mining. Over the next two weeks…
In spite of what everyone believes through natural pride and vanity, the family house is an asset that depreciates. Don’t be deceived that the value of property goes up and up, which of course it does…
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