This morning an innocuous observation on Twitter sparked what would turn out to be (for me at least) a far-reaching discussion concerning the teaching of Information Technology and its related fields in New Zealand. For background, the statistics referred to by @littlehigh (Paul Reynolds, not the Telecom CEO) come from this NZ Herald article.

The following is something of a synopsis of the conversation to help people get on the same page – the take out on this is to lend YOUR expertise to the conversation and help us do what we, as an industry, can collaborate to entice new blood to join our ranks.

You can follow (the latter part of) this conversation via the tag #GoTech and see how things are progressing over on the GoTech website (thanks again to @SKnightly for setting this up)

The conversation started with a question asking if there was a need to get schools, politicians and the IT sector to get together to address the halving in numbers of IT graduate students over the past four years. Ben Young responded declaring the graduates need to turn into facilitators to make up the numbers and I joined in stating that prospective students need exposure to what else (other than code and screwdrivers) falls under the banner of IT, and asking for exciting stories. In parallel, Paul pretty much said the same thing.

The problem facing IT is the Geek Stereotype reinforces a sense of social awkwardness and places those in IT as outsiders. And, as Nat Torkington pointed out, the next generation is less likely to want to study IT and work for a living when society is pushing finance and real estate as the ‘easy money’ careers of choice. At about this point in the conversation, there were a couple of linking posts which drew in more of the NZ Twitter space and then things really took off.

Graduates are getting (or taking) more options in their education – more bachelor of Commerce students major in Computer Science and also take a business side to their degrees. The next evolution of quaternary production seems to be branching to both a knowledge and an ideas economy. For New Zealand to truly be successful in this space then, the whole education system needs an overhaul – currently, the focus is coming too late in the piece and looks only at Tertiary or Secondary schooling. Kids need to learn and understand programming – and they can be taught from a young age.

A bit of discussion ensued around the teaching of things ITish to primary school aged children, the result of which was – while some schools ‘get’ and embrace this, there is often little scope in the curriculum to provide this education and, teaching becoming what it has, if it’s not on the list it won’t or can’t be taught. Perseverance, patience and volunteering was the suggested approach to solving this immediate issue.

Given the noise this conversation was making in the NZ Twitter space, both Steven Knightly and Brett Roberts chimed in with suggestions of capturing these thoughts and a forum where some traction may be found.

The ‘capture this conversation’ branch subsequently went on to agree on #GoTech as a way to mark future discussions after dismissing words such as ‘Geek’ – After a bit of contention of course

The ‘what and where should NZ more to in IT’ conversation branch went on to cover such things as if we could or should try and compete against other coding countries, having a local team to implement ideas, outsourcing and/or working as part of a global team, perhaps leveraging New Zealands GMT+12 timezone difference with call centers or out of hours coding / SaaS fixes

And that is about where the conversation ended – we picked up some additional interest and offers of help to discuss and move these ideas along. The current feeling is that we need to address:

• The audience and influencers (how and who we sell the message to)
• The approach (current methods are just not working)
  • Getting in touch with schools, universities to visit and talk at career days etc. to highlight that there is more diversity to IT than programming and repair.
  • Anecdotal evidence from a recent graduate was 50% of his class dropped out because the content was boring and they couldn’t see the relevance, or be excited by the prospect of making IT a career.

So, where to from here? Well – the domain is setup, there is a forum currently available until the scope and direction is sorted so, respond there as I don’t want to fragment the discussion too much – so I’ll finish with by quoting the opening post on the GoTech forum from Steven Knightly:

The problem: The topic of the skills shortage in IT, engineering, technology, R&D in New Zealand has been going on for a while now, but is something that people in these industries feel passionately about. Yet the problem persists.  See the latest NZ Herald article ‘IT grads halved over last 4 years’ http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=10546944‘.

What been done so far:

• Some discussions about the issue on Twitter, agreeing that we need to share more real stories and reasons with people
• The decision to use the #gotech tag to track great stories about real people with great technology careers
• This domain and a TEMPORARY forum have been set up

Next steps/Discussion: What is the best tool to use for this website?  Sure, some of us can track discussion using #gotech tags in twitter and elsewhere, but not everyone can.  I reckon we need a website to a) allow people to post to directly, b) somehow track twitter and blog posts and aggregate them here.  I propose that this forum is only TEMPORARY, and be replaced by something better with your input.

How should this site be structured? Cool Tech Career Stories, Reasons/Arguments, The Problem, Resources (links for those that want to get into Tech)

How should this campaign roll out?  The campaign: #1 quickly agree how to structure this site, #2 brainstorm Stories & Reasons, #3 Vote for the Top 10 Stories & Reasons, #4 Challenge contributors and others to share that Top 10 with others (especially people borderline interested in tech).

My hat is off to the New Zealand Twitter community for getting behind a potential solution to a looming IT problem. Head over to the site and be part of the solution.

Edit: I do have a capture of all the Tweets which I saw around this subject if anyone thinks it’d be interesting to publish them for the sake of context.

Doc Searls ended a recent post on the folly of yet another guess as to how to get online advertising to work with those words. A succinct yet accurate observation such as I’ve come to expect from the Doc since first encountering his thinking while reading the The Cluetrain Manifesto back in 2001.

