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Otago Polytechnic internal marketing for sustainability

Samuel Mann keeps flying the flag for Otago Polytechnic and its efforts for Sustainability. This poster captures some interesting pointers and inspires me to do more.

We have Living Campus - an effort to turn the campus into a living, breathing, producing, educational model of sustainability, particularly in the gardens

We have SHaC - Sustainable Habitat Challenge where several institutions (Otago being the lead) are working on projects to improve the over all design of housing

We have the Education for Sustainability initiative - Where every graduate will be able to think and act sustainably, and go out into the workforce with the necessary skill sets to affect change for sustainability. This is more a goal statement project slowly building itself into curriculum, and probably an area I could do more on in our Educational Development work.

We have the Permaculture Design course - A not for profit course running on a trial basis. The last trial comes to an end soon and we might have to look for new home for it as the hosting school has not indicated a desire to continue with the course just when it was growing roots too! I plan to try and get the course formally established and propose it be hosted by the School of Design instead.

L4C Workshop in Tuvalu. November 2008

In Tuvalu I experienced my first OLPC reality test. I’ve touched them before, drooled over them at an expensive conference in Wellington while I stuffed my face with Atlantic salmon and caviar finger food one morning… but up until now, I had never had the opportunity to see or use them in the context they were designed for. What follows are my notes on such an opportunity, using brand new OLPCs in a wiki training workshop for teachers in Tuvalu, a small Island nation in the middle of the South Pacific.

The setting:

The workshops I’ve been running here are for the Tuvalu Ministry of Education. They have me here for a Wikieducator initiative called Learning for Content (L4C). Many primary and secondary teachers from around the Islands of Tuvalu are here, as well as people from non government organisations and service areas in Tuvalu. The organisers and I thought it would be a good idea to run the session on the new OLPCs, and expose the teachers to what was coming to their students.

We are working in a large room on the second floor of the Government building, over looking the Funafuti atol. It is very hot in that room all day, and I try to keep prime position in front of the only fan. There is a wireless network set up from a main satellite connection and distributed through a Linksys wireless router situated in the room with us. The OLPCs were fresh out of the box and the IT person had only had the afternoon before to familiarise herself with them.

The OLPC experience:

The first thing I noticed (but already knew about) was the radically different operating system interface is. It doesn’t look anything like any Linux distribution I have used before and it certainly looks nothing like any Windows or Mac OS. This operating system is out on its own again, a 4th operating system if you will, and while I at first was mighty impressed by it back in Wellington while eating caviar, I have serious reservations about it here in Tuvalu…

The next thing I noticed was the browser. At first glance it looks a little like Google’s Chrome, but less than 3 clicks around you soon realise that its not of course. I couldn’t for the life of me work out how to get new browser tabs happening, and I suspect that tabbed browsing is not possible! The apparent absence of such an important browser feature had me seeing doubts about the approaching workshop. If I couldn’t even work out the browser, let alone the operating system, how the hell was I going to run a workshop for 40 odd people through it over the next 6 days?

Its funny, it only takes one peculiarity of a thing – compared to what we’re used to of course, and we start to look out for more and see only the faults. I started to notice the differences a lot more from this point on, not in terms of innovation – though on reflection I can see many aspects of the software that could be seen as innovative, but more in terms of usability and limitations to what we needed to be doing.

I couldn’t work out how to save and recover files from a USB. Admittedly I was by now very short on time and didn’t look long or hard for it, but I was continuously thrown off by new icons I hadn’t seen before, trying to work out what signified what and where, and how long a thing took to initiate, how to quit a thing, or how to swap windows. As with most things that require patience, I had to walk away from this one and get the classroom ready for a workshop I was now dreading.

Soon we had somewhere near 20 people in the room for day 1. The nice little charm of the OLPCs turning on started filling the room.. great, everyone found the on button. The IT lady was running around connecting everyone to the wireless network, but each computer was taking a dreadfully long time to connect, often hanging once the access key was entered, or just dropping the connection soon after it found it. I needed a projector to demonstrate things in the workshop, but couldn’t plug an OLPC into the projector. The only other device on hand was a standard 17 inch laptop with Windows Vista on it

I filled some time raving about the OLPCs and how much I was stoked to be in a room full of them, and how they were the thing that inspired Asus and others to start putting out great little things like the Eee PC.

