Category: Economy
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Cool blogs I read from time to time: Altucher Confidential, Gapingvoid, Austin Kleon
Procrastinate much…? Here are some of my internet heroes and favourite places to waste time reading: James Altucher’s Altucher Confidential: This guy is one of my favourite internet characters. He’s really smart, has a great sense of humour, and has failed at just about everything you can fail at in business. He’s also just started a…
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Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon all to build giant data centers near Taupo in New Zealand
Actually, it’s not true. Let me state categorically that Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon are not going to build massive data centers near Taupo in New Zealand. Or anywhere in the Southern hemisphere that I am aware of. And at least not any time soon. However, I got to thinking about this recently. What if…
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Kids need teachers because teachers are essential to education
Kids need teachers, right? So do adult learners, right? Well… what if they didn’t… In New Zealand, current budget reforms mean that schools and training providers are facing tough times due to reduced funding. That means some schools will lose teachers and will need to have larger classes. And the teachers are revolting. I mean,…
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10 reasons why we need higher level qualifications in adult literacy and numeracy education.
If you are in education you need to think about ways in which you can strengthen the literacy and numeracy skills of your learners. This is true if… You are a teacher, a tutor, or a trainer of some kind. You own or work in an education business of some kind, even if you are…
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You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto
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Jaron Lanier is my guru… He thinks that I’m not a gadget and this book – which is his first – is a rant against the negative effects of technology including the internet.
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Grown Up Digital
How the net generation is changing your world Don Tapscott undertook some research back in the late 20th century (1997…) and wrote it up in a book called Growing Up Digital. It was a book about what it meant for the generation that his kids were in – to be growing up in a digital…
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Software will eat education Part 1- Or what I really don’t want from an online education platform
What’s the difference between a standard sort of website and a website designed for doing education online? Hard to know really… but perhaps quite a lot actually is what I’m finding out. Basically, your standard kind of template driven brochure websites, even the ones with all the bells and whistles, are fundamentally different from what…
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Superfreakonomics
Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, & Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance. This is the brilliant sequel to the bestselling phenomenon Freaknomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner which we’ll review at some stage as well. Basically, this is a book about numeracy. At least, that’s how I’ve read it… It was my numeracy…
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Who cares about literacy, numeracy, and other excuses for the crappy economy?
In 1996 New Zealand took part in the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS). This evolved into the Adult Literacy and Life Skills (ALLS) survey in 2006. Now in 2012, the survey has evolved again. The new acronym is PIAAC which stands for the Programme for International Assessment of Adult Competencies. The two earlier studies kicked…