He is commenting on a recent idea called ‘SmartAds‘ which plans to slap advertising space into ‘blank’ spaces of online video. Coming from New Zealand where we are exposed to one of the highest rates of advertising messages in the world*, I’m really hoping that this is not going to take off – my brain doesn’t have enough space left for any more non-relevant advertising taking the shotgun approach to product awareness. A kiss this certainly would not be.

*I did read a paper on this somewhere, I just can’t remember the source and Google seems to want to hide it from me this morning – Can anyone else find it?

For those of you waiting for news of my sons arrival, here it is…

Hi all,

We are delighted to share our news that Tobias John Inskeep arrived  safely into this world at 14:07 today (16/10/2008) weighing in at 3.590 Kg at North Shore Hospital.   (convert here if you’re still rejecting the metric system introduced to New Zealand almost 32 years ago)

Amanda and Toby are doing well,  Rob  is seeking recommendations for a good vasman, and Hadley, Max and William will be introduced to their new brother later today .  Amanda will most likely be in the hospital until Monday if you feel like a visit (hours 2-8pm).

It took us most of the pregnancy to decide on name we both liked and that had the family connections and significant meanings that were important to us, but we are stoked with Tobias  (after Amanda’s great uncle Toby, meaning God is good) and John (after Rob’s Dad, meaning God is gracious ) and we all feel truly blessed to have our newest addition.

We have already been asked about gift ideas….. but given Toby is our 4th beautiful son we really do not need any gifts (boys clothes and toys coming out our ears). However for those of you who really insist, a meal or baking for the freezer, would be an awesome help in the weeks to come.

Hope you enjoy the photos attached. For some more photos over the coming days, Rob will undoubtedly pop something up on his blog, (he’s probably already Tweeted the arrival) and those of you on facebook can link to Amanda’s photo album for #4 here, or to our Flickr account set here (registration and ‘friending’ required – please send your name so we can accept the friend/family request).

That’s us for now ,

Love
Rob, Amanda, Hadley, Max, William and of course Toby!

So – no real need to publish photos here (is there? I’ll ceed to the will of the commenters). Mum and bub are fine and short of discussing how and what technology was untilised in creating and distributing this announcement, I guess there’s little more of relevance to this blog

I’ve just come back from a great weekend away at TelecomONE where I facilitated a number of sessions throughout the weekend, one of which was entitled “Listen to MEEEE – Engaging the customer; Capturing the conversations”. This session resulted in a challenge by a couple of the attendees to finish (and publish) this article to capture my thinking.

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A friend of mine wrote a post pondering the believability of images now that digital capture tools and manipulation programs are so accessible to whomever wants them. Specifically he raised the question also raised by newsweek in this article. Dale went on to ask the question “what about photos of – say – someone committing a crime? Useless in a court of law?”

I think his concerns were addressed by other commenters, but the question got me to thinking, and that started off what ended up being something of an epic comment of my own, which I’ll repost here to remind me to return to this subject later after a bit more research as it’s quite an interesting issue that Dale has raised.

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I had an interesting discussion / exchange of tweets today around the subject of customer service with @audaciousgloop and @Gripnostril twitter certainly is starting to become more of a conversation hub for me than a unidirectional notification/microblog and this exchange was one which really got me thinking.

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Today marks the beginning of the downhill slide in our wait for #4 to arrive… 100 days to go and we’re still trying out names for the little guy. Amanda has started her nesting routine however, and we have random purchases of new baby clothes arriving at our place.

I’d post the countdown widget – but it doesn’t work (elegantly*) with this template… Grr.

You can try following the link and allowing java/installing the ActiveX control

Monday afternoon was painful.

While I was at work, I’d received a notification that my community wireless point had gone offline – this hadn’t happened since I’d switched to my new router, but regardless, I wasn’t too concerned… until I got home. No interweb, then a call on my cellphone “I’ve been ringing and ringing – where are you?”. Oh crap. It appears the phone was also dead (in my defense, what self respecting geek checks a POTS line these days?!).

On the phone to 120 and, after 2 arguments with the automated voice recognition system, I got through to the people I needed to talk to, well – the queue anyway. Fifteen minutes later I had a human on the phone and, nice chap that he was he quickly determined it was an external issue “might be a cut line out on the street or something”, diverted calls to our home line over to my mobile, and told me the earliest I could expect resolution would be “around midday on Wednesday”. Frick – 2 days of no web?!

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I transitioned my content from the World of Warcraft blog I originally set up back in 2006, back into this site today. I’ve been having issues maintaining the discipline to post regularly in this blog, let alone attempt to maintain another blog devoted to the wonderful World of Warcraft thus, in an effort to simplify my online hosting, I’ve killed off the blog and moved the content. Sorry WoW Blog, we didn’t really seem to hit it off… /mourn

It’s a wild deviation from the normal subject matter for this blog, but I feel compelled to add my hat tip to what will be many tributes to this great man.
At 0900 this morning the great man who was the first to conquer Mt Everest passed away. RIP Sir Ed, you are an inspiration to many New Zealanders, myself included.