Square Kilometre Array Project

Greetings from the National Library of Australia in Canberra, where there is a presentation on the Square Kilometre Array Project (SKA). Not to be confused with Ska Jamaican music of the 1950s, SKA is an international project to build a large radio telescope, part in Western Australia and part in Southern Africa.

The SKA has obvious industry spin-offs in advances in computing and telecommunications, as well a sensor applications particularly for the military.

There is an Australian SKA Office within the Department of Industry.  Unfortunately the Department's website has a number of problems. I found the web page very slow to load so ran the usual checks which I teach to students:

1. Twelve validation errors,
2. Mobile compatibility score of 0 out of 100: The web page has  3 critical, 5 severe, 1 medium and 5 low level problems,
3. Web accessibility: 18 Known Problems.

These easily corrected faults in the design of the web page will make it harder to access and also may make the reader question if Australia can't design a web page, how can it build the world's most advanced scientific instrument?

Greatest Unsolved Mysteries of the Universe MOOC

The first of the Australian National University’s edX Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), started today "Greatest Unsolved Mysteries of the Universe" (ANUx: ANU-ASTRO1x). I signed up for this and "Engaging India" (ANU-INDIA1x: ), which starts 29 April 2014. Previously I have tried MOOCs and have not found them a very satisfying experience, as a student. So I thought I would try two newer ones, from a leading Australian university, to see how the state of the art had improved.

The astrophysics course  started with a welcome message to the students, inviting use to watch a video. Unfortunately my home bandwidth is limited, so I clicked on the link in the email which took me to the course website to read the introduction. However, under the headings "Course Updates & News" and "Course Handouts" I couldn't find any content. It seemed odd that neither the welcome video, nor a text alternative (as required under Australian anti-discrimination law) was provided.

So I then went to the "courseware" page, which asked me for a user-id and password. It is some months since I signed up and could not remember the password, so I requested this be reset. So far the reset email has not arrived. So the only Great Unsolved Mystery so far with this course is "where is the content?". ;-)