Rob the Geek

Technology, Open Thinking, Community & Education…

Browsing Posts in Education & Innovation

21st Century Parenting – Challenges and Solutions Lee Chisholm, Operations manager, NetSafe This was an obvious choice as a session for me to attend, and it opened with an attention grabbing quote… “Three times as many smart phones every minute are activated than there are babies being born” – Hans Vestberg, CEO of Ericsson This [...]

Privacy Issues for business in the new digital age Marie Shroff (Privacy Commissioner) This session started with a fizz and a whimper, I think based more on the usual audience for the Privacy Commission than the subject matter itself. I did enjoy the comics though Customers are starting to take an ACTUAL interest in their [...]

Session Lead by: Brian Calhoun, Independent Consultant and co-chair of NZRise Inc  “I see a gradual slide toward corporate and government control…by control I mean content” The session started with a discussion of TOR / BitCoin / BitTorrent – all created specifically to circumvent control systems that were already in existence. The question then posed [...]

Digital Citizenship – Combating Cyber-bullying & Harassment Stream led by: John Fenaughty (NetSafe) Perhaps the most notable example of standing up against bullying of recent times is that of 16-year old Australian Casey Haynes story (YouTube “Fat Kid takes on Bully”) a video that went viral both online and via traditional prime time media. When asked, 33.2% of youth [...]

Digital Citizenship – Cybersafety Stream led by: Martin Cocker (NetSafe) – NetHui Digital Citizenship Forum Martin started off the session by outlining there things are in New Zealand, as well as providing a context for the terminology which would follow. In this regard, Digital Citizens were defined as those using technologies to have: Greater productivity (via use [...]

You could tell that you’d arrived at the NetHui because every seat anywhere remotely near a power source was occupied by someone hunched over an electronic device, either furiously tapping away at a keyboard or swiping at a screen. Skip to: Opening Address: Vikram Kumar / Rod Drury Presentation of InternetNZ Lifetime Achievement Award World [...]

So – the Net Hui is on at Aucklands Sky City Convention Center and, given the line up of people and the subjects being discussed it’s something I decided I need to be at so, startig tomorrow – I am taking 3 days of Annual leave and heading off to the conference as “Rob – [...]

The kids in Room 3 had a problem, all of the caterpillars that went into the pupa stage of their metamorphosis were emerging when the students were out of the classroom. The solution was to setup a laptop with a web camera programmed to take a snapshot of a waiting chrysalis once every minute. These [...]

When my wife and I first learned we were having our first son, we asked around our friends in the childcare industry for recommendations for pre-school care. The answers unanimously came back “Tots Corner” they all gave glowing accounts of the staff and the atmosphere there and, when we had our first look around we couldn’t help [...]

Chris McDowall is a very, very clever person. In addition to all the other cool stuff he’s done in the NZ data space, he has just released this post on taking the Maxx public transport data feed of movements over a day, and plotting it out on a map. It’s hypnotic and astounding in the [...]