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I work in a private RTO. When can I use copyright material for my work without seeking permission from the copyright owner? Your private RTO is unlikely to have been declared an 'educational institution' under the Copyright Act 1968 10A(4) declaration and will not be operating under statutory licences that allow it to reproduce other peoples creations.Private RTO's can purchase 'blanket licences' that allow it to operate in the same way as the statutory licences. Contact the Copyright Agency Limited for detailed information.Otherwise, if a work is subject to copyright you will generally need the copyright owner's permission to reproduce it. However, listed below are several circumstances where you won't need permission:Owner gives permission Some authors, want to make their work more freely available so they put an alternative copyright statement on their work. This is often true in the VET system where there is a strong culture of collaboration. To check this - read the copyright statements on hard copy items. In the electronic environment look out for items bearing a Free for Education (FfE) or Creative Commons logo.Work is now in the public domain What is the public domain? This is where all works go when their copyright expires. In Australia, that is 70 years after the author dies. Once a work is in public domain you can use as much or as little of it as you like without the author's permission. To find out more try typing "public domain" into any major search engine.

I'm currently listening to David Rock's 'Your Brain at Work' in which he uses the metaphor of a stage and actors against a narrative of a typical day in the lives of two protagonists to explain neuroscience and how our brains function. In doing so, Rock explores what we can do to maximise our finite energy and be more mindful of how we are using our brains. This is a compelling book that has already spawned several AHA moments for me - and the two characters are still only half way through their work days! So far, the biggest take-aways for me include: - our mental 'stage' only has room for a few actors at a time - there are times of day that are better for complex tasks than others - by paying attention to your mental processes, you can control the factors that impact the way your brain functions - being 'mindful' and paying attention to your physical surrounds can give you a much-needed break from the narrative processes that would have you dwell on planning and scenarios. Am enjoying this journey immensely and will be sad when it's over. Am looking forward to learning more about how to get the most out of my 1.3 kilos or so of grey matter at my disposal.

http://groupworksolutions.com.au/Home.htm Groupwork Solutions is a training company that specialises in dynamic learning, mastery of practice skills, resource development, working with men, using strengths based approaches and creative group work.

Cultural dimensions of Indigenous participation in vocational education and training: new perspectives by Alfred Michael Dockery, Centre for Labour Market Research and Curtin University This report provides new evidence on the interrelationships between Indigenous Australians' affiliation with their traditional culture and the nature of their engagement with vocational education and training (VET). It aims to enhance our understanding of the causal channels through which culture shapes VET participation and outcomes, and vice versa, and builds on previous work presented in the author's 2009 publication, Cultural dimensions of Indigenous participation in education and training, in a number of ways. Most importantly, richer measures of culture are developed which capture separate elements of the broader concept of 'cultural attachment'. Using these measures and more recent data, previous findings relating to past educational attainment and participation in training are reassessed. Evidence is also presented on the links between cultural attachment and current participation in education and on the benefits Indigenous Australians derive from education and training, conditional upon remoteness and cultural attachment.

There are plenty of sites dealing with the use of the apostrophe in English, but many people just want a quick answer to a question that arises in the course of their work.  The following examples show correct usage for questions that arise frequently, and apply equally to British English, American English, Australian English and New Zealand English. A general tip for checking that your use of apostrophes is correct is to change the phrase around so that the part before the apostrophe becomes the last word.  If it still has the same meaning, the apostrophe was correct.

Great page with quick references and easy to follow.

MIT today announced the launch of an online learning initiative internally called "MITx." MITx will offer a portfolio of MIT courses through an online interactive learning platform that will:organize and present course material to enable students to learn at their own pacefeature interactivity, online laboratories and student-to-student communicationallow for the individual assessment of any student's work and allow students who demonstrate their mastery of subjects to earn a certificate of completion awarded by MITxoperate on an open-source, scalable software infrastructure in order to make it continuously improving and readily available to other educational institutions.

Chart and explanation based on Di Clemente and Prochaska's work

Why we need to move beyond text assignments in our courses...