High Flying Wi-Fi, Scooter Bans and Private Spacewalks

Episode Transcript (computer-generated)

Paul Spain:
Hey, folks, greetings and welcome along to the New Zealand Tech Podcast. I’m your host, Paul Spain, and a real privilege to have Barry Dowdeswell, from Otago Polytechnic, joining us on the New Zealand Tech Podcast for the first time. Welcome, Barry.

Barry Dowdeswell:
Thank you, Paul. I’m looking forward to chatting with you.

Paul Spain:
Likewise. Well, always good to catch up and great to have you on the show for the first time. And for listeners, Barry is also known as Badger. So if you hear me saying that during the show, don’t be confused. And I hear your students sometimes call you Doctor Badger.

Barry Dowdeswell:
That’s it. Yeah, works for them.

Paul Spain:
Maybe a quick intro of what you do within this world of tech education.

Barry Dowdeswell:
Well, could I simply say, I feel like I’m in heaven. I am spoilt to be in academia after years of being in industry. And I feel like a lot of things are coming together, working alongside some stunning students who really want to get into the it industry. And that opens up a world of possibilities, doesn’t that?

Paul Spain:
Yeah. Yeah, it’s very exciting and it’s great to see people have their, you know, their talents unleashed and, you know, get prepared so that they can unleash them and into the workforce. So we’ll look forward to hearing more about that later on in the podcast. Of course, a big thank you to our show. Partners to One NZ, Spark, HP, 2degrees and Gorrilla Technology. Now, let’s jump in. There’s some local news, some international news. First up, Beam scooters.

Paul Spain:
Now, it’s a little while since we’ve talked about these electric scooters that zip all over the our cities and towns now, but, you know, for a while there, it was a really, you know, it was a really hot topic. This was, you know, a very transformative transport that became available. But Beam sort of got quite a bit of a slap down from doing some naughty stuff. I see. You know, sometimes it gets referred to as compliance issues, but, you know, basically, it seems. Seems like they were reporting one set of numbers in varying cities, but numbers of scooters that were out and about actively and so on. And in actuality, there was a whole bunch more and they seemed to know what was going on but didn’t tell anyone. And, of course, this also impacts the different agreements they have with councils who are financially motivated, interestingly enough, to have these scooters around the place.

Paul Spain:
But, yeah, Wellington is the most recent. Wellington City Council is the most recent to have banned Beam scooters. And the reference I have is to safety concerns and non compliance with regulations. And if you think of there being, say, too many scooters on a street. And this is something that councils have to decide what’s. What’s appropriate, then there’s more chance of people tripping over ones that are dumped around the place and, you know, varying sorts of issues like that. So there’s that aspect and then there’s the fact that if you’ve got a company who is not being honest and, look, they’ve been hit across Australia as well now, Canberra, Brisbane, Townsville and so on, as well as. Yeah, here in New Zealand, Auckland and Wellington.

Paul Spain:
What’s your take on this?

Barry Dowdeswell:
The negative side is sad, but the potential opportunities for use of scooters is huge. They’re Internet of Technology devices, right?

Paul Spain:
Yeah.

Barry Dowdeswell:
So they’re connected. But it wasn’t so long ago I heard a story from Canada of some off centre theaters and eating establishments that weren’t on main transport lines that found their clientele went up once scooters were introduced, because people were driving as close as they could, jumping on a scooter and going to the restaurant.

Paul Spain:
How cool is that? It’s brilliant.

Barry Dowdeswell:
Partially filled theaters were getting filled, so the city council worked with the computer, with the scooter company, to arrange appropriate behaviors for parking and stuff. So how do we capitalize on an opportunity is the real question, isn’t it? We’ve got to manage it. Right. But what is scooters offering for us? And if it can be done? I don’t hear as many problems as I heard in the past with mechanical failures of scooters. So maybe they’re improving. How do we make it work for us?

Paul Spain:
I think that, yeah, they’ve stepped that side up, the safety side. Some of them have helmets and probably not enough. So there’s maybe some work to be done there. But look, this is a technology that didn’t exist in the past and, yeah, lots of positives, but I do think there is a balancing act on that safety front and we’ve certainly seen maybe too many issues from a safety perspective. So I think there’s some work to be done on that side.

Barry Dowdeswell:
Absolutely.