Eventually we had enough OLPCs connected to proceed, and we packed up the 3 or 4 that just didn’t connect or misteriously turned themselves off after a few seconds.

After I had given a little show and tell on the projector it was now a job of going around and showing each person how to find and start the OLPC browser and bring up the wikieducator website.

I’d say about 1/3 of the group had used computers before, and all of those people would have used a Windows operating system. While their intuition seemed to get them at least as far as I had before the workshop, that intuition wasn’t any use beyond that point. We were into a case of the blind leading the blind. No one worked out how to get tabbed browsing going, one guy managed to get a Logitec wireless mouse working (highly recommended btw!), and no one worked out how to save and recover files from a USB. Those who had not used computers much before were not at much of a disadvantage to the rest of us. We were all using computers for the first time it seemed, and so I couldn’t rely on anyone to help others.

And here is my point. It would seem that the designers behind the OLPCs have been so carried away with their design innovation that they lost sight of something critical. That the people on the ground who are going to hand out and help administer these things are likely people who have at least some experience with computers. And like it or not, that experience will have been based on a Windows or Linux operating systems, and probably only in as much as the graphic user interfaces would offer. While I can appreciate innovation and have a high tolerance threshold for new ideas, the differences between the OLPC and any other interface are so great that it simply left me and anyone else who might have been able to assist feeling useless and unable to help, and that will be the OLPCs undoing when they hit the ground they were designed to be used on.

To be honest, I would sooner hand out $400 Asus Eees, just because they don’t need an instruction manual like the OLPCs do. EeePCs run on Linux too, but what the developers of their operating system got right was that they understood how much they could rely on user intuition, in fact I would say that this was a primary element in their design brief. If you’ve never used a computer before, you’ll be able to work out the Asus EeePC. If you have used Windows, Mac or and Linux, you’ll know how to work out an Asus EeePC. What’s more! If your first computer is an Asus EeePC you will easily work it out AND develop computing intuition along the way that will be useful for using Windows, Mac or Linux (which you will inevitably use if your job involves computing in some way, or you start inheriting second hand computers via the electronic waste management center.

The workshop still worked out OK. People got by on the OLPCs and tolerated the frustrations of dropped connection, no right click options, difficult touch pads, overly small scroll bars, and annoying uninformative browser address bars. We got by, but not without a few complaints. We put up with the limitations, and odd peculiarities that I certainly wouldn’t call innovations, and we were able to use the OLPCs for accessing and editing pages on Wikieducator.

I am still mightily impressed with the obvious innovations in the OLPCs. Things like keeping most of the hardware in the screen and so elevating the main vulnerability out of splash zones of spilled drink. (A fan, cranking full tilt around the room WILL sooner or later spill a half empty plastic cup of water across the desk or floor). And I do actually like the keyboard configuration, even without a forward delete key.

But I think it was a terrible mistake to go too far into new territory with the operating system. There are clear advantages to leveraging from experienced people’s computing intuition, but the OLPCs have decided to go way outside that realm and force everyone to learn a whole new metaphor, essentially plonking a 4th operating system on the table. Yes there are innovations in some of that software and interface design (for techno and edu geeks), but OLPC has shot themselves in the foot with mass users. The software innovation would have been better deployed on some other laptop project that wasn’t so reliant on mass take up, or wasn’t concerned with things like relevance and transferability of skills. The similarities between Windows, Linux and Apple are close enough for an intuitive person to migrate between the 3. The OLPC could have (should have) used Ubuntu and leveraged the massive support network out there, but the OLPC is out on its own and too soon… I wonder if they’ll work OK with Ubuntu or Asus Xandros on them? Hackers?

Oh, and by the end of day 2, the heat and humidity seemed to have gotten the better of at least one of the OLPCs.. its touch pad was lifting and seemed to have freed itself from its adhesive. I can’t imagine how they’ll be a few months from now, with the salty, humid air all around us… perhaps OLPCs are designed to withstand that too?

Conclusion:

Despite all that I’ve said here, I still love the OLPC - the ideas in it at least. Like I said originally, back in 2005 – OLPCs have more to offer people in the wealthy economies than they do in poorer ones. They have forced computer designers in wealthy countries to rethink their commodities and release cheap, strong, portable and better designed computers at more accessible price ranges. They have lead us to consider the savings possible through the use of free software (at last). And they have indicated to us that it could be possible to develop very cheap computers and so conceivable that everyone have one (if we still think that to be advantageous). But from my experience in Tuvalu, the OLPCs got the software wrong for their mission. The Asus EeePC (arguably a result of the OLPC initiative) got it right, but ironically don’t share the OLPC mission.

