Chris Betcher

The recent decision in the Apple/Samsung debacle has really got me thinking about a few things. If you read my last blog post you'll know that I feel somewhat disappointed in Apple's seemingly bullying behaviour towards a competitor. I suppose I feel like this because I have had such a high opinion of Apple for so long and this is just not what I expected from them. The hashtag #boycottapple was trending globally on Twitter for a while this morning so clearly a lot of other people were equally unimpressed with the whole thing. Realistically, I know it's more complicated than that. The fact is that Apple is a company, not a person, and companies are ruled on business decisions, not emotions. There is no doubt that Apple brought amazing innovation to the phone business with the release of the first iPhone and that numerous competitors immediately changed their design ideas in order to compete. And yes, quite a few of them probably copied some ideas. I also understand that Ap...

I'm feeling disillusioned and sad today. When I was much younger I met someone that truly amazed me. They were young at the time too, full of interesting ideas and brilliant thinking. They were different to everyone around them and they stood out because of their genius. I loved being exposed to their thinking, and they made me see the world differently. They let me explore the world in ways I hadn't really considered before. Looking back, I think I could even say their ideas have shaped my personality in ways that I probably wasn't even aware of, and I ended up choosing a career path based on the passion they instilled in me. They always impressed me. They had attention to detail that was astounding. They inspired me, and millions of others too. They came up with incredible ideas that were brilliantly different, and they had a profound influence on the world around them. Of course, they had influences of their own too, and they were often shameless about taking the seeds ...

When students at our school get to Year 3 they are given their own school email account. We are a Google Apps for Education school, so the email they get is a rebadged Gmail account, and part of my role is to teach them to use it. We do lots of work on digital citizenship and we try really hard to give our students opportunities to be responsible members of the online world, but at the point they get their email we really just want to make sure they know the mechanics of using it... how to compose a message, how to reply and forward, the difference between cc: and bcc:, etc. In those early days of getting their gmail account I really just want them to get the hang of it by using it. Around the same time as they get their email account, they also do a thematic unit of work about national parks where they look at several of Australia's most prominent national parks and learn about what they are and what they do. I had a bit of a wacky idea for integrating the use of email into their ...

Olympic sports commentators have always annoyed me with the "how do you feel?" question immediately after an athlete finishes an event. It's such a shallow, inappropriate question at that moment in time. Regardless of whether you just won a gold medal or a grand final, the typical answer is both inadequate and self-obvious. You feel great. Amazing. Exhilarated. Overwhelmed. Whatever adjectives you offer at that moment all probably fall short of communicating the real emotion of winning. But I find the most irksome question is when the sports commentator asks the winning athlete "did you ever dream you'd be here winning a gold medal?", as though the athlete was somehow unexpectedly caught by surprise with their win. Such a question shows a complete lack of understanding of what it takes to reach the pinnacle of sporting success. The drive, the focus, the goal setting, the early morning training, the daily practise, the sheer dedication to achieve at the highe...

With the impending release of Mountain Lion , Apple's new version of the OS X operating system, I've been giving some thought to whether I'll bother upgrading or not. I am, or at least I used to be, what many would refer to as a Mac Fanboy. I still think Apple builds the best consumer computer hardware on the planet, and, so far anyway, OS X is probably still the best desktop/laptop operating system currently available. A few years ago I would not have included the "probably" qualifier in that last sentence, but lately I'm feeling more and more disenfranchised with Apple and their litigious nature and walled garden approach to creating customer lock-in. It's not that I don't like their products. I do. I have several Macs, iPads, iPhones, and Apple TVs. Walled garden or not, they build beautiful products that -  for the most part - do exactly what they claim... they just work. While I don't always approve of their proprietary attitude to the way the...

I was cleaning up my home office recently and I found a couple of installation disks for Apple's OS X Tiger operating system, 10.4.7. They must have come with the Macbook Pro I bought back in early 2006, and since that time I've upgraded  several times, to 10.5 (Leopard), 10.6 (Snow Leopard), 10.7 (Lion), and in the not too distant future I'm sure I'll make the move to 10.8 (Mountain Lion). Because I have absolutely no need to keep the OSX Tiger disks, I figured I'd sell them on eBay. After all, they might be of some use to someone with an older Mac who wants to stay on that older version of the OS, or who possibly has lost or damaged their original disks. I listed them online for $1, eBay's minimum bid, and hoped that they  might be of some benefit to someone, somewhere. Less than 24 hours after listing them, I get an email from eBay telling me they had to pull the ad after getting a takedown notice from the Business Software Alliance . "Your item was remo...

Many people I know struggle with technology. They bumble by, more-or-less managing to make their computer do what they want it to do, but often without that real sense of confidence that comes from feeling fluent with the software they are interacting with. And let's face it, when we talk about "technology", we mostly mean "software". Sure, there are some hard-to-use hardware devices but by and large when I watch someone struggling to feel comfortable using "technology", it's usually because they are out of their depth with the software they are trying to use, not the hardware. It might not seem like it when you're so frustrated you just want to throw your laptop out the nearest window, but companies who build software try really hard to make their tools easy to use. Of course, not all software is actually easy to use, but I do believe that all software designers really do try to make their software as easy to use as possible. It's not eas...

Yesterday at PLC Sydney we held a whole-staff PD workshop with American educator Mark Church. Mark is a co-author of the book Making Thinking Visible , as well as a contributor to the Project Zero team. I found myself really resonating with much of what he had to say. I liked the fact that his focus was on really good pedagogy, and although I could see many connections to the sorts of thinking that I find myself constantly exposed to in the edtech world, his message had very little to do with the use of technology. It was really just all about good teaching. PLC brought Mark out from the US especially for this workshop after members of our senior leadership heard him speak at another event. They were really impressed with his message and felt it was just what our staff needed. I tend to agree. In schools like ours, where we are essentially teaching to a largely compliant, affluent and literate demographic, it's doesn't seem to be too difficult to have our students achieve si...

I wonder how many teachers would be prepared to gather all their students together at a school assembly sometime and say the following to them ... "Look, we just need you all to know that we do NOT trust you. We've talked about it, and we think that given the opportunity, you will all get up to no good and make poor decisions. Because of this, we plan to closely monitor your every move and to make sure that you don't get away with anything, ever. We plan to prevent you from doing common tasks that are probably perfectly fine and safe. However, since we are, after all, assuming that you won't be able to make your own good decisions about those things, we have taken the liberty of making those decisions for you. Essentially, we think you are all a bunch of thieves, cheats and liars with no sense of morals or ethics, and you probably spend all your time looking at pornography anyway. We have no intentions of assuming anything other than the worst... as I said, we real...

Hello Telstra . I'm one of your customers. I have my mobile phone service with you... the reception is reasonable, at least it seems to be better than most of the other Australian Telcos. You charge a little more for it, but hey, I've tried the others and I don't mind paying a little more for a service that actually works... But, Telstra, can I tell you what really sucks? I recently bought a new wifi+3G iPad . It should really be a 4G iPad, but apparently you and Apple can't agree on what the term 4G actually means. So ok, it's still just a 3G iPad, and I guess I can live with that. But I'd like to buy some 3G data from you so I can use my iPad when I'm not in wifi range. Now, for me, that's not all that often. I'm in wifi at home, and in wifi at work. I could tether to my iPhone's 3G data when I'm out of wifi range (and I often do) but it would be a lot more convenient if I just had a 3G SIM in the iPad itself. So I want to buy an iPad 3G d...