Paul Spain:
I see around Auckland now, the kind of, I don’t know what you call them, triskers are becoming more commonplace, as are the seated variations. And I guess one of my early sort of thoughts was a seated variant, and I was more thinking the more the moped sort of style might have its place, because people could go longer, are more likely to go longer distance in that case. But, yeah, the price points seem to be such that they are more geared towards a shorter journey. Because you can spend a lot of money actually, quite quickly. The per minute rates are getting up there with taxis and ubers and so on, but of course you get a fraction of the distance, but they’ve certainly got their place for that short distance travel.

Barry Dowdeswell:
And I walk the length of Queen street most mornings getting to work, so I tend to look at what’s there. And you’ve noticed how lime have increased the size of their battery pack. So obviously there’s a lot of evolution in the technology about how you manage a large fleet of scooters without forever having them all on charge all the time. It’s interesting to look at what the technology is doing to involve. And has that impacted safety? We would hope it has.

Paul Spain:
There’s a lot of iteration, isn’t there? Which is good. And I think initially they were probably more off the shelf. I’m sure what’s available as a standard option is. Has increased. But, you know, also when you’re buying a big fleet, you get to have some control.

Barry Dowdeswell:
So, yeah, you’ve only got to sit on the train to drool over some of the people who’ve got their own scooters. And the range and size and scale of some of those is so impressive.

Paul Spain:
Definitely, definitely. I’m not sure they’re all legal or safe when you’ve got ones that can do, you know, 50 ks an hour maybe. Well, I’m told some of them up to 100 ks an hour roll on technology. Now, also on a local front, there have been some privacy, a privacy complaint lodged over the Inland Revenue department. Some data sharing with social media companies.

Barry Dowdeswell:
Yes.

Paul Spain:
And yeah, this caught my attention. It’s an interesting one because it is, I guess, going outside the bounds of what an individual might expect in terms of what happens with their data. But it’s also very, very common. Those organisations who are wanting to target their own memberships, their own people that have connected with them in some way that they’re still trying to sell to in varying forms. If you’ve got an email list, you can upload that email list to a platform like Facebook and then target those people in a particular way. My understanding is this is the sort of thing that has possibly happened with the Inland Revenue department. So, yeah, quite a concern that, but although not unexpected, that organisations are able to sort of make missteps in these regards. Now, look, I’m not sure what the actual outcome will be of this particular one, but it’s certainly been questioned.

Paul Spain:
Is it legal, what’s going on and is it consistent with what we should.

Barry Dowdeswell:
Expect from a privacy perspective, especially what’s happening in Europe, there’s a lot more conscious response to privacy issues. Data sharing, global data sharing, acts of what you can share and what you can actually store as a tech company in the way of your customer information. So it’s quite a wide ranging issue. This is just the tip of the iceberg, isn’t it?

Paul Spain:
Now before we go to international, there’s a story that came through around tax exemptions that may well impact some startups. So this came through from the beehive and what they’re saying is that with this change that, you know, tech startups and tech companies are likely to benefit from this increase to current thresholds that create an increased exemption around employee share schemes. So I guess this is one of the things that can be common within startups. You’ve got fast growing startups and employees are able to buy shares. So what they’re saying is that the bill proposals lifting the maximum value of shared shares offered to employees under this exemption scheme from 5000 to seven and a half year, and also raising the maximum discount an employer can provide on the market value of those shares from 2000 to nzd3000. So yeah, these things, I mean, I know a lot of people over the years who have built their wealth by joining a fast growing company, whether it be a big well known one like a Microsoft or a Tesla or what have you, to smaller firms that have increased their value and enabling staff to buy shares. And it is a common element within the startup ecosystem. That’s one of the reasons that folks might stay with a startup.

Paul Spain:
Is that potential that they can earn through these share schemes?