To the Tuvaluans I would suggest selling the OLPCs on eBay and fetch the $300 you could get from collectors in the United States and Kingdom, then use that money to buy Asus EeePC or similar. That is if you can’t get another operating system working on the OLPCs.

List of things wrong with OLPCs Operating System:

1. The connectivity metaphore on start up is inappropriate for people in areas where connectivity is a long way away. The OLPC is more useful to people in Tuvalu as a device for games, media and typing before it is for connecting to the Internet, so the connectivity interface should not be the main focus at start up.
2. That said, we were using wireless connectivity in the Government building, but the OLPCs holding that connection was flakey. We had no trouble keeping a connection to the network on the Windows machines, but the OLPCs kept dropping. Placing a Wireless modem in the room with us seemed to help the situation. Another problem relating to connectivity was the amount of time some of the OLPCs took to connect. Some didn’t at all. All of them need clearer indication of progress in connecting.
3. The pop up menu for the operating system is very frustrating and seems to be affected by processing. Sometimes it is slow to initiate and even slower to disappear. I think its better to use the key on the keyboard instead, and turn off the mouse over feature.
4. Need better preloaders for the software. When we clicked an icon the software takes a while to load. Sometimes the loader dialog that says “starting” would take too long to appear. The icon does appear in the pie chart indicating active applications, perhaps something in that graphic could more effectively illustrate it as loading.
5. The browser must have tabbed browsing! If I missed where it was, then it is too hard to find. There was no right click option on any of the OLPC we were using, and I don’t know if there is meant to be. If the tabbed browsing relies on a right click then we were thwarted. Also, I think the browser needs work on its layout and features. The address bar takes up too much room and for some unkown reason wants to display the page name instead of the URL. The URL is for more useful in terms of information, and having to click into the address bar just to check the URL is just silly. The scroll bars are too small, and especially noticable when managing a website with a scrolling window inside it, like the edit view of a wiki. We didn’t try any ajax, java or flash – but I hope they are good to go!
6. I couldn’t work out how to manage files. I could download PDFs ok, but it was a bit of a fumble to display them, and I have no idea how to save them. I tried plugging in a USB but as far as I could tell, no new icon appeared offering me access, and nowhere in the browser of the PDF display could I find how to save the file to the USB.
7. I wonder about the touch pad. I am used to using them and use the one on this Asus all the time, but seeing as the OLPCs are so ready to think outside the square, lets rethink the touch pad. If you didn’t have the touch pad, you could have so much more room for keys! Apart from supplying a small mouse (which is infinately more easy to use) I wonder if the game controllers in the screen could substitute a mouse, as could smart use of the tab key. That little blue dial that IBM used in the middle of their keyboard had potential I thought.
8. I reckon the operting systemm and software should completely change, and I’d suggest something like what Asus has done. I can certainly appreciate the innovations that I’ve found so far, but the extreme difference between the OLPC and other OS is too great, and will affect the usefulness of the laptops… think of it like Vista.. you are causing stress and lock in by being so different. The OLPC is not the place to experiment if your primary objective is to offer people in poorer econimies to access and exploit opportunities. Of course there is the new opportunity of servicing and adminstering the OLPCs themselves, but that’s hardly sustainable and I hope it wasn’t planned for!

I just realised, I’ve been edublogging for 4 years now. I started in November 2004, and while that doesn’t make me an early adopter, I was there the year it all changed.

It is interesting to look back and see elements of consistency in my writing, and not too many embarrassing moments. Needless to say (to those who do blog their interests) I have learned a lot through expression of opinion which attracts the odd helpful comment and citations; not to mention the learning just through multiple attempts to explain an idea; and the connections I have made with people around the world through this little reacher-outerer.

I still remember the morning Sean FitzGerald emailed to congratulate me on being cited by Downes who remains today, the only A-lister who consistently reaches back into the tail to bring forward new voices on a very regular basis. Good on you SD!

