 I'm really excited for this next discussion between two of my favourite minds in the country. Anakīs asked me to introduce him as a man of no fixed abode. Truly a global citizen with a global outlook, and a master of processing large amounts of information synthesising them and forming a view as to what the narrative and the positioning is, what that means for the world. Joshua, many of you seen, speak earlier in the week, co-founder of Inspiral, co-founder of Devacatame, and welcome you both to the stage. Kōwai te tūtai, a'ai, kia ora koutou, nā mōa, kia koutou, nā mihi nui. This is a wonderful opportunity, thank you, and wonderful to be here with you, Joshua. I've been inspired by a number of things this morning already. I think right at the outset, as Michelle was describing, her work with children and the technology space, I've found tears on my cheek. There's something about that sacred responsibility of young human beings and creating the space, and then holding the space in which they grow and find themselves and are fed, and her speech to spoke to me very powerfully. So I was curious at the outset, my qualifications for sitting here, but I'm taking my tears as one qualification. There's a connection. I have another qualification which the school system never really engaged me at all. I was intellectually precocious, so therefore I was reading two or three years above my age class. I was the lone boy in the corner, and at the same time I had glasses on my legs and there's all sorts of other reasons I was the lone boy in the corner. So I don't have positive or warm-growing memories of those early years. As a result, probably quite predictably, I was repeatedly in the worst third form, fourth form and fifth form at James Hage High School, the years that I was there, the most disruptive classes, drinking 18-gallon kegs with friends and getting legless in the fifth form, so quite serious dysfunction as I was really opted out of the whole education system. So maybe that's a qualification, but I obviously have some perspectives and some views. As it happened, I've had just a wonderful array. The universe has been very generous in giving me amazing life opportunities from which I have learnt an enormous amount, along with sharing that journey with wonderful, warm, generous human beings and the power of people and mentors and friends who create opportunities for us as people to explore ourselves and find our space safely, to hold us to challenges at the right time. It's not all about being easy, and so I've had a wonderful and rich education. It just didn't come from an institution. I've done a lot of work in the Indigenous space and there's a lot of wonderful stories from that territory. I've got a theory that the biggest handbrake on that whole sector of our society is human capital. There's not enough human capital in that system to manage 40, 50 more billions of dollars of assets if that's your measure, but to manage the challenges of a community that's on the wrong side of all the measures and the challenges of building their way into the future, the biggest handbrake is there's not enough people with the skills, the life experience, enough bruises to bring their own personal wisdom to create the solutions. Just thinking about this across the course of today, I do wonder whether that's true of us all and all their activities, that the biggest handbrake is ourselves or the limits on our own capacities in our various communities. So this is a very important space in my view. The other thing that comes to mind to me from my experience working with Ngai Tahu is that I'll do this very simply, but eventually these machines, these communities, as you rebuild these nation-states, they create a surplus, an economic surplus, that's the point of the model, and then you want to reinvest that surplus back into your community. How do you do it? Education obviously features, but I've long been dismayed by the lack of thinking about how that's applied. You're all tribal members, you're all at the age at university, I don't care what you're doing, I'll watch you all to check. That's the end of the conversation. It seems to me to miss a whole lot of things that you could be doing if you were being intentional about rebuilding your own community. But more fundamentally, I get really interested, as you look at the research, the place where you can make most impact on the age curve for human being, of course, is closer to age zero and, in fact, is at minus nine months. And it's at that point of conception that the game's on and there's a truckload of evidence to say that if you do good things at that point, think nutrition, health care, if the mother's surroundings and so on, guess what, those children will be more fertile, less incidence of heart disease, choose your metric. That period which is invisible normally, and we treat as invisible, is the richest investment space. And as we go up the curve from age one to age two and so on, guess what, the 15 and 16-year-olds, the dye is not completely cast, as I'm evidence, but it is largely cast. So last elimination on that point, I'm a parent of a 16-year-old son who's another gift from the universe. My wife and I were biologically unproductive. Her sister-in-law was very biologically productive. They came round to the decades and table one day and said, well, would you like this child? And I can already fit in myself stopping here. This is, at the time, it was such an enormous challenge for my worldview that your family members might come in and