Barry Dowdeswell:
Absolutely. Well, I’ve in previous life went through a venture capital round and I’m eternally grateful for my staff, my long term staff who chose to invest at the time that we got our venture capital investment to take shares, it pushed us to a different level of funding that we wouldn’t have had and created a stability because they created a commitment. So, you know, to any of my former staff out there who are listening, thank you, I haven’t forgotten. And I think that’s the incentive that they’re trying to encourage. How do we create stability at a time? This is often a very uncertain time for a startup. You know, you’re going through your first raising of funding and it’s quite a scary experience if you’ve been through it. And so anything which makes that task easier, I’m very encouraging of.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s good. Now onto sort of more international things. But of course that you know, this is one that has an impact on Kiwis. We heard of some smaller airlines jumping on board with Starlink to really up their game in terms of the Internet performance in the year. And I guess, you know, New Zealanders have done reasonably well if they fly internationally on air New Zealand, because actually in New Zealand have got a pretty good in flight Internet service. But that sort of starts going next level now as Starlink goes mainstream in flight. So we’ve got the announcement from United that they have, they’ve had signed a deal with Starlink that’s going to provide Starlink in the year. And the things that really differentiate Starlink are because these are Leo satellites, low Earth orbit satellites, and there’s a lot of them, they’re able to provide really, really good performance.

Paul Spain:
And many have already experienced that in one form or another in remote locations. Or if you’re rurally based and you’ve chosen to adopt Starlink, then it is a pretty impressive result when you realize that the signal’s being beamed up and down from Earth to space and back again. But, yeah, a really big leap forward when it comes to in flight communications. And, yeah, their really goal for United is to put that right across their fleet.

Barry Dowdeswell:
Absolutely. And if you think about the promise of what that offers, we all remember iridium creating those amazing mobile phone units, which were very expensive to run. But the potential for a nationwide coverage for emergencies and disaster, that doesn’t depend on a cell tower, which could get knocked out in an accident and in a tsunami or something. It’s got tremendous potential.

Paul Spain:
Yeah.

Barry Dowdeswell:
Well, what could we do with that in a country that has to be careful of tsunamis? Let’s be realistic.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, well, I think one of the big lessons of the big weather events that we had early last year was that cell towers are getting taken offline in some of these disaster situations. Actually, Starlink is often the perfect backhaul option, and we will see the market change as we get other competitors. But it seems like Starlink are in an absolutely incredible position with thousands and thousands now up there. Now, also, I guess, on a related basis, we heard about the Polaris dawn mission and this first private, privately, privately funded spacewalk, although there wasn’t that much walking going on, but it was pretty impressive. And that was live streamed and the live stream mix of audio and video. I think there were maybe a few video dropouts, but the audio seemed to run smoothly and the communications were understood to have all been managed by SpaceX as Starlink.

Barry Dowdeswell:
Starlink, yes, absolutely. And the reports are that the network latency was around 20 milliseconds, which is unbelievably good. But there’s a lot of technology being shown off. If you watch those videos, look at the spacesuits, look at what they did. But I’ve done a lot of work on aerospace as part of my research, and I’m fascinated by one thing. Those spacesuits. Watch in the video how the arms of the astronauts move so freely compared to a normal iSS space traditional ones. There’s a lot going on there.

Barry Dowdeswell:
But more than that, a spacewalk on the ISS is about an eight to twelve or longer hour exercise of depressurisation. Spacewalk repressourisation their entire time from depressurisation spacewalk and repressurisation was about 3 hours. So this is a very different spacewalk technology. And Harold’s just what’s going on. So there’s a lot of firsts as a result of Polaris dawn. It’s the furthest out since the days of Apollo.

Paul Spain:
That’s right.

Barry Dowdeswell:
I, and they’ve achieved some amazing stuff and they looked like they were having fun. And in fact, the whole crew space walked because they evacuated the cabin of the dragon. So a lot of interesting stuff of watching that video again and thinking what’s going on here particularly. He’s waving his arms in joy.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, it was a sight to see. Yeah. As you say, there was a lot of firsts there. This is quite a big deal. It is in that sort of space tourism category, which some people may look back, and I remember looking at very dated magazines as a youngster from maybe that were 20 years old at the time, that were showing pictures of tourists up in space at some point in the future. And I think we’re well past probably most of the dates that were predicted that we’d all go up and be space tourists. But look, there’s a lot going on there. And of course, with Rocket Lab, New Zealand is very well connected to this.

Paul Spain:
For those that are curious around what’s going on with rocket Lab, and we spoke a few weeks ago about their share price, which has been, you know, somewhat volatile. But the last I saw it in the last couple of days, they were really doing pretty strongly. So, yeah, there’s some good indicators there, sort of from the financial perspectives. But I think when you listen in to some of what Peter Beck is saying and some of their future, this, you know, a scenario under which we could see rocket lab actually taking astronauts up, definitely. Yeah, that’s certainly something that’s in Beck’s mind. And that could well be something that is part of New Zealand’s space history one day.

