My Short Bio

My name is George E Duckett

I currently live in Tingalpa, Queensland, Australia.

I was born in Highland Park a suburb of Detroit Michigan USA in November of 1938.

My father was in the Army and served overseas in WWII and the Korean War.

We moved many times and I went to many schools until he settled us in Sonoma California in 1950 when he was on his way to to Korea.

I left school at 16 to take an Apprenticeship as a Loft Rigger at Mare Island Naval Shipyard in 1955.

I joined the Army and spent 13 years in the service from 1956-69. I served overseas during the cold war in Korea and Germany

In September of 1970 I enrolled in college. I received my BS (Hon.) Educational Media Production in August of 1973 and went on to complete my MS Educational Media Technology in June 1974 from the University of Northern Colorado (UNC). I had a Graduate Fellowship with Department of Educational Media at UNC during my Masters work.

From 1974-78 I was employed as an Instructor in Educational Media, U.N.C., Department of Educational Media. In 1977 I completed Professional Teacher's Education Certification in Secondary Communications with endorsement as a K-12 Media Specialist.

In 1977 I received an invitation from the Tasmanian College of Advanced Education, (TCAE) Department of Teacher Education to come to Australia as a Lecturer in Instructional Technology from 1978-80. My contract with TCAE ended and due to the cutback in funding for education at that time there were no positions open at the college. During this time, 1980-84 we bought a property and built a house. My wife worked and I built the house and picked up work when I could find it.

I decided to go back to TSIT and enrolled in Environment Design. At the end of the first year a position opened in the School of Architecture for Senior Technical Officer and part time Lecturer. I took the position and worked for the school until I was asked to apply for a position as Administrative Officer, Purchasing and Transport, Launceston Campus of the University of Tasmania (UT) From December 1991-January 1994. I started working on a Phd. at UT in 1992.

In January of 94 I took early retirement from UT and enrolled full time PhD by research at Deakin University from August 1993-August 1997. I completed my Research and was writing the dissertation but again severe cuts in in Education left me without a supervisor and I was forced to resign from the program. At the time the Faculty of Education at Deakin, from 1994-97 was cut from over 300 lecturers to about 30 and classes were being offered that had no one to teach them. At that point I felt I was wasting my time and opted out.

I returned to the US 1997 to see what was going on in education there and found they were no better off than we were in Australia. Returned to Australia in February 2000 and found nothing was available in my field.

Although I am now retired I have a background in education and am still interested in its outcome. I would love to do something to help bring education back to a 1st world level. This year 2009 an opportunity once again has presented itself and I'm helping with the development of online tutorials with an online learning program by the California School Library Association 2.0 Team.