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Kootuitui ki Papakura Trust

Here are most of the members of the Kootuitui ki Papakura Trust at one of their recent meetings. They are community representatives working together for positive change in the lives of families and young people in Papakura. As the name suggests, the programme interweaves education, health and homes, to build social infrastructure and deliver life outcomes for children in the low decile schools of the area. The trust sits at the nexus of a number of collaborative endeavours:
- the collaboration among six schools with the implementation of digital pedagogies;
- the collaboration with health providers;
- the collaboration with local government, local community organisations, businesses and support agencies;
- the collaboration with corporate sponsors and philanthropic trusts.
Through the formation of the Trust, the framework has been established to provide leadership for the community from within the community. Finding local solutions from within is a partnership model in which all participants are invested in the outcomes and therefore have a huge stake in ensuring these are positive and significant. It gives agency to this community to determine and take their own actions without having to continually be on the receiving end of assistance from outside. Which even if it is well-intentioned, it does not take account of the Chinese proverb, "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime".

Students' Digital Footprint and the 'Cloud'

      It came as a revelation to some students this week that everything they do online is 'visible'. We have started working with them on their digital footprint and this has raised some questions and discussion. Some students think that everything they write gets saved only on the computer they are working on and if they destroy it, then their activity will be gone. We explain that it is the opposite and that nothing they do on their chromebook is actually saved their local hard drive. All of their commenting, drawing, slide-making, and blogging etc is stored on a huge cloud, which by association is somewhere up high in the atmosphere, away from anyone being able to delete or destroy it. In reality, everyone's data must be stored somewhere though and the 'cloud' storage is on large servers in large rooms of large buildings on large campuses of large IT corporations in large countries.
      I was fortunate enough to visit one of these cloud facilities in August 2015, where I was shown the new Z Series computers which operate in the cloud. They are just huge black cabinets with lots of flashing lights, electrical leads and fans to keep the machines cool. There was tight security so just nobody could gain access, but they could be destroyed by natural disasters, fires and malicious damage. In addition, storage media can fail, large corporations can get hacked, and data can get deleted just as easily on a server as it can on anyone's computer.
      Even so, it is important to realise that living in a world of connection through any device, at any time and from anywhere in the world, necessitates that users understand the implications of both their passive and active digital footprints being able to be stored and accessed. This may be through the tracking of our IP addresses, web browsing, facebook, twitter histories, and leaving comments on blogs etc. Have you ever realised that data about you has been collected via the internet without your knowledge? Every time you answer a quiz, buy something online or use social media, machines, and by default people, are collecting information about you and this information can be packaged and sold was IP addresses, mailing and telephone lists. While this can be used for good and things you need, want and care about, other less desirable uses, from pestering to bullying to breaches of your privacy could result. Children need to understand the need, skills and tools to safeguard their online character and reputation in their ever-expanding digital world.