Barry Dowdeswell:
Well, I have graduate students who have gone on to work at Rocket Lab and they’re not allowed to tell me what they’re working on under confidentiality, except the smile on their faces. We’re having a lot of fun building cool stuff, and that’s all I want to hear. Graduates who are in roles where they feel like they’re doing something exciting. So, yeah, I can tell you that I’m hearing story after story of my students having fun.

Paul Spain:
Fantastic. Now on to new gadgets and so on. Of course, there’s all the announcements from Apple, and we will be able to get our hands on the new equipment this week. Yeah, I’m looking forward to trying out the new iPhones and there’s new AirPods and new Apple Watch ten, as well as the, you know, the iPhone 16, the 16 plus, the 16 Pro, the 16 Pro Max. Lots and lots of choices, you know, a fair investment. But look, I think the smartphones being made today, we see incremental changes every year. So we’re no longer in this world where it’s a huge number of people that are rolling over their device every single year. But there’s also so many of them out there that every year, even if people are only replacing, say, five years, was a discussion I had with one of my team today.

Paul Spain:
He said, look, I’m on iPhone eleven, so iPhone 16 seems to be the series to step up to. So that’s about five years, and that’s a pretty good life for a device. And look, maybe you spend a couple of $1,000 on the device, but when you think of how often these gadgets get used, it’s a large number of hours. So I think a good return on investment and yep, I think pleasing to see the continuous improvement that we see across the software and across the hardware. And of course, Apple have really led the way in terms of making their older devices get better. We’ve seen now Tesla do that on the car front with the software improvements, but Apple are continuing to do that. Yes, for some of the best features, you need the newest model or one or two models back and so on, depending on what those capabilities very much. But yeah, it’s that kind of annual refresh and usually enough that it’s appreciated, but we’ll delve into that a little bit on a future episode once I’ve had some good sort of hands on with what’s new.

Paul Spain:
One gadget I have been playing with over the last couple of weeks or so is the GoPro Hero 13. And this is somewhat similar in that GoPro, they are the dominant player when it comes to the action cams, but they’ve also got some good competition out there and they are releasing consistently annual updates to their main, their main product. And yeah, they’ve done the same again this year. Last year they stepped up with a new processor and a bunch of other things. The ability to sort of swap out the main lens for an ultra wide and give you virtually a 180 degree view. I think it’s 177 degrees or something with their ultra wide angle lens. But there’s always challenges. None of these products is ever perfect.

Paul Spain:
So I liked that there was this ultra wide lens option for the GoPro twelve, but it was also a little bit annoying. When you change the lenses, you had to manually change the settings to accommodate. Now, with the GoPro 13, you use one of the lenses and there’s actually a much broader range of lens options. And the hardware and software works together and detects the lens change and automatically adjusts the settings, which is a lovely step forward. So lots of good things in there. The new magnetic mounts that they’ve got, as well as all their existing options. And last year, in order to probably help them extend the battery life, amongst other things, they dropped having a gps on the GoPro for the first time in quite a few years. Well, this year, that’s back, they’ve got a whole new battery design, which I guess one of the things around GoPro compared with some of the others is they do quite well in those icy cold environments.

Paul Spain:
So for, you know, snowboarding and skiing and, you know, I took a GoPro up on Fox Glacier when my son and I went up there. And yeah, it’s just great being able to capture footage and in all sorts of circumstances, you know, great when you go on a jet boat ride, there’s all sorts of scenarios under which something like GoPro handles the water and everything else quite well. But I think there is still this crossover with our smartphones. And so it does sort of depend what you’re doing as to whether, you know, whether a Gopro or a similar sort of, you know, device is appropriate and how much you’re into creating, you know, video. So it does depend on, it’s more those sort of action scenarios where it really comes into play. Interesting this year. So they’ve launched the Gopro hero in New Zealand. I think $750 is the price point at this stage, but they’ve done something which is a bit new for GoPro and they’ve launched a smaller sibling, which we’ve seen these mini Gopros before.

