Judge Harvey, Kim Dotcom, and The Press
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 …
Schools and Belief
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 …
Education and Technology
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 …
Holiday Road Toll
Every long weekend we hear how many people died, as though it means something, but there’s never any analysis beyond whether it’s more or less than last year’s number. It …
2011 in Books
I’ve been conscientiously using Goodreads to review every book I read. I’ve used the Goodreads API, some Perl, and some Javascript to boil down my year’s reading. Without further …
National Standards, Charter Schools, and a Pint on the Future
tl;dr: Charter schools aren’t a panacea, they don’t appear to be compatible with the emphasis on National Standards, and this seems like the top of a slippery slope which will result in us …
Libraries: Where It All Went Wrong
It was my pleasure to address the National and State Librarians of Australasia on the eve of their strategic planning meeting in Auckland at the start of November this year. I have been involved in …
Innovation is a Moral Good
Pondering the New Zealand fishing industry, I had an insight today. Forgive me if it’s old news to you. You have three options to make more money: Lower costs. Sell more of the same stuff. Make …
Questioning University
There’s a trend now to question the value of a university education. It used to be that simply possessing a university degree gained you access to a Better Class of Job. That is no longer the …
Week 2
A busy week but with little progress on MacLean and Higgins. I did, however, manage the Mix and Mash judging and a trip to Wellington for the Library Information Advisory Commission (LIAC), and …