Conversation on Continue

Triumph and Disaster Part 1

Mon, 22 Jul 2013 10:33:44 +0000

Paul Brislen asked me to write a little piece for the TUANZ blog, and I’m grateful to him for offering to host my writing. I sent him this piece, and he was kind enough to let me run well over his normal word limit. I’ve made a few revisions and now post it here in two parts. Please comment and hold me to account.

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If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

Triumph and Disaster Part 2

Mon, 22 Jul 2013 10:31:27 +0000

In New Zealand education policy, the failure of Talent2 and the Ministry of Education to build and deliver the Novopay payroll system has been widely covered in the media. This failure occurred for a number of technical and contractual reasons, many of which have been laid out in reviews. The recently released Ministerial inquiry lays the blame for failure in a range of places. But in reading some of the timeline details, and the technical review I got the sense that during the process, failure was not tolerated or accepted.

Public Achievement Information

Wed, 15 Aug 2012 11:03:17 +0000

Buried deep within the Ministry’s website are these pages. If you’re at all interested in the future of NZ education - please take the time to peruse them and consider what they mean for the shape and feel of schools and learning.

Public Achievement Information page

Flyer for parents on PAI

Timeline for PAI - 2012 - 2017

PAI - The Case for system-wide improvement

PAI - Use of Data - Expected Outcomes

Where exactly are we failing again?

Sun, 27 May 2012 07:37:13 +0000

Buried in the final paragraphs of this article in the NZ Herald on charter schools, is an interesting admission.

For her part, Isaac expresses a faint hope that charter schools won’t be seen as “an assault on teachers” “I would be the last person to trash public schools,” she says. “We’ve got wonderful schools and wonderful teachers.” But there are children coming out of some schools whose lives are ruined before they even start, she says. “Some overcome a bad education but many don’t. This is a small initiative that may be effective for children currently failing.”

"Technology at the core"

Mon, 14 May 2012 09:23:37 +0000

Technology drives South Korean ‘smart’ schools.

Not much mention of learning in this video. Instead it’s all about the technology. Because that’s what makes a school “smart”. Apparently. I know it’s the job of the media to focus on the shiny. I’m not even that bothered about the hints of ‘Big Brother", or the counting of calories in school lunches.

But I was a little worried.

Because if you look closely and pay attention to the model of learning, and imagine that the shiny tablets are just a normal tablet made out of paper, and that the large MS Windows powered touchscreen is just a black board, it demonstrates the model of learning that exists in behind all of the hi-tech, ‘smart’ shiny on display. A model that’s largely untouched over the last 100 years. In which a person stands up the front and tells a bunch of other folk what’s important.

Seriously? This is the conversation?

Sun, 13 May 2012 07:36:33 +0000

This image annoys me. To me it shows a real deficit thinking model that exists in our teaching profession. And it falls into the trap of accepting the common perception of what’s actually important in education.

I get the aim of the exercise.

Let’s talk to the ones doing the teaching, and find out what they think is the most important thing they need.

Which is fine.

But asking teachers to tell us what they need is only going to tell us what they believe they need as individuals. We can tally up all those responses and make statistically sounding conclusions, but it’s still basically what a bunch teachers want.

Moving ISPs - a creative writing lesson.

Sun, 15 May 2011 07:32:06 +0000

I had to change the school ISP this week, after 3 weeks of send email failure, blacklisted emails and just intermittent headaches for all of the users on our domain. The biggest issue wasn’t actually the technical, it was trying to actually talk to someone at our ISP. It was almost impossible.

I shot out a frustrated tweet, and actually got a reply back. That began a brief exchange of emails, and raised my hopes some progress might be made - but which ultimately proved to be futile. Last I heard from them was May 5th. And we moved ISP’s on May 12th.