I’m not sure how to tell who my oldest reader is, especially seeing as I regretably moved from Blogger to WordPress back in 2006, but I know it was Kylie Rowsell who showed me my first blog and Adam Bramwell who taught me how (both Newcastle Australia folk). Them were the days. I suspect it might be Rose Grosdanic, Sean FitzGerald, Steven Parker, and not long after - Stephen Downes who are the longest term readers of this blog.. not that I hear much from any of them after that rather severe dose of NZ reality I dropped them in back in 2006

Others in that NZ reality say blogging is dead and even rejoice the day when some of us are killed off in the forward lines so they can pick over what remains.

Anyway, its been an intensly interesting 4 years and I’ll keep going at it. Especially adding to LifeSouth and 100somerville a lot more these days. Thanks for being there and leaving the odd comment or joining in a little chin wag with each other y-all

I have a hunch that no one potentially knows more about “learning styles” than a good marketeer. Emphasis on good. And that education could get a whole lot more sophisticated in this area if it was to look into contemporary marketing ideas and practices.

Cathy Sierra planted that seed in my head back in Feb 2007 with her post Marketing should be education, education should be marketing. Ever since then I’ve been on the look out for a good marketeer who is ready or willing to talk about education. Next week I’m meeting with a marketing researcher which I hope will lead me to something interesting in terms of what marketing and education speak could do for one another.

Otago Polytechnic spends pretty big on its marketing and brand development.. some of it is great, some of its real bad, some of it has a lot more potential than key people realise. A lot of the problems in that marketing and branding exercise is touched on in this presentation called The Brand Gap: How to bridge the distance between business strategy and design. (Thanks for pointing it out Peter).

As with most of these things, different people will interpret it differently, and we will probably never make the time to stop and talk about the many discussion points worth having out of this slide show.. worse, I doubt the people that call the shots on marketing and branding in my neck of the woods will ever look at this presentation, let alone discuss it here. I think it would be a valuable ideas exercise to try and relate the points in these slides to the concerns branding and marketing a public educational institution…

Another thing on many people’s minds, and that some how relates to this post is Scott Leslie’s post about sharing, where he details the differences between individuals networking online, and institutions.. doing.. what is it they do again?

I reckon the subtitles in your post Scott, are the bones down for a swarvo slide presentation like that brand one above… if it wasn’t for your non-commercial restriction, I’d do it for ya

• We grow our network by sharing, they start their network by setting up initial agreements
• We share what we share, they want to share what they often don’t have (or even really want)
• We share with people, they share with “Institutions”
• We develop multiple (informal) channels while they focus on a single official mechanism
• What to do if you are stuck having to facilitate sharing amongst a large group of institutions?

This is the funniest (yet painfully serious) video/presentation on educational technology I have seen in ages!

Many thanks for making the recording Alan the zombies here have chewed the wires to Second Life…

Santtu at the helm by wili_hybrid

When I get a free minute I try to get through some of my feedreader. Unfortunately I don’t get very far into it because Abject Learning is first in the list.

This time Brian is questioning the need for OER, and I have to say I largely share his position, it is over rated in the grand scheme of things.

One of the other participants asked a question that resonated with me: if we live in an era of information abundance, why is the primary drive around OERs the publication of more content? And what other activities around the open education movement might be an effective use of our energies? What other needs have to be met?

The predictable response from content centric OER proponents relates to copyright and freedom, OER content is “free”.

But as Brian points out, this is increasingly a non issue:

I staked out something of a confrontational stance… that higher education is still conducting its business as if information is scarce when we now live in an era of unprecedented information abundance. That we in the institutions can endlessly discuss what content we deign to share via our clunky platforms, while Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, TED Talks, the blogs and other networked media just get on with it… That I might not be able to legally reproduce much of the copyrighted media on the web, but I can link to it, maybe embed it, or simply tell students to search for it.

Already, formal education is out of the picture in every way. Our educational services are locked up in Blackboard, and our teachers are too afraid to professionally network online. Online education is a dark web. Stepping up to the plate then is Open Education services like Wikieducator, but bringing another set of restrictive criteria that effectively keep people in a twilight zone - adherence to one form of copyright. While the Internetworked cultural development powers on, largely ignoring copyright or bypassing it with hyperlinks, embedding and data sharing, OER efforts want to declare a point of difference because we think copyright is still even relevant! Trouble is we are held back because the user base we rely on to produce this “free culture” still have no idea or just don’t want to have to worry about copyright - they just want to get on with the teaching with what ever the best content is on the day, and with the least amount of practical restriction as possible.

