Chris Betcher

I received an email recently from a colleague asking about data sovereignty, and in particular asking about how schools deal with the  need to store all personal data on Australian servers to be compliant with the law. This was my reply... When deciding whether to do a thing - any thing - you need to assess the relative risk. There is NOTHING that can have it's risk mitigated to zero. So while we can have debates about the security of the cloud, the fact is that ANY service is generally only as safe as the password that protects it. It's far simpler to socially engineer your way into a system than to hack it, and it's easier to follow someone through an open doorway before the door shuts than to crack the lock. There are security risks involved with every system. What makes you think that data saved on a server that happens to be geographically located on Australian soil is any safer than data on a server located on the other side of some imaginary geographical dividing l...

We all see the world through our own personal lens. Consequently, we all form our own opinions about the world and depending on the sorts of experiences you've had in the past, your view of the world and how it works can easily be coloured by those experiences.  Sometimes, we form opinions about things based on experiences that are limited or incomplete or biased one way or the other, and the interesting thing is that we still believe those opinions are correct, even when they can be completely wrong. There's a lot to be said for real expertise. One of my favourite examples of pitting a narrow opinion against broad expertise is from the movie Cool Runnings .  In one scene, the team coach Irving Blitzer (played by John Candy ) is having an exchange with Sanka Coffie (played by Doug E Doug ), where they are arguing about who should be the driver of the bobsled. Sanka is a Jamaican pushcart champion and sees himself as the obvious choice. But Jamaica is ...

I have an RSS feed set up that automatically scans the Google news feed s for the phrase " PLC Sydney " or " Presbyterian Ladies College ", so anytime either of those phrases appear in a news publication worldwide I get notified of it.  (Which, if you want to monitor your school's online public image, is a useful thing to set up by the way!)  While I do get the occasional mention of other Presbyterian Ladies Colleges such as the ones in Melbourne or Perth , and occasionally the abbreviation PLC Sydney turns up some non-related stuff , having the RSS feeds scanning the news for mentions of your school is handy. Recently, I spotted this article in one of the local papers.  It was a project that I didn't even even realise was taking place in the school so I was surprised when I spotted it.  (I also like the idea that some of our teachers are now doing interesting projects that use ICT and they don't need me to make it happen!  Yay! The good kind of redund...

It's sometimes difficult getting kids to understand the full implications of something as seemingly harmless as putting their photo online. They often don't realise that, just like The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins , once something goes online it is near impossible to remove it. This video makes a pretty good point of showing the effect of this behaviour... [kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/iwBz-hxjSLU" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /] It's something that both children and adults need to understand well. This is a post-Google world we live in. It's no longer unusual that an employer Googles the name of a potential hire to check their reputation and see what they have done (or equally, not done). When you go out with a new person, it's likely that your date has Googled you, MySpaced you or FaceBooked you to get a little bit of "background" on the sort of person you are. In a digita...

As a parent, it's a fine line we walk sometimes in knowing where the boundaries are for your kids. We want to protect them from danger and shield them from hurt. At the same time, we need to allow them to experience the world and learn to interact with it in meaningful ways. This paradox of safety versus experience is a tricky balance to get right, but I'm convinced that we are probably the most overprotective generation of parents in history. A recent post here listed a number of tongue-in-cheek example of how much we seem to overreact to things that would have been much less of a drama a few years ago. How many of you went out playing all day when you were a kid, and the only rule was to be home by dark? No "Call me when you get there to let me know you arrived ok"... just "Bye dear, have fun playing!" This video from the TED Talks series, called " 5 Dangerous Things you should let your Children do " makes a similar observation that maybe w...