'Now, Year Ones, This is Your Life!'

Abstract

Although I am not a specialist in distance education, I am very familiar with the specialist demands of rural schooling through my having been a Regional Director of the huge Western Region (Eyre Peninsula) of South Australia, and then from my being the foundation CEO of the Northern Territory school system. The role carried with it all the complexities of dealing with children on station properties, with two Schools of the Air, and with the education of Indigenous people who were still resident on tribal land, and with distance. From this kind of educator background, I shall aim to draw a large picture of the future and on a wide canvas. 'Scrap-booking' is one the most recent, rapidly growing hobbies in America. It has been called the modern equivalent of 'the making of an American quilt', because people are now meeting or forming clubs to do it together. It has been given its stimulus by the welter of nostalgic looking-back-at-the-past which accompanied the last year of the Twentieth Century. People apparently want to look back over their own lives too, and so they are producing scrap-books which assemble the mementoes associated with their high and low points, their achievements and their own life story.