Paul Spain:
Well, actually, it’s not quite here yet. I think it’s still a few days away till the mini version comes out. They’re just calling it purely GoPro. So the GoPro hero action cam, but without a number, without mini associated with it and so on. And it is a bit trunk down, but it still has the sort of a full touchscreen on the rear and so on, and it’s half the price. So dollar 379 in New Zealand. So for those who are kind of, you know, a bit curious about an action cam, maybe they’ve got an older model that maybe doesn’t do 4k or what have you, is. Yeah, they’re launching this lower cost variant.

Paul Spain:
One of the downsides I saw, talked about online was that it’s got an integrated battery, which we see with a lot of things, smartphones and so on. So if you were using it a massive amount and you actually wore your battery out, which would take some pretty serious use, I would tend to think. Because even our smartphone batteries tend to last for years, then. Yeah, that’s part of the trade off with paying half the price. And there are some other things in there as well. But, yeah, I thought that was quite an interesting move from GoPro in terms of trying to undercut some of the other brands and go, well, actually, you know, we could be very, very competitive as well.

Barry Dowdeswell:
It opens up a door for artists to do creative stuff. One of my former staff runs a YouTube channel called Go Girl and Doggo, and she mounts a goPro on the back of her dogs. And you see a dog walks through the park from the perspective of the dog. And when the dogs meet up, when you get a whole group of dogs and it’s a completely different video experience. Dogs on the height of the dog’s eye view. And I love her videos month with by week, as she’s putting stuff up and she’s got incredibly creative where she gets to exploring and the dog’s perspective, not the humans.

Paul Spain:
Yeah.

Barry Dowdeswell:
So again, it allows creativity for artists to do stuff that we could never do before.

Paul Spain:
No, no. And it does make me wonder, how do you attach a GoPro to your very clever harness?

Barry Dowdeswell:
A very clever harness.

Paul Spain:
Okay, there you go. So, yeah, so lots of opportunities. And I think one of the things that we see with some of these technologies look at GoPro is the price doesn’t necessarily increase year to year yet. And, I mean, this is the case with a lot of technology, right? Is realistically, the prices over time are coming down and so that makes them more and more accessible. That’s all helpful. So.

Barry Dowdeswell:
Yeah, and it’s opened up a world of sports, media and journalism from coming down the side of a mountain that you couldn’t film easily before. Certainly seeing it from the perspective of the sportsman. It’s a very different perspective and it’s kind of exciting.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. Yeah, well, I’m. Yeah, potentially going to be traveling with a goPro. I’ll be overseas shortly and I’ve got some interesting excursions planned. So there might be some curious footage that comes back.

Barry Dowdeswell:
We will wait in anticipation, Paul.

Paul Spain:
That’s kind of most of our main sort of tech newsy type topics. But Badger, I’m really keen to hear a bit more. And as I’m sure listeners are around this Otago Polytech campus that you’re part of the international campus, which is Queen Street, Auckland. So I think some people would have been thought it wondering like, hold on, why are you mentioning commuting around Auckland when you work for Otago Polytechnic? But there’s a pretty busy campus here, right in the heart of Auckland. Tell us a little bit about it.

Barry Dowdeswell:
Otago Polytechnic, Auckland International Campus is the satellite campus of the Dunedin Otago Polytechnic. And that has a very long history. I mean, 1889 was when the first incarnation of a technical institute which would change over the years into Otago polytechnic. And then 20 years ago it spun off into an Auckland campus to address the needs of international students. We are in a building on Queen street and we’ve got this year currently just under 1000 students. And it is a hive of creativity.

Paul Spain:
It’s a thousand students in Auckland.

Barry Dowdeswell:
Yep. Just cycling through in the course of a week. They’re not all there at the same time. And we’ve got eight floors, but we’ve got a very unique structure. So we are supported by the Dunedin campus. We have a lot of cross pollination between material and stuff. But we are a campus that focuses on a thing called experiential learning. And that’s what distinguishes us.

Barry Dowdeswell:
And that’s what attracted me to the place. Once I finished my doctoral work. I had originally run for 27 years. A large computer company with my wife built it up. Gone through all the venture capital rounds and stuff like that. And in 2004 I made what I consider the best mistake in my life. And that was I began to take into my company university students from the University of Auckland with some amazing lecturers who encouraged us. I ended up probably with 15 students over the course of about five or six years, including masters and PhD.