The rhetoric about freedom and moralistic argument in OER amps up non-the-less. We fail to see that we are loosing our freedom as it relates to effective and efficient educational practice. Not to mention the role we play in assisting with the erosion and missed opportunities in Fair Use and Fair Dealings.

The distinction here is between educational practice and content production. Instructional designers have long confused the two. For an educational practitioner (and a student) there is more usable content than we could possibly need for education, more is good and more will come. Most of the good stuff is already openly accessible and in many instances copy-able! The communication channels around it all are open too, why would we want to limit our options with some complex and practically irrelevant detail about copyright, effectively giving ourselves another form of lock in?

As a content producer it is a diffferent story, we need more content with less restrictive copyrights, but even for us it is less of an issue now with linking and embedding, not to mention how quick it can be to simply ask for permission.

In short, OER can be a distraction and can lead us back to content centric thinking that is not the real issue we need to be talking about. OER should stand for Open Educational Reform (appropriating that from Alex Hayes), where we talk about access and equity, connectivity, relevence, flexible assessment, and efficiencies. I am increasingly trying to look at the OER services like Wikieducator more for their platform feature sets relevant to what I need to do, and less (if at all) for its stunted content and contradictory ideas about freedom.

Risiera di San Sabba, an italian lager #2 by Chiara Marra

Brian Lamb considers the question of flexible assessment:

Essentially, how might it be possible to make assignment deadlines more flexible for distance students? If deadlines for ongoing assignments are simply extended deeper through to the end of the course, wouldn’t there be a natural tendency on the part of most students to hand in their assignments at the latest possible moment, to the detriment of their learning? My own experience as both student and teacher (as well as the virtual learner data that the UOC has analyzed) confirms this fear…

Yep, that’s been my experience too… but I am learning that its not a bad thing necessarily.

I have been running 2 online courses (inspired by David Wiley’s initial wiki courses) with flexible assessment:

1. Flexible Learning
2. Facilitating Online

Both of them have very similar assessments in that they have 3 assignments, one of which is blogging into which the other 2 assignments are posted.

The thing is, these 3 assignments can be completed at any time. We do set up a course schedule, with a start and end date, but we do this to encourage a cohort of people through at the same time so that they can bounce off each other and feel that group learning atmosphere that many expect to be there. Inevitably, many do not finish by the time the course officially finishes. That’s fine, we encourage them to take their time and do it right. All the course end date signifies is that the facilitators are no longer on call and keeping the course moving along as one big cohort. After the “end date” participants are “on their own”. In reality, they are not on their own at all. By the time that date comes, the course blogging network has been established - or they have become more comfortable with self paced online learning. When they are ready to be assessed, they simply contact the facilitator who engages an assessor. There is no extra work on the assessor or facilitator, in fact the intensity of the assessment period is now spread out and so is done better.

Administrating this is a hassle, because to run the course we normally enrol people up front, and the enrolment lasts for a specified period of time. If they don’t finish, we would have to mark them as “not yet complete” and then re enrol them for the next course - messy and time consuming. What is better is if people do not enrol! They just start the course. They enrol when they are ready for assessment. This way we get 100% completion rates and not so much wasted energy chasing down people who were never going to complete anyway, and so make your books look bad! We call this form of participation, “informal enrolment”.

What we are working out now is managing the increased numbers of informal enrolments so that they are not an unreasonable drain on facilitator resources that are not yet paid for. For this we have found it acceptable to have both formal and informal participants starting and moving through at the same time. So far we have not noticed a drop in formal enrolments. There are still those who prefer to enrol formally and up front, and who want to be paced by the facilitators and be sure they complete and get assessed by a definate date. They know who they are. Everyone in the course, whether informal or formal knows that the facilitators energies are focused on the formally enrolled and making sure they understand what they are to do and are on task, that is what the fee is for. If any of that facilitation effort is able to be shared with the informal group, then great! so long as the people who pay are getting what they pay for, including assessment. Being able to manage this is where a skilled and experienced facilitator comes in. It doesn’t take long before the whole group is supporting each other regardless of their enrolment status, people are the greatest learning resource in these courses.