hand over a human being who's on his way into your care. So what do I do? Well, I'm a geek, I suppose. I went and looked for the manual about how you manage this complicated proposition. And it really struck in my reading that the way I understand it is our view of the universe, the critical question, is the universe a beneficial, generous, warm, nurturing place or is it a hostile environment? Your view on that is, let's say, these numbers won't be quite correct, but 60% determined by age six. So here's a point, isn't there? How do we want our next cohorts of communities to what's their outlook on the universe and towards each other? So that space is particularly precious. I think the numbers go something like 90% if your worldview is formed by age 12. So I'm really interested in the early space and what that might mean. The last leg, so a few of us, my wife's, I'm an only child of single parents. I've got five cousins in total, I think. My wife's one of five. She's got about 100 first cousins. Her mother was one of 18. Her father's one of 10. There's an enormous small nation state in themselves, actually. And they've got a long tradition in the education sector. So when my mother and my mum, as we all know her, had their first child ready for a preschool, well, she went and joined the preschool. She was a teacher in that preschool. That child and the other children started to arrive and grow. They went to other schools and she joined those boards and participated in the room and taught. And up to the point of high school years when she and my father-in-law went and were the other parents in a Māori boarding school, Te Waipana Mugil's College, for a number of years. And so mum is mum to whole cohorts of these young women who came through the system. If you will, in holding itself and owning the responsibility for this challenge. So my cohort, we have children. Guess what? We're fasi. We want excellence. We want excellence in te reo Māori and te kāunga and so on, but we want excellence in the English language. We want access to good science skills and math skills and we're really reluctant to compromise. Why compromise anything here? So they've been doing an excellent job of this and what we've done of these kids growing older, what have we done next, we've applied for licence, we have a special character school licence for Te Pao or Rākai Houtu. It's an indigenous frame. It's exactly the point that was made earlier today. The idea of it takes a village to raise a child. So we want the cultural elements. We're really interested. We're feeding the children as well. That's addressed. It's a community of celebrations. We've been going five weeks so I've got a long track record of experience here, but you get to Friday and it's time to celebrate Josh's birthday today. Josh, would you come up to the stage a little two-year-old or four-year-old or probably five, six, seven in fact at the moment, the cohort we've got, but there's this celebration of these people as young human beings and the things that are happening for them. We're going to celebrate good dental health and we'll make a point of it and in between we've got some kapa haka going on and so looking to create a nurturing environment which is unapologetic about its roots and where it comes from is unapologetic about its aspirations for excellence. It's very clear that the environments are core part of this. We want our own orchards and gardens so we can feed our guests and ourselves. We want the technology. We want these guys to be coding and the idea of in two languages really appeals to me as well. So, as I say, four weeks in, very early three-age cohorts only, but going to 700 students in due course, it's an experiment. Another theme that comes up today and it's very big in my life actually is I think we need to run experiments. I think Josh, you might have mentioned this a couple of days ago, be mindful, intelligent, intentional, try something. Be mindful and iterate. So, I think, Leanne Canvas, this whole methodology, the language, the mindsets, it's exactly right to grapple with these questions in my view, but they need to be applied with discipline. The early days, we're taking a success measure from the fact that the kids cry when you ask them to go home at the end of the day, not when they have to come to school in the morning. So, they're enjoying it. And, I'll stop. Even when I were comparing grand theories about the universe last night, which I was very much enjoying, I think that we're on a journey of reclamation, really. I don't know that we're building anything new. These tribal groups, all of us are from tribal groups, we were self-contained, we were whole. We worked as a single and we were our own parents in our own universities, in our own space, in our own houses. And, what we've done is we've got more and more specialised, of course, with enormous effect. Adam Smith methodologies and so we're enormously productive now, but we've separated this from that and we've thought about them differently. I think I believe that what we're doing is stitching some of these things back together, making them whole again, healing them, and somewhere in there is a very powerful place where the generations that follow find and build that place in their own image. I think that's the challenge. Kia ora mai. Delightful. I've known Aniki for a fair while but that's the first time I've heard that story in its fullness, so I was very much enjoyed. And I think where I come from is probably at the complete other end of the spectrum