Archive for the ‘New Zealand’ Category
Friday, February 21st, 2014
Telecom New Zealand is changing its name to Spark. Most commentators regard it as a backward move, most recently Lance Wiggs who diagnoses marketing capture, distraction from executive and board, and the death of a valuable brand.
I'd like to respectfully disagree.
I might be a contrarian, but I think it's ...
Posted in Business, New Zealand | 1 Comment »
Thursday, July 11th, 2013
Andreas Schleicher runs the PISA programme for the UN. PISA is the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment, a test given to 15-year-old students from most of the world. Data about the students, countries, and education systems are analysed to see not just who is high-performing and who is improving, ...
Posted in New Zealand | No Comments »
Sunday, June 16th, 2013
(this post is about the New Zealand education system. I wanted to say more than Twitter made easy)
NZ has an amazing education system. We went through the "Tomorrow's Schools" revolution in the 1990s, which devolved governance of schools to the communities in which those schools sit. A Remuera ...
Posted in Education, New Zealand | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, March 20th, 2013
The NZ Arts Foundation has launched Boosted, a way to crowdfund arts projects. Now, if you're like me, you're probably wondering "don't we already have several ways of doing that? I mean, Kiwi artists have already used Kickstarter and PledgeMe to fund projects."
Boosted's key point of difference is ...
Posted in Business, New Zealand, Technology | 1 Comment »
Thursday, February 28th, 2013
Katherine Mansfield is New Zealand's literary icon: feminist, bisexual, incredibly gifted, part of the Bloomsbury circle of clever people pushing literary form before she died of tuberculosis. Her short stories are as moving today as they were when she wrote them almost 100 years ago. Her papers, and ...
Posted in New Zealand, politics, Technology | No Comments »
Thursday, November 22nd, 2012
(belated)
Monday was a big day: I confirmed the hiring of my first employee, and gave a seminar at Auckland University on open research. The employee is my sister (getting back into the workforce after five years out with son; has been helping me out as book-keeper during that time), ...
Posted in New Zealand | No Comments »
Sunday, September 9th, 2012
It's always seemed strange to me that local broadcasters would hold off broadcasting Dr Who, Mad Men, and other high-profile shows. Viewers chatter about it as soon as an episode airs in its country of origin, so regional fans either have the episode ruined by net spoilers or disconnect ...
Posted in Business, New Zealand, Technology | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, July 18th, 2012
Judge David Harvey has stepped down from the Kim DotCom case. At NetHui last week, he led a discussion of copyright where opinions from the floor were variously thoughtful, passionate, and novel. He was careful to watch his words, at one point saying "I'd better not say anything about ...
Posted in InternetNZ, New Zealand, politics, Technology | 4 Comments »
Thursday, July 12th, 2012
Most of us have a case of "you don't know what you don't know": we don't know the range of what's possible, so we continue doing things as we've seen them done before but with slight improvements. I think of it as being in a dark room: by looking at ...
Posted in Education, New Zealand | No Comments »
Monday, July 2nd, 2012
I've been in the position of being a geek talking with teachers for a while, and I've found it best to approach the whole area of education with humility. In education, as in business, you can't just thrust technology into a situation and magically get the best possible result. ...
Posted in Education, New Zealand, Technology | No Comments »