A fresh start...

I was contemplating a fresh start with a new blog and but then when I came back to this one I realised that my posts from two years ago are still relevant to the things I want to say. So I thought I'd just start with a new post and a new commitment to writing.

There are a couple of things on my mind today - both to do with history and change.

Last night I had organised a "farewell" for a site we were about to decommission. Several people have commented to me on how interesting the short presentation I gave on the site's history was.

Several years ago our Masters class in education research had the good fortune to have Dr Neil Dalgliesh do a workshop on historical research. It captured by imagination and one of my regrets is that I didn't get to do his full paper as he was on sabbatical the following year. The consequence of that is I have always reviewed files and records with some respect and quite enjoy tracking back the story of a project through it's file.

For a number of reasons I had access to some wonderful archival files about this site. By putting together the pieces and some use of the Wayback machine I was able to pay tribute to what had been one of the very first education websites in New Zealand. So early was the site that the first discussions weren't even considering the internet as an option. It beat our Ministry of Education site by almost two years.

In the rapidly changing world of IT we dont often look back and reflect on the journey we have travelled or just how rapid that journey has been. The "quaint" early comments and questions from the feedback surveys on the prototype site were only 13 years old! Several of us were looking through the files later and exclaiming over the amount of handwritten notes. The question in my mind is that as most of us in IT are constantly looking towards the "next best thing" we forget that in the future others may want to know how we achieved what we did. What is all in a day's work for us is contributing to rapid social change and yet so much of our electronic world is disposable.

I'll leave my second thought for next time...