of education, but I'm fairly new to the education sector. A long-time entrepreneur, a long-time programmer. A couple of years ago I was running a technical recruitment business and there was just nowhere near enough people. We saw acutely the pain that the organisations and employers felt by not having enough talent and my business partner said we should go and get into an education, we need to start training people. So I knew the founder of Dev Boot Camp in San Francisco, a massive nine-week intensive training course to take people from no programming experience to enough skills to get a job as a junior developer. Very much grew up in the sort of the talent context of Silicon Valley but then it spread to New York, Chicago and there's probably about 50 of these boot camps around the US and growing around the world. So we thought maybe that model would work in Wellington. So this is a year and a half ago and we brought it over here and started training programmers. So I found myself in the situation of getting right up close with tertiary education and on some aspects of it it was absolutely delightful and like there is something sacred about education and there is something special about that watching people grow and investing in people and human development and I think that where education finishes and where human development starts it's really blurry and you can hear all this talk about nutrition and wellbeing and context bleeding into classrooms and concepts and lectures and whatnot and so getting to see that and having that experience of trying to be a good teacher of connecting what is it I love about programming and how can I help people connect to what they love about programming as the very first thing so that's been my world for the last year and a delightful world it is but it's also I started to bump up to the tertiary education sector in New Zealand for the first time and I was absolutely horrified with what I saw. It was the context and like my understanding is that there's been a lot of systemic change over the last 10 years like 15, 20 years ago getting away with close to fraud of like we say we're educating someone but we're not delivering on it and that a lot of the systemic responses are about ensuring that if you get money to educate someone you actually educate them and that qualifications and certifications and whatnot the consequence of that has been what I would describe as a system that feels quite mad to me and again I don't want to be too critical of the system but my perspective coming into it has been it feels quite mad that you see tertiary education providers where if you do not get the number of students that you've been funded to get your funding will be permanently cut and you can't get it back the consequence of that alone on an operator is that if we don't get the numbers we're permanently get a haircut in our funding and if you want to revise your course and the consequence of that on adapting to sort of systems and processes and whatnot and so the other part of it is that it feels like for tertiary and getting degrees and qualifications there was this social contract that's what you did to be successful like if you were if you cared about your children or their development then you would want them to go to university and get a degree and that if you did that it feels like it has broken down substantially where the relationship between tertiary qualifications and employment is broken and it's broken in the US it's broken here it's broken in the UK that the degrees do not mean employability anymore but still a lot of people feel like they do and a lot of people go into tertiary education with the explicit intent of employability and they don't even measure and they don't even get jobs let alone tell everyone about it like what we did which was radical and bold was against each cohort that we went through we published their employment numbers next to the thing on the application page and that was considered dramatically radical and courageous being honest about the employment outcomes of our students and I think that starts to highlight how deeply the system is corrupted and co-opted from the delivery and so I think that I feel like there's a lot of work to do as a system and I guess that's sort of in my main learning from the last year is that you meet with students and they come to you with their hopes and dreams in their hands like one guy he was a Vietnamese student foreign student the export market we keep trying to win and get great revenue money in for his family a bachelor's of information systems and he comes out the end not even close to employable and his institution did not care he was done, they were finished he got his qualification a meaningless qualification and I think that seeing that up close compared to what's possible in terms of for us it does not take three years to train a programmer to get them employable give me six months with someone who's interested in programming six months it takes six months to do it and the universities haven't even gone close to exploring that possibility because they're in a context of three year degrees and the arrogance which comes with from academia the first thing we did as recruiters was let's go up and talk to the university about how we can help your students be more employable because our businesses have to spend six months training when they hire them so I guess that experience has shaped a lot of my world so what we do is essentially it's a completely private provider it costs about $11,000 which is quite a lot for a short course if someone doesn't have the money we lend it to them so we can afford to fund 20% of the fees of the course ourselves we've never turned someone away because they can't afford it we actively work on diversity and Maori and women in particular we want to see population parity first in our course and secondly in our industry and we're just jumping out there and doing it and it's been a hard ride but that's sort of our journey and for me it's the scary part of it is it hasn't been that hard like it was hard but not that hard and we put maybe borrowed maybe $100,000 to do it we licensed the model from something which has successfully improved in San Francisco but that's an anomaly and that accurately reporting employment outcomes of our courses is radical I think for me that's an indicator of how much work our education system needs to go so that's I guess the main sort of perspective and perception where I'm coming from and yeah really keen to see where the conversation goes from there Joshua I'm curious I've got proximity advantage here so I just ask you a question so you've got a slice you've got a subject area and you've got a model that's delivering that do you think that it would be reasonable to teach English this way or just thinking about how what's the scalability across the verticals I think it commends completely on the sector and the type of skills the main one of the main principles I think is around having people learn from practising professionals in that field so this is an area where I'd say that medicine traditionally does it very well like if you think about the journey that medical professionals go through to become qualified a huge amount of that is in a hospital multiple years and there's this deep practical element to that training when you think about how programmers are trained it's very different you're locked away in academia and then you might have a little bit of a very strong bias for the people who are teaching you to draw you into the research world and not the sort of working world so I think there's two different sectors and I think it's a case by case basis like it might not be you can do a six month or a nine week boot camp and in a six month context would work for other sectors it might mean you'd have to do a bit differently it might be one year or two years and so on so I think it depends on how much of a system which is relatively evenly spread is that a BA from this university might be broadly equivalent to a BA from Otago and so on so you get sort of these logic blocks that you can say that's 50 metres that's a BA I know roughly what that is so there's a number of registered tokens in the market I guess and I just wonder if we had a whole lot of dev academy initiatives the individual does the market then got an information problem has dev academy a good brand or a bad one or I'm just curious about how the market gets the noise out of it as like IT professionals we are good at solving information problems so the reason that you have a bachelor of arts and that means something or a bachelor of science and that means something is because that was an information signal when you had physical pieces of paper that in the context of rich information systems I can really accurately see your profile, your portfolio I can call up most of the people you've worked with and ask them what they think of your skills that in a deeply interconnected world I think that the information signalling of a qualification is marginal there might still be some place for it but I think that moving away from accreditation to reputation is a fundamental transition in how we do education it's a huge amount of stuff about how we assess people and that idea of portfolio based education pieces where you can see the work someone has done you can talk to the people they have worked with that's all the information you need to make an assessment on them and that you know whether they've done a degree or not just becomes a very early filter I'd say of marginal value so I'm curious about the I guess the intersection between this very close to the metal where you can measure education on how you're doing based off employment outcomes as opposed to quite early stages that what's common between those two places what's the difference like is it even part of the same system and doesn't make sense to think of them in relation to each other Great question I think we've got challenges already we've got some parents who I was having a chat with a couple of them the other day come to pick up the children and they're saying, oh look we're just loving this and the kids are really happy and they're coming home and they're chatting and they're telling us about the Taniwha story and they're doing this thing and never seen this much energy and excitement but they don't seem to have much homework so in fact our own thoughts about what good schooling is is that you know you should be at your desk for two hours every night and it's given in your book and we've not seen these different systems as doing the heavy lifting that's needed so already our own communities raising these questions about it so how you measure whether you're on the right track or not I think laughter is not a bad place to start but it's a serious question we're going to try from early childhood all the way to year 13 so we've got to think hard about this stuff because they get only a channel is their exposure really Is there much sort of education going on or exploring the ideas of the