Artisan Guns – Bird & Bone

January 14th, 2010 Filed under: Music, Reviews | Tags: new zealand, rock
1. Tuesday Night
2. Autumn
3. Goodbye
4. Rose
5. Ballad of a Red Man

Overall:

---

My 15 Minutes of Fame

July 2nd, 2009 Filed under: Life, Music, Web | Tags: new zealand, nz beats, podcast, radio, wellington

To my surprise late last week I got an e-mail from Access Radio in Wellington. They were contacting me because they were planning a show based around kiwi podcasters and they had run into my little site NZ Beats Podcast. One of the co-hosts Yenping and I got to talking and she ended up doing an interview for her show.

First I have to say, Yenping did a fantastic job of making me feel at easy. I usually get quite nervous in these sorts of situations, but this was just like having a conversation with an old friend. She also talked me up, a lot. My head size tripled in size while listening to the show, made me feel quite proud of myself and NZ Beats.

I have the interview bellow for your listening pleasure, but I would suggest heading over to the Access Radio Blog and listening to the whole show there. That way you’ll also be able to hear another interview with a different kiwi podcaster Tom whose podcast, Like a Mad Dog Running through a Puddle of Gravy, consists of him and his brother shooting the shit about an array of different topics.

---

Big Brother in Christchurch

June 23rd, 2009 Filed under: Rants | Tags: big brother, cameras, christchurh, new zealand

About a month ago, the Christchurch City Counsel spent close to a $1 million on “new crime-fighting video cameras” that police say will help reduce criminal activity and violence in central Christchurch.

The 25 cameras, almost triple the coverage of the 13 existing cameras which were already on Christchurch streets.

Last year the cameras helped with almost 80 arrests, located 27 missing people, seven witnesses to a homicide and helped identify and locate the suspect in a stabbing. Although those stats sound good, I still feel like we are giving up a little too much of our privacy to see these results.

I have been thinking about it for a while and the more I think about it the more it freaks me out that I am constantly being recorded during my day to day life. The key word in that sentence was “recorded”, I realise that these camera’s are in public places and that we are seen by random people all the time when walking around town and I’m fine with that. It’s the recording that unnerves me. I would be a lot happier if the camera’s watching me were doing just that, watching not recording me. It would be the same as any other random person on the street being able to see what I was doing.

This would still be advantageous to police, as they could have one officer watching multiple cameras, thus giving the police a greater presence in the community. The police officer viewing the camera feeds could keep mobile officers up to date to help stop crime on the streets.

One argument against this would be that evidence of crimes being committed would be lost. To this I suggest that the officer viewing live feeds should also be able to be used as eye witnesses for crimes in court, the same way any other officer would be able to if they were standing where the camera was when the crime was committed.

I would really like to hear your thoughts on this subject of Big Brother encroaching into our privacy. Do you mind being recorded? Do you think my idea of only allowing live feeds from the surveillance cameras is stupid? Have you got any other ideas? Hit those comment boxes people.

---

Assessment for Learning in Aotearoa

June 17th, 2009 Filed under: University | Tags: assessment, children, education, new zealand, University

Historical Influences on Assessment Within New Zealand

Since the late 1980′s, many historical events have influenced the way we as educators assess the children in our New Zealand early childhood centres. In this essay, I will highlight three such influences and discuss how they have affected the assessment of children in early childhood centres to the present day. The historical events I will examine are the publication of three government documents; ‘Te Whāriki He Whāriki Mātauranga mō ngā Mokopuna o Aotearoa Early Childhood Curriculum’, ‘Kei Tau o te Pae Assessment for learning: Early Childhood Exemplars’ and ‘Revised Statement of Desirable Objectives and Practices’. I will discuss the theories behind these documents and how they differed from what was previously being used in centres as well as some major ways in which they impacted on the role of assessment.

The introduction of Te Whāriki in 1996 greatly influenced assessment as we know it in the present day. Before it was released as New Zealand’s early childhood curriculum, assessment focused around Piaget’s developmental views that development precedes learning. This meant a discontinuous development model where children would be grouped into different developmental stages by age (Berk, 2003). Educators would test children’s abilities and check them off a predetermined list for their age group. Any tasks that the children were unable to complete to the predetermined standard were highlighted as areas that needed to be improved and worked on. This lead to an assessment process of ‘deficit value’. Te Whāriki on the other hand is more influenced by Vygotsky’s developmental views that learning precedes development.This results in a continuous development model where each child is looked at individually and their learning is scaffolded by a more knowledgeable other (Berk, 2003). In other words, educators work closely with children in areas that interest them, always trying to help the child take the next step towards being more competent. This leads to an assessment process of credit value. This can be seen in how Te Whāriki defines assessment; “The process of obtaining and interpreting information that describes a child’s achievements and competence. The purpose of assessment is to provide pertinent information to contribute and improve learning opportunities for children. (MOE, 1996, p.99) and else where states “assessment of children’s learning and development involves intelligent observation of the children by experienced and knowledgeable adults” (MOE, 1996, p.29).