Barry Dowdeswell:
And they revolutionized our company. Having students in the midst of a tech company. I’m not trying to do a sales job on you, buddy. Having students. I can remember one simple example. I had one of my staff, Stephen, very experienced developer, and he came into my office one afternoon and said, guess what I’ve just done for the last 2 hours? I said, what? He said, dong sat down with me and showed me the UML. I’ve been drawing flowcharts for a long time and I thought, I have got to learn this. So this student, third year university students, upskills one of my staff with something that became a key part of his design technology.

Paul Spain:
Brilliant.

Barry Dowdeswell:
And in 2004, PhD student I had in the company who was doing a placement there, looked me straight in the eyes and said, we’re having more fun than you’re having. What are you going to do about your long term career? That’s a courageous move from a student. Right?

Paul Spain:
Wow.

Barry Dowdeswell:
And he was right. I was thinking about a change. And so my, we talked earlier about shares, right, or my business partner at the time had invested at the time that we went through our venture capital round, asked to buy the company out. And I went back to university in 2013, began to study, had a whole lot of interesting things I wanted to study, and eventually, after completing my doctorate, ended up at Otago Polytechnic. And I have found there a very different way of learning. So it’s kind of exciting. So I guess you’re going to know what’s different about it.

Paul Spain:
So, and just before we, I’m keen to delve into a little, a little bit of that. Yeah, go for it. You know, a technical institute, polytech compared to a university. And also, I guess the, you know, the breadth of technologies that you cover. Can you, can you talk to those?

Barry Dowdeswell:
Absolutely. So if you think about the learning experience of a student in a polytechnic which is geared towards it, we have business, we have construction, but I’m involved with the it area there. And if you look at the approach is different. I’ve taught in universities in between coming to polytechnic, and the difference is that we have a very different structure to a university for teaching. So a typical university course involves a couple of lectures a week in your topic and some laboratory time. We tend to do it differently. I have, for one of my development or hardware classes, two four hour blocks a week for a period of eight weeks. So they’re in eight week cycles and I don’t lecture for 4 hours.

Barry Dowdeswell:
I’ve typically got something that might last between 30 and 40 minutes for teaching and then it turns into practical work in the classroom. So if we’re talking about a particular aspect of hardware, networking, or programming, there will be a whole work plan of practical. So in the course of a week, in one of my programming courses, if you’re in a typical university, you might just spend a few hours cutting code, but in my class, you’re likely to spend six and a half to 7 hours on a coding exercise. Now, think of you as a developer in a company. What are you going to want in a graduate? Hours of practical experience. And that crosses all our courses. In our networking classes, they’re doing hands on experiential, build networks, set up subnets, learn to diagnose problems. It’s not theoretical.

Barry Dowdeswell:
And given that our classes are a little bit smaller, in the course of a four hour block, I have time to sit with individual students 1520 minutes at a time, working alongside. We get together in groups, we brainstorm, we solve problems, and they get the one thing that I want, confidence to be able to work with a computer to cut code and to be confident. And that’s the difference that I find there. We call it experiential because we want them to experience building things. And the number of times I see an assignment come out that blows my socks off at the depth of what they go. And especially when we’re doing graphics programming, 5% of the mark in each of my assignments in one of my programming courses is make me laugh, do something which stretches me. And last block, one of my students said, I hope you have fun with this assignment. And it was a particular order entry app that he’d written.

Barry Dowdeswell:
And when I placed the button, clicked the button for the place, the order I got, rickrolled a video, began playing, and Rick Astley’s gonna, never gonna let you down, never gonna play around. And I sat there roaring with laughter. He said, yes, sir. We didn’t cover playing video inside the app, but I taught myself how to do it, and I rickrolled you, and it’s that sort of experiential fun that for me, it gives me so much fulfillment to see a student actually stretch themselves out going, I can play with this. And on the same note, I had an assignment submitted a few weeks ago where a student delivered a version of brick Breaker. Beautiful graphics, all in c sharp. They’re learning a lot. And he said to me, and I bet you can’t win this.

Barry Dowdeswell:
And halfway through, it began cheating against me because he’d rigged it so I couldn’t win. And he got his 5% on that one for the fact that I played it and played it and I could not win because the further I went in, the more it messed around. Can you see learning ought to be fun?