relationship between them between pupils between pupils in different ages so I'm really keen to play with the two kind of a tainer idea that the elder siblings they've got some responsibilities to the younger ones because they're more mature and so on but equally that the younger members of the family have always got things to teach the elder members they're the precocious ones they'll get up to a bit more mischief when everyone's learning so really keen to support that idea of traditional hierarchy but not in a one-way direction model one thing I really enjoy is their foremins and son what we've done is put them in private boarding school on Christchurch and it's sort of an elite school so I've done exactly the opposite and what they do is they've got really interesting leadership development it's interesting to study actually you're older than me so therefore you've got some leadership responsibilities which is actually a Tuakana tainer type relationship so I think there's something very powerful in that in the peer group I took far more notice of my peers than I did of parents or uncles so I think role modelling we're very serious about I think that concept of Tuakana tainer that was, I bumped into that maybe five, six years ago in New Zealand the idea of elder sibling, younger sibling and that it's a dynamic thing so that you might be better at me at programming and I might be better at you at reading and that in those different contexts the relationship would switch and that it really inspired a lot of my thinking around designing education environments where it's not all on the teacher a teacher becomes much more of a facilitator and this is what a learning journey is and the teachers on their own and that's sort of modelling what it means to actively learn and to actively ask for help and so that, is that like a fair, accurate representation of the concept or am I just making stuff up based on the inspiration sharing it around it's actually just rational where's the resource are you the resource on the subject let's go to you because the resource on that subject let's go to her one of my past times speech at the commencement speech where the big flash person gets up and says you're all onto us now the recipe actually is that we get you here we put a lot of effort into selection and then we get the hell out of the road and actually you guys just taught yourself across this year and it's very true that experience was enormously rich and it was rich because you and I were in the classroom and we worked together and we grew together really and the current I guess edge of my learning in this year of sort of just diving into education is around the concept of collaboration between teachers and collaboration between teaching organisations who's familiar with open source software a bunch of people so it's generally it's the concept that programmers will write some code and instead of just keeping it locked away they'll put it up online it's the key IP in software and the open source movement over the last two decades or so has transformed how we build software things that used to take me charge $50,000 for ten years ago you can do them for five or less now like a dramatic increase in productivity because of deep sharing and collaboration of resources I think there's an immediate opportunity to apply the same sort of thinking to education so that if you're a teacher and you have a curriculum that by having curriculum put into the commons and not just put out there because that's pretty easy but then it's expensive to use but put in there with an interface which is it slots into generic learning management systems you can start to dramatically get the same exponential increase in the cost of improving curriculum so that it becomes much cheaper to improve and you can continuously improve it and that way as someone who's putting together a talk or lecture on something you can pull in software into my project pulling curriculum into my class and that's the project I'm most focused on this year is building up that sort of thing modelling it very closely off open source software very likely using GitHub as a delivery mechanism but make it so that you can just build up your package file these things put in your custom linkings between it and have quite high quality curriculum as a result so I just wanted to drop that idea as well so I think Annaki so we've got about five minutes or questions and reflections so who's first Annaki I have a question for you so you spoke a bit at the beginning about the opportunities with the indigenous community and skills training and the current handbrakes as you said I'm curious for those community members who may not be interested in the technical fields so much but what else we can do to bridge the opportunities around environmental restoration and land stewardship and some of the new practices that might be emerging say for instance not really a new practice but permaculture and what does permaculture training look like and I'm just curious based on your understanding of the dynamics if there's any thoughts or reflections you have on those types of notions and how to explore here that could be explored with great value I think a lot of hard to generalise across the country the realities are different but there are communities with need there are communities that don't have their own food systems there are communities with high employment you can start to put some things together that would make sense and help build healthier communities more resilient