I was in Christchurch yesterday afternoon for a meeting with my PhD supervisors, but before heading out to the University, I had the privilege of meeting Derek, Nick and Glen from CORE Education. Peter, a mutual friend for Derek and I, had made the introduction as what I’m interested in professionally within an enterprise / organizational setting, Derek and his colleagues are interested in within an educational setting. We had a great 45 minute discussion, covering a wide-range of topics.

Here’s a summary of my notes:

• The founding ideas of CORE Education come out of work done at the Christchurch College of Education by Nick (and others) on developing an ICT strategy for New Zealand schools.
• CORE Education was set up in 2001/2002 in New Zealand, originally focused on professional development of educators within New Zealand. It had a different name originally, modelled on a similar organization in the UK, but changed its name to CORE Education when there was a parting of the ways. Professional development remains a central tenet of CORE Education.
• e-learning is at the heart of CORE Education’s philosophy and approach … how to cultivate it, how to ensure effectiveness and success.
• CORE Education does quite a bit of visioning work for education and e-learning futures within New Zealand, and has established relationships with the government and schools for implementing some of these ideas. One of the current projects is to think about the opportunities that the Advanced Network offers educational institutions.
• Derek and Nick are two of the three directors of CORE Education. I didn’t meet the third … Vince … but apparently he spearheads a research focused part of CORE Education on topics like ICT effectiveness in education, the impact of online games and gaming on education, and more.
• There is a growing interest across New Zealand in creating and supporting online environments for communities of practice. CORE Education has recently run a fully online conference for New Zealand teachers, that attracted about 1400 participants from across the nation. As a result of its success, CORE Education has linked up with the K-12 online conference work out of the US.
• Glen is one of the technology leaders at CORE Education, and is spearheading the technical platform for CORE Education’s work and offerings. He originally developed Interact, a platform for online education.
• What is … (or from a visioning perspective) … what could be the impact of the huge penetration of mobile phones and devices among school aged children for the delivery of education? Eg, if you think out five years, and assume that every child has a mobile device that’s connected to a fast wireless network, what does / could that mean for educational delivery and effectiveness?
• “Collaboration” via online tools may be a foreign concept to those over 30, but for today’s teenagers and 20somethings, it’s just a reality / fact of life. Online collaboration is just how they live their lives. While that has big immediate impacts for educational institutions, it equally has big / huge impacts for enterprises and organizations in 5-15 years.
• Web 2.0 tools such as blogs and online documents, eg, Google Docs, are changing the practice of working together. Derek said that it is very common for him to attend a meeting and have someone at the end say, “I’ll throw up a Google Doc so we can work on that”.
• CORE Education has 37 staff within New Zealand, 12 of whom work out of the head office in Christchurch.

It was great to meet with Derek, Nick and Glen. If you are involved in the future of education and need some thought leadership, get in contact with CORE Education.