Paul Spain:
Yes, definitely.

Barry Dowdeswell:
But learning ought to be deep on real industry topics. And our motto at Otaka Polytechnic is turning out the world’s New Zealand’s most employable graduates. And I think that we’re deliberate on that mission.

Paul Spain:
Fantastic.

Barry Dowdeswell:
So that’s kind of what I do. And you can see that I’m having fun.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. Yeah. Oh, every time we catch up, you’ve always got. You’ve always got stories. There’s good stuff going on and it’s great.

Barry Dowdeswell:
That makes education different when a student can engage and feel like they’re making progress, but also we’re accessible. I’m on campus a lot during the week and you and I talked about LinkedIn, didn’t we? Most of my students are connected to me on LinkedIn, so they can query me at odd hours of the night because I’m working when they’re working and they can fire an assignment question at me. And we use LinkedIn. It’s a safe environment to communicate with me. But also they’re building their business profile, aren’t they?

Paul Spain:
Yeah. Yeah. They’re getting familiarity with the tools that they’ll need to get.

Barry Dowdeswell:
If you engage with them on campus, they would wave their phone at you and ask to connect with LinkedIn on you and you’d probably be happy to do it. You don’t want to connect them on Facebook or WhatsApp. But LinkedIn, and I’ve seen students doing that in industry functions where they’ve learned to. To build their profile. And isn’t that what education’s about? Yeah, they’re no longer schoolchildren, they’re prototype developers. So, yeah, you can see I’m having fun.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, definitely. And what’s the bread? You’ve talked about programming and hardware. You know, what do folks, you know, delve into?

Barry Dowdeswell:
Well, we have multiple streams, so the first year of a three year it degree is some core papers. So I teach one paper, which we call platforms and devices. And in that eight week block, they’ll have a two week introduction to hardware. What is a device? What’s a platform, what’s a component? Fundamental electronics. We then delve into two weeks of windows fundamentals. And during that time, the message is, while you’re living on your laptop, I want you to be confident that no matter what that laptop does, you’ll be able to cope with it. So they learn how care and feeding of their laptop. We then give them two weeks on Linux.

Barry Dowdeswell:
And the contrast of Windows to Linux teaches them. So, hey, if you’re going to be in the world of servers, you’re going to have to be able to cope with Windows and Linux. And the final two weeks is something that I love. These little Arduinos, little tiny Arduino processor which is an IoT device, Internet of Things device, which I can connect sensors to. And they build their first electronic device. They program it. They have so much fun. Ultrasonic sensors, alcohol sensors for ethanol on your hands, RFID card readers.

Barry Dowdeswell:
And they get a taste of managing hardware and software. But the message is confidence. Will you be confident? Parallel to that, my colleague Ganeshan is running. We’ve got a brand new networking laboratory in there with the most fabulous equipment and they are learning practical hardware, networking to the point where they are confident. And that’s the message that goes through all of our programming courses. You will become confident and able to design and do stuff creatively. And certainly it’s different to what I’ve seen in other universities, but it pushes them to a level where I believe they will become New Zealand’s most employable graduates.

Paul Spain:
Fantastic. Well, that’s great. That’s probably a great note to finish on. Unless there’s anything else that you thought we should touch on there?

Barry Dowdeswell:
No. Thank you so much for this opportunity. We have both domestic and international students and it is a very real alternative to traditional university environments. But thank you. This has been a fascinating discussion.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. Oh, fantastic to have you on the show and I hope we’ll have future opportunities and, yeah, really, really good to delve into what’s happening at the Auckland International campus of Otago Polytech. That’s great. Well, thanks, everyone for joining us on the show this week. And of course, if you’ve been listening to the audio, do make sure you go and have a look around. You can follow myself, Paul Spain on LinkedIn. If you want to access the live streams on LinkedIn, you can also access them by following NZ Tech Podcast on X, YouTube or Facebook. So a few options there.

Paul Spain:
We’ll be back again next week with another episode, of course. A big thank you to our show partners. Guerrilla technology, oOne NZ, HP, Spark and 2degrees. All right, thanks, everyone. And thanks, Barry.

Barry Dowdeswell:
Thank you, Paul. I’ve enjoyed it.

Paul Spain:
Cheers.