Portfolio task 6

A single global currency?

Some people believe that trade and travel would be easier with a single, global currency. It may seem a superficially attractive idea but on closer examination it seems extremely naïve.

First, what are the attractions? Well, obviously travelers would not have to queue to exchange their own currency for that of the country they are travelling to. In addition, international trading would be easier, more stable and more predictable, which would be attractive, in many ways, to the world’s stock exchanges. Many countries find it harder to export when their own currency is much stronger than thecurrencies of those nations they wish to export to. Finally, of course, there
is the view that a single currency would promote international harmony and
cooperation.

How real are these touted gains? Travel would certainly be easier without doubt but how much easier? We can at present take $US to almost any country in the world. International trade might be simplified but there would also be many drawbacks. If a country is in economic
difficulties, one way out is to alter its exchange rates; this would not be possible with a single currency. Above all, the idea that rich and poor countries can share the same currency is basically impractical. We need only to look at the present (2011-12) euro crisis to see that even the relatively affluent countries of the eurozone are struggling to share the same currency.
Overall, the idea of a single global currency seems driven by the same utopian vision of world harmony that inspired the creation of a so-called international language, Esperanto, about a century ago. That didn’t work. Neither would a single global currency.

275 words

Portfolio task 5

Visitors to Australia

The line graph shows the number of visitors to Australia by overseas residents from 1975 to 2005. The table shows which countries these visitors came from.

The overall trend in the line graph is a steady increase from 8.8M in 1975 to just over 30M in 2005. There is no fluctuation. Where did all these visitors come from? Again there is no change in the overall pattern. Most visitors in 1975 came from Japan, 3.2M, and most in 2005 came from the same country, 12M, a three- to four-fold increase. There was a similar increase for the next country, South Korea, 2.9M to 9.1M. Europe, Britain, the USA and China were the next, respectively, in number of visitors in both 1975 and 2005. The biggest increase was European visitors, over four times as many and the smallest from China, under three times.

There was a steady increase in the number of overseas visitors to Australia in this 30-year period. The percentage increase from the 6 countries in the table was remarkably similar.

171 words.

Project

E-mail

Project

The innovation which has transformed my professional life in recent years is the e-mail. At ADMC we faculty live and die by electronic mail. We send, every day, e-mails to people who are only a few desks away. In the past we would have gone to see these people in person or written hard copy notes to leave on their desks.

Electronic mail predates the inception of the Internet, and was in fact a crucial tool in creating the Internet. MIT first demonstrated the Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS) in 1961. It allowed multiple users to log into the IBM 7094 from remote dial-up terminals, and to store files online on disk. This new ability encouraged users to share information in new ways. E-mail started in 1965 as a way for multiple users of a time-sharing mainframe computer to communicate. Although the exact history is murky, among the first systems to have such a facility were SDC's Q32 and MIT's CTSS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mail).

So e-mail has been around a long time but it is only in the last 10-15 years that it has played a part in my professional development.In fact, all aspects of life have been changed by e-mail. When I first went to Brunei (we landed in Bandar Seri Begawan, or BSB, the capital, on 1st January, 1980) there was no widely available worldwide web. No-one had a computer. E-mails were unheard of. There were no projectors in classrooms. There weren't even whiteboards or airconditioning units in classrooms. I used chalk on a blackboard. And this was in the Pusat Tingkatan Enam (Sixth Form Centre), at that time the leading academic institution in the whole country. We didn't even have air-conditioning in our staff room, and papers had to be weighted down on desks to prevent them being blown away by the fans.

The contrast with the situation here today in ADMC is striking. Technology is king. Every classroom has a/c, projectors, smartboards, whiteboards (http://www.admc.hct.ac.ae/internet/). I can communicate with all my students by e-mail; getting them to check and read their e-mails is a different matter.

E-mails have transformed not just my professional life but all aspects of life in general. Increasingly people in their everyday lives, as well as their professional ones, are switching from old-fashioned letter writing to e-mail. It would appear to be an inexorable progression from hard to soft copy. When, in 1986, I was studying for my Licentiate Diploma in TESOL with Trinity College,
London, (http://www.trinitycollege.co.uk/), I received work modules by airmail, and returned the completed work likewise. It would take weeks for work to arrive, be completed, returned to London, get marked and sent back. The same tasks could be completed today by e-mail in a fraction of the time. The world has been transformed by electronic mail.

503 words


Bibliography:

"E-mail." En.wikipedia.org. http://www.google.com/. Web. 15 Nov. 2009.

"E-learning." www.admc.hct.ac.ae/internet. Web. 15 Nov. 2009.

http://www.trinitycollege.co.uk/