Getting people over the line is still a challenge. But with patience, they get there. Everyone remains in the communication channels whether they have completed or not, and to some degree it is the people in that channel that motivate completion. It is up to the individual participants to turn off the channel if they wish. Quite a few opt to stay in actually, just to watch how the next course goes and to see if they can pick up on a few things they missed. Naturally the ones who have not completed stay, and the next course becomes their new motivation to advance through the tasks.

I think we have the first runs on the board for a new model that promises a considerable amount of flexibility for the participants, including the facilitators and assessors, and could even improve outcomes for everyone. It is all based around open educational resources and practices. It is the facilitation that is the key. Knowing how to do it without working yourself to an early grave, and in such a way so that everyone feels equal and not over or under whelmed.

Front cover to original NZTE text

I’m happy to be able to say that the wonderful people at New Zealand Trade and Enterprise (NZTE) have given us permission to make a derivative of their very useful text, Starting a Business: Determine whether your business idea will work. The additions that Otago Polytechnic will be making (pending funding) will be to add a chapter to it on sustainability in business, a new layout in a variety of formats, and a range of support media and short seminars and workshops to go with it. The derivative content we make will be released under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 New Zealand License.

Currently I am considering ways to publish the derivative text. Building on the success of the Anatomy and Physiology of Animals text, we will probably follow the Wikibooks and Lulu.com combination, with additional distribution channels like Google Docs and Archive.org

The main thing we need here is a high quality text, with supporting resources and events that will assist our students from all areas in planning for small business. Using the NZTE text as a basis will help ensure that what we do will compliment and perhaps integrate with existing business support services around New Zealand, as from what I can tell most of these services seem to be using this text as a standard.

The distribution of the derivative will ensure that as many people as possible will have access to the text, and with the unique features of the respective publishing platforms. For example, Wikibooks and its translation community as well as its new and improved Make a Book and Print to PDF; Archive.org for its archiving and audio books development; GoogleDocs and its ability to offer both web based and downloadable edit files; and Lulu.com for its printing and binding on demand as well as sales management.

Our development process will likely be:

• Write sustainability chapter, sections and plan templates
• Edit original NZTE files with additional chapter in Open Office and export to MediaWiki text
• Upload MediaWiki export text files to a new Wikibook
• Develop graphics, illustrations and photos for each chapter and section and upload these to Wikimedia Commons
• Add graphics, illustrations and photos to the Wikibook
• Add graphics, illustrations and photos to the Open Office Text file and upload to Google Docs
• Upload the PDF and cover art to Lulu.com
• Upload all media and edit files to Archive.org

At the same time, Hillary and I will develop a schedule for the course using the enveloped learning model.

Now, about that development funding…?

Vote for me, user generated poster campaign

You’d be forgiven for not knowing that New Zealand is preparing for a National Election in the next few days. Even the coverage here is more excited by the Obama win than its own election preparations. Personally I’m more than a little skeptical of Obama (let alone democracy in the USA).. I haven’t even heard him say anything of substance yet, and it surely wasn’t possible for the repugnance to get in again! I suppose Obama’s win is significant in other ways.

Back home in New Zealand the main politics is much more dry. While it is easy to miss, we actually have a lot more than 2 parties running the election. Unforgivably the NZ media mainly runs the stories of 2, trying desperately to cash in on a US style, hyped up, revenue drawing, simpleton election. Those 2 basics are Labour under Helen Clark (presently in power) and Nationals under John Key. Helen Clark is campaigning on a platform of a strong public sector ensuring jobs, infrastructure and stability. John Key is campaigning on a platform of privatisation, stimulating economic growth, and rationalising the public sector. While my sympathies are with Helen, both campaigns are age old and down right dull.

The Greens on the other hand, they have run a very interesting campaign and have a long track record of principled and visionary policy making. Just their poster campaign itself is significant enough, representing a party that can think outside the square and be innovative. Brent Simpson compared the parties a while back. Given that the Greens have had next to no prime time media coverage, I think it is fair to say that they have done an excellent job maintaining a presence in this election, not to mention by far the strongest and most authentic online presence long before the election campaigns started.

Vote for us

If a change is what we need, I sure hope it doesn’t go the old ho hum and long over due for retirement, public vs private direction. That time passed  20 years ago! I hope to see a real shake down and a new generation of politics enter New Zealand government. One that reinforces NZs international reputation for progressive politics and continues to attract migration of progressive people.