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 a good idea. First, let me quickly disregard that idea that Telecom New Zealand is a good brand. It’s a fucking terrible brand for what they want to do with the company. They do NOT want to be a dumb pipe, a commodity provider of connectivity—particularly now they don’t have Chorus. They’ve announced Internet TV and there’ll be more to come, I’m sure. The branding lets them get as far away as possible from the idea that they’re a telco.

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, but why. He came to New Zealand in July, and his talk to Members of Parliament was recorded. My transcription is below. If you can fix some of the parts which are unintelligible, for a limited time you can edit the Google Doc which also has screencaps of some of his slides (please feel free to add more slides).

(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 school will teach and value different things than an Otara school, despite being only a few km away from each other, and that’s okay. But in a world of devolution, how does the state ensure that schools don’t suck?

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 that, being operated by a charitable non-profit, your donations are eligible for 33% tax rebate. So everyday punters like us can enjoy the tax advantages of philanthropic donation, the same way that the millionaires do. To get that tax rebate, however, you can’t receive anything for that donation: no tickets, no hip flask, no signed postcard, no posters, no “flown to Austin for lunch at a fancy hotel with me and my artist friends”, and all the other rewards that Kickstarter and Pledgeme and other crowdfunding sites are built around. Your only reward, so far as I can tell from careful study of Boosted site, is the inner glow of donation and a tax rebate of 33% of the donated amount.

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 those of her husband John Middleton-Murry, are held at the National Library in Wellington as part of more than 50 years of dogged collection by that organisation.

(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), she’s part-time (four hours a day), and our goal is to have her help me scale the business. I know the events inside out, but Jenine has been much better at process definition and automation than I have. Bree’s job is to help me do for my side of the events (definition, promotion, sales, registration, hosting) what Jenine’s already done for her side.

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 until the episode airs locally. The situation has improved enormously from the days of six month or multi-year lags, but the experience is still a bit shit.

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 that” when other trials he has came up. He didn’t mention Dotcom, and the conversation never turned on the Dotcom case.

Harvey’s throwaway “we have met the enemy, and he is U.S.”, was in reference to the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement: the American negotiators have repeatedly pushed for longer copyright terms, no parallel imports, removal of format-shifting exemptions, and much more. If you like parallel imports, turning your CDs into MP3s without having to buy the music again, and the growth of public domain culture, then the enemy very clearly is the U.S.

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 other schools, talking to other teachers, and meeting other school boards, we can shine a torch into the darkness to see where there are walls and where there’s unexplored territory.

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. So the answer to “how to do I use technology to help kids achieve?” is not a laundry list of technologies that the successful schools are using.