communities employed communities and so on I think it's a game for the patient would be a phrase that I find myself using in this space and it's very easy to underestimate the trauma that these communities have been through in the past to start with it's actually trauma involved in getting out of that spot and reframing your own narrative and building your own institutions how do you elect yourself how would you run your own parliament it goes on and on which really take all the oxygen out of the room and unfortunately these new frontiers have been just a step too far or a luxury for later and what I'm hoping is that we're starting to see increasingly green shoots as some of these communities have been capitalised for 10 or 20 years now and on your point absolutely I think any idea that there's just a track that it will go to Stanford or Harvard or Pick Your Name brand and that leads you somewhere I think those days have long gone and without apology either I think no shame in fact a lot of money and being a serviceman and a plumber in Christchurch in particular if you're down there at the moment so we are seeing the emergence of the revalidation of the trade sectors and so on as well so it's not all we're not completely fixated about the academic track anymore as we used to be Cool Time for a couple more questions I really like what you had to say about it's all in the curation of the students and then the teacher can step back and a couple of people have asked me this week if I'm stressed or nervous and I've just thought look who's here look at what's happening here which is just the seeds of discussion going into shoots which is nothing to do with any one masterful person standing up here and dictating what this class is learning we're teaching each other one further here we go this is a reflection on what Josh was saying about the Dev Bootcamp model I found it really interesting we took on an engineer about a year ago who went through General Assembly which is a similar thing to Dev Bootcamp he had done a degree in philosophy and he had no computer science, engineering background and he's been able to jump in and be really, really effective in 12 months he's come an incredibly long way and he would be more useful to us than a grad from any university that is graduating considering studying computer science so I find that really compelling for the Dev Bootcamp model and I think that it's the way to go if you want to enter into the industry and be employable the from my own experience so I did a batch of arts but I majored in computer science I came out if I just did my coursework I would be pretty much useless in the like software engineering realm but essentially all of what I do in my day job has been things I've learnt on the side but I'm not a dilemma I have in my mind where it's like I look back at that experience of my undergraduate degree and I'm like well I didn't really learn a whole lot of stuff that I'm applying and using today and that's really frustrating and I could have learnt a lot more and I would have come out and right now my skills would be a lot further than it is but at the same time I do see a huge amount of value in engineering and I think that we do want our engineers to have a flavour of what the arts offer in terms of like how it helps you think and how it helps you be a human so I really love the Dev Bootcamp model and I think that it's the way to go to get engineers into the workforce but I think there's also there is importance and also having people who are going through that to have the other parts I don't think you want to just take kids I guess what I'm saying is I see value in the college and university academia kind of model I just don't think that it's been executed correctly and Dev Bootcamp is definitely the way to go up industry but there also needs to be a way to get the arts into these engineers at the same time Absolutely agree and I think that the main learning for me is to put tertiary education as your whole pretty much most of your adult education you might go back and do a post grade sort of thing and you might have a personal learning practice but it's usually a solitary personal learning practice and it's usually snuck in the edges of not much time and I think that in the context of like education sort of evolution things like charcoal or lifelong education which is around how you start to have deep education for your adult life which is not just isolated and solitary and in the margins but it's part of being an adult is constantly learning on things because if you think about like we always say to our programmers it'll take you three years to be good and you're still going to have to spend a big chunk of time learning but you only have to wear that yourself for the first six months the other two and a half months you're paid to keep learning and I think that if you think about trying to design a career but also has includes that wider appreciation that more fundamental education of humanities and arts and philosophy and lots of other things you could start to design a whole lot of stuff in that other two and a half years and you could do that much more cost effectively and much more tailor made for each individual person to get and it wouldn't end at that three year time like if you build that community and that practice and you came through that sort of process then a three year stint and then workforce and self directed at the end of it I'd like to thank Joshua and Aniki for sharing your thoughts with us thank you very much