The first changes to residential tenancy laws in 20 years are now open for public submissions and will introdce the final legislation in the new year. The draft chenges provide increased rights and and place increased obligations on both the landlord and the tenant.

Reaching critical mass

The site has now been running for just on three weeks and we have sent 190 invites and have 97 members and heading for 100 shortly. The site has had an amazing 14,000+ page hits. There are 4 different sub groups with varying numbers of members and at last count over 22 different forum
discussions taking place.

Setting up the group site

We decided that the ning.com community was the best tool for us as we are able to control access and security while giving members quite a degree of freedom within the site.

The need for a community

This project had the main objectives of determininf if increased levels of contact with distance education students would increase course completion rates and reduce the time to complete the course.

Students were provided with;

A new application called  Metamorphosis has come across my desk and it looks like a great tool that for teachers for creating web or application based learning directly from MS Word documents. The company, EasyAuthoring claims on their web site that the software  can "convert a Microsoft Word text document into a fully fledged elearning course with assessments in minutes".

Westpac have released their Outlook for the Australian Property market through to 2009. The report predicts residential markets to rise bwteen 2% and 4% with the runaway markets in the mining boom states to come back to normal growth rates. They believe that the rental shortage and stable prices will see rental prices increas by 10% and returns increase to above 5% in the major centres.

The Minister for Fair Trading has announced that the government will
adopt the recommendations of an independent evaluation of Continuing
Professional Development (CPD) programs to enhance and improve their
operation for property and building licence and certificate holders.