Te Whāriki was also built around the ecological systems theory of Bronfenbrenner. Bronfenbrenner’s theory suggests that the environment a child grows up in will impact on their development, therefore said child’s whole environment must be taken into consideration while being assessed (Berk, 2003). Unfortunately, educators were confused on how best to document this environmental impact as well as the minute by minute assessment of children which Te Whāriki supports; “assessment occurs minute by minute as adults listen, watch, and interact with an individual child or with groups of children.” (MOE, 1996, p,29). To help, the Ministry of Education later released a set of books Kei Tua o te Pae Assessment for learning: Early Childhood Exemplars in 2005. “Kei Tua o te Pae will help teachers to develop practices that integrate assessment and quality learning experiences and to engage with children, parents and whānau about children’s learning and progress” (MOE, 2004, Book 1, p.15). These exemplars showed a new approach of documenting assessment in a narrative form through learning stories. Learning stories reflect and protect the quality and complexity of learning by using a narrative approach (Carr, 2001). This meant that educators could now assess children’s development based on their relationships with people, places and things within the child’s environment (Carr, 2006), thus supporting Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory. It also showed the use of multiple perspectives from educators, caregivers and the child themselves within the learning stories, further showing its dedication to involve as many aspects of the child’s environment as possible during assessment. Long gone were the assessments involving forms full of check-boxes that only looked at the abilities of the child rather than at the child as a whole including their ecological system.

The Desirable Objectives and Practices (DOPs) were first introduced in 1990. They were put in place to enforce standards among chartered early childhood services within New Zealand. These standards were used to show educators what is expected of them and their centres. This document was then revised in 1996 to link closely with the newly published Te Whāriki resulting in the Revised Statement of Desirable Objectives and Practices (DOPs). The importance behind this is that while it is not mandatory for all chartered New Zealand early childhood centres to follow Te Whāriki, it is for them to follow DOPs. This was a clever government work around to help ensure that Te Whāriki would start being used in centres as soon as possible, as it is much quicker and easier for a government to edit a previous mandatory document than it is to introduce and pass legislation on a new one. DOPs’ close ties to Te Whāriki and the Vygotskian developmental theory of a continuous development model can be seen in the following exert, “identify learning goals for individual children, and use this information as a basis for planning, evaluating and improving curriculum programmes” (MOE, 1998). It also ties in with Kei Tua o te Pae and it’s exemplars of learning stories that incorporate relationships with people, places and things; “Educators should implement curriculum and assessment practices which reflect the reciprocal relationships between the child, people and the learning environment” (MOE, 1998), as well as with the introduction of multiple perspectives; “Management and educators of chartered early childhood services, in partnership with parents/guardians and whānau, will promote and extend the learning and development of each child” (MOE, 1998).

In conclusion we can see how the documents; Te Whāriki, Kei Tau o te Pae and DOPs, have been linked together to allow a relatively swift transformation in the way assessment is carried out within New Zealand early childhood centres in the present day. Introducing new developmental theories by Vygotsky and Bronfenbrenner to help push assessment towards focusing on the achievements of the whole child and their place within, and interactions with people, places and things in their environment. Providing a good guideline on how assessment can be done while leaving it open enough to allow for individual centres’ philosophies and environmental impacts to be taken into consideration. I doubt assessment would be as it is today if any of these three documents had not be published to help support the other two.

References

Berk, L., (2003). Child Development. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

Carr, M. (2001). Assessment in early childhood settings. Learning stories. London: Paul Chapman Publishing.

Carr, M. (2006). Learning dispositions and key competencies: A new curriculum continuity across the sectors? Early Childhood Folio, 10: 2006, 21-26.

Ministry of Education. (1996). Te Whāriki: Early Childhood curriculum. Wellington: Learning Media.

Ministry of Education (1998). Quality in Action; Te mahi whai hua. Wellington: Learning media.

Ministry of Education. (2004). Kei Tua o te Pae. Assessment for learning: early Childhood Exemplars. Wellington: Learning Media.

---

Road Trip to Greymouth

April 13th, 2009 Filed under: Life | Tags: greymouth, new zealand, road trip, westcoast

It’s Easter which means a four day weekend. Ivy and I thought that we’d better take advantage of this weekend and get our asses off the couch. Problem was we didn’t have any ideas on what to do. After a couple of hours of failed attempts of discovering awesome cheap things to do on the internet we decided to go with the old fall back Road Trip! So we packed up the car with some sleeping bags and snacks and hit the highway. It was a beautiful day out, so we decided to head over Arthur’s Pass to the Westcoast. The Arthur’s Pass drive is really quite beautiful, with everything from lush forest to snow tipped peaks.

The old Honda had a bit of trouble with some of the steeper slopes, but all in all the drive was fantastic. We went non-stop on the way over since we left later during the day, but made plans to stop at various places on the way home.

We arrived in Greymouth at about 5 pm to a practically empty town. The streets were empty and everything was shut except for some restaurants. Or first stop was the info center where we grabbed a local map and the location of all the hostels in the area. Now to our surprise most of the hostels were booked up even though the town seemed empty. We ended up at The Duke, a hostel in the town center $25 each for a bunk bed.

After arranging accommodation for the night we went to the supermarket and Warehouse for supplies. Turns out every one in Greymouth was at the Warehouse buying up large in Easter Eggs. We picked up some chocolate, peanut butter and bread and some juice. On the way back to the car a we helped a lady jump start her car and she rewarded us with a big bag of M&M’s, always pays to help someone i need out.

Next we went to a pub, Revingtons, for a meal. Here we met two locals. We ended up chatting and they invited us back to Marty’s place to hangout. This is lead to the most incredible conversation where everyone’s skeletons came out of the closet. This is a whole other story which you can read about in my post Crazy Night with the Locals in Greymouth.

After Marty’s we headed back to The Duke and watched the end of Ameile (great movie) with some other travelers before getting an early night.

Got up early the next day and headed off to Punakaiki to see the Pancakes Rocks. We had both seen them when we were kids, but that was more than 15 years ago. It was a nice walk around the small coastal area where these rocks are found. They were pretty much how I remember them, stacked pancake shaped rocks. Really the only thing that has changed is the number of tourist cafes and shops that have popped up around the walk entrance. We also checked out the Punakaiki Tavern where they have a statue of some horses sitting outside drinking some beer. They also have a beautiful garden out back with a fish pond that has the biggest most bloated gold fish I have ever seen.

After the Pancake Rocks we started on the three hour drive home remembering to hit the places we missed on the way over. First we stopped at a little goat farm that sells goat cheese, unfortunately it was closed until the next season. Who know goat cheese had seasons? So on we drove until we hit a river bed, where we stopped and collected some stones for a project I’m working on for Uni and Pre-school.

Next stop was Cave Stream. Cave Stream is this awesome cave that runs right through the center of this hill. The cave passage meanders and twists in pitch darkness for 362 metres between the two entrances. The cave ends in a deep pool with a 3-metre high waterfall. A ladder of iron rungs in the rock climbs up beside the waterfall and a chain and step help the crawl along the overhang ledge to the exit. We didn’t come prepared to actually go through the cave, but we did walk down to the entrance and yelled “Echo”! Ivy even managed to fall into the freezing water while we were walking out, hilarious.

Next we stopped at the Castle Hill Village to see there Easter Art Expo. Turned out to cost a gold coin donation to get in, we didn’t have any cash and the closest ATM was about 70kms away, so had to give that one a miss. So we were back on the road again. Are next stop was in Springfield where they have a giant doughnut that was put there in 2007 to celebrate the release of The Simpson’s Movie. We just had to stop ad get our photo taken with it. Don’t judge us, you would have too.

The last stop on the way home was at the Shefield Pie Shop! This pie shop had a huge sign out side advertising their great pies. To tell you the truth I actually thought their pies were nothing special.

So that was our Easter Road Trip. Check out all the photos bellow.

---

Simon Heads to Wellington

January 8th, 2009 Filed under: Life | Tags: friends, new zealand, simon, wellington

Simon left for Wellington today. He got a three month contract working for some software company up there. All this is great news for him, but crappy for me. One less friend in Christchurch. But I’m a big boy I can take it. Good luck Simon, all the best for your new job.

---

Heat Wave

January 8th, 2009 Filed under: Life | Tags: christchurch, new zealand

There has been a crazy heat wave in Christchurch over the past 3 days. Last night it was so hot I needed to use a wet towel as a blanket in order to fall asleep (nice image for ya).

Today it got up to a whopping 39 degrees Celsius. Luckily, I work at a preschool so I can always just get the hose out and start a water fight. Ivy on the other hand was stuck in a storage room at Spotlight. Poor girl.

---