With EdTech, the world is in your backpack (Illustration: Marc Conaco)

PartnersJuly 25, 2022

The NZ-made tech reshaping education around the world

Contributing writer

With EdTech, the world is in your backpack (Illustration: Marc Conaco)

Education is experiencing a technological revolution at the moment – and New Zealand companies are at the forefront.

When Covid-19 forced thousands of schools and universities across Aotearoa to close their doors, it was technology that came to the rescue – and a lot of the technology that led the charge in online education was born right here in New Zealand.

While the shift from classrooms to computers wasn’t always smooth sailing, technology allowed schools to march on, helping educators to lessen some of the disruption caused by the global pandemic. Today, it’s clear that education and technology have become inseparable, and in the future, are poised to become even more so in ways that may upend learning as we know it.

While Covid-19 accelerated the uptake and deployment of EdTech in the last few years, the sector – which refers to “technology supporting the experiences and outcomes of learners, educators, and educational institutions” – has been a steadily growing industry for some time. In 2019, US$164 billion was spent globally on EdTech – a figure that’s set to balloon to US$404bn in the next three years. In New Zealand, EdTech has been on a similar upwards trajectory: according to the Aotearoa EdTech Excellence report, spending on education software alone was $173.6m in 2020. By 2025, that figure is expected to almost double to $319.6m.

Even VR is now being used to teach real-life scenarios in the virtual space (Illustration: Marc Conaco)

Aotearoa has a young, growing, and highly innovative EdTech sector. Despite its modest size and relative newness (around 60% of local companies identify as startups and 65% were created in the last 10 years), approximately 92% of EdTech companies are already exporting or thinking about exporting. Part of this growth can be put down to the global reputation of New Zealand’s education system – in 2019, the country ranked third overall in the Economist Intelligence Unit’s (EIU) Worldwide Educating for the Future Index and has long been a prime destination for international students.

“I think one of the factors [behind EdTech’s growth] is that New Zealand has a really good reputation in areas of education,” says Dave Moskovitz, a member of the EdTechNZ Council. “Then there’s New Zealand’s reputation for technological innovation. Rocket Lab and its 3D printing of rocket engines, for example, or Xero and its mission to make accounting beautiful. Who would’ve thought that would be possible?”

Today, EdTech presents a massive export opportunity for New Zealand firms, particularly in the wake of Covid-19. Not only is the global education market set to reach at least US$10 trillion by 2030 due to population growth in developing markets, but New Zealand’s international education sector is now strategically focused on reframing how the world can study with New Zealand, not just in New Zealand. This means fit-for-purpose technology will play a huge part in how local providers adapt to meet the changing ways local and international learners (and their educators) engage in education.

Peter Dong, CEO of computer science learning platform ByteEd, was at the Dubai Expo as a member of the New Zealand delegation earlier this year. He says the trip was “very much about taking a 100% New Zealand education technology to a new market” and being able to “make connections with higher education faculty, curriculum development leads, and school principals, and subsequent meetings on the ground in Dubai.”

Education right now is going through a period of disruption, which goes above and beyond the pandemic. New trends, such as the rise of micro-credentials or short courses, are poised to upend how we consume and deliver education.

“The education system of today hasn’t really evolved quickly enough to meet the challenges of the 21st century,” says Moskovitz. “So, for me, technology is key to helping accelerate the transformation that needs to take place for education to be fit for purpose.”

That transformation has been crucial in allowing international students the opportunity to connect with New Zealand’s world-class education while borders have been closed. The Future Learn initiative, for example, has enabled a global community of 15 million learners to connect with a curation of short courses from New Zealand universities, English language schools, and other educational providers, as well as EdTech educators incorporating virtual reality and game design. The goal of the platform is simple: to provide global learners with “tasters” of New Zealand education that could lead to further online or onshore study opportunities in the future.

Online classrooms allow students and teachers to collaborate seamlessly (Illustration: Marc Conaco)

Despite the industry’s relative infancy, a number of high profile EdTech companies from New Zealand are already making their mark on the world. Kami, for example, an all-in-one digital classroom app allowing students and teachers to interact and collaborate seamlessly with each other is now used by over 30 million learners and educators in more than 180 countries. Education Perfect is another high profile example: founded by brothers Craig and Shane Smith initially as a language-learning programme back in 2007, Education Perfect has since expanded to a full-curriculum of subjects offering a customisable platform that’s self-paced and responsive to learners’ feedback. With more than 40,000 subject-specific lessons online, the Dunedin-based platform is currently incorporated in more than 4,500 schools across 55 countries. Last year, the company further cemented itself as an EdTech behemoth when it was bought by global investment firm KKR in a deal estimated to be valued at more than $450 million.

A big trend for the future of global EdTech is artificial intelligence (AI). Much of the value of AI is its ability to create a more personalised learning experience using a plethora of data unique to each individual learner. Kara Technologies, for example, has developed AI-powered digital avatars translating written, audio, and visual content into sign language, providing access to children’s books like The Very Hungry Caterpillar to young Deaf or hearing-impaired learners.

Another major trend we can expect to see more of is gamification, with companies like Gamefroot (a platform allowing kids to develop their own games while also teaching them how to code along the way) and Maths Adventures (whose iPad apps touting maths problems disguised as puzzles have been downloaded more than 11 million times) already helping to lead the way.

Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) have also given rise to a number of innovative startups, such as Ara Journeys – a Māori-owned company blending these immersive technologies with Indigenous storytelling, promoting health and wellbeing through a Te Ao Māori lens as well as working with Indigenous groups around the world to preserve and share Indigenous stories, knowledge, and languages for future generations.

AI is not just for customer service or social media algorithms; now it’s taking a bite of the education apple, becoming a crucial tool for EdTech (Illustration: Marc Conaco)

At a higher level of education is Virtual Medical Coaching, for example, which provides AR and VR simulations for learning complex or dangerous tasks in radiography and childbirth without the risk of harming patients. Another example of an immersive training simulator is ShowHow, a programme allowing students in industries such as medical, military, and emergency to create, shoot, and practice potential real-life scenarios.

“I’m a big fan of experiential learning: learning by actually doing rather than sitting and listening to a wise person tell you about what you might need to do. Because chances are, that wise person who’s teaching you is already a couple of decades out of date in terms of current industry practice,” says Moskovitz.

“The most useful stuff you learn by doing rather than by sitting and listening to a lecture. So technology solutions that help people learn the things that they want to and need to learn in order to be more useful members of society I think is a big trend.”

EdTech is an industry that’s ripe for investment, and the companies that populate the industry today show Aotearoa has the skills, experience and reputation to make a massive impact for good on the way the world teaches and learns. To take full advantage of global momentum and demand, however, changes need to be made to address some of the EdTech sector’s most immediate challenges.

The Aotearoa EdTech Excellence report outlines six key recommendations in order for the sector to grow. These include:

Creating a national EdTech strategy
Improving the domestic market for EdTech vendors
Developing a more centralised education technology procurement model
Providing better digital upskilling for teachers
Striving for digital equity across Aotearoa, and
Making it easier for companies to export their services and solutions around the world.

“If we’re going to tackle this we all need to do it together as a country, starting with a national EdTech strategy,” says Moskovitz. “We need to get the government, industry, teachers, parents, and students all involved. It’s the only way we can achieve our common goal.”

Keep going!

Gilbert & George (Image: Supplied)

PartnersJuly 20, 2022

The art icons who made provocation their profession

Chloe Lane

Guest writer

Gilbert & George (Image: Supplied)

A new show at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki marks the first major local presentation of work by epochal British artists Gilbert & George. Chloe Lane talks us through some of the exhibition’s highlights and looks back on their 50-year career.

“The Singing Sculpture” is the work that secured Gilbert & George’s place in the art history books. First performed in 1969, it was living proof that art could be anything – and that “anything” could be highly creepy. The metallic face paint and doll-like dance movements that support Gilbert & George’s quivering rendition of the nostalgic ditty “Underneath the Arches” is the stuff of particularly strange nightmares.

Who are these men decked out in tweed? A 1971 New Yorker “The Talk of the Town” column from around the time of the first US performance of this work states: “Their dealer insists they are not putting anybody on.” In 2022 the nature of Gilbert & George – two men, one artist – and the sincerity of their output is unquestionable. And yet there remains a remarkable tension between the serious, political, controversial and even horrifying content of their work, and its eerie and sometimes even comedic execution.

Gilbert & George: The Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland Exhibition 2022 at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki is the first major New Zealand presentation of Gilbert & George’s work. Since the 1970s they have made monumentally large-scaled “pictures” that montage photographs with self-portraits. This exhibition includes 61 of these pictures, covering six groups that span the period 2008–2020: Beard Pictures (2016), Jack Freak Pictures (2008), Scapegoating Pictures (2013), London Pictures (2011), Utopian Pictures (2014), and New Normal Pictures (2020).

The exhibition isn’t organised chronologically or thematically. Rather, it operates as a journey through Gilbert & George’s 21st century – if you can say that the little metal ball in a pinball machine is on a journey. No, it’s not a quiet, gentle, easygoing experience. Quiet and easygoing isn’t how Gilbert & George have, even after fifty years, maintained such a fierce grip on their confrontational edge, and their relevance.

*KNIFE STRAIGHT*, 2010. Courtesy of the Artist

As artists, Gilbert & George are documentarians first. The London Pictures use the headline posters (literally – they nicked the posters from outside local newsagents) made to sell newspapers to present a “moral portrait” of London and its inhabitants. In “Knife Straight” (2011) the 27 posters that make up the picture are presented in their original black and white. Except for the word knife, which in each headline is bright, blood red. Gilbert & George loom behind the text, only their heads flesh-coloured, their bodies, naturally tweed-suited, dissolving into a background of florals that have the quality of the limp mesh curtains hanging in your grandparents’ house. Creepy factor: still pretty high. Gilbert & George’s expressions are maybe the eeriest aspect of this work, hovering somewhere between concerned, ambivalent, accusatory – it’s hard to nail them down.

*BEARDWISE*, 2016. Courtesy of the Artist and Thaddaeus Ropac

There is visual tension in all of Gilbert & George’s pictures. Considering the old “painting” stuff of colour, line and composition, these are the works of masterful practitioners. “Beardwise” (2016) from Beard Pictures presents Gilbert & George in a saturated red, donning feathery beards made of montages of golden leaves, their expressions blank, even possessed. Their heads are sandwiched between fencing and barbed wire, and hemmed in from all sides by floating cameos of tarnished silver. The colour palette in other pictures from this series is similarly limited and sickly: sharp purples, mint greens and bright oranges feature heavily. Many of the works also have Gilbert & George drawn with darkened, sunken eyes. It is unnerving – they appear vampiric.

*BRITISHISM*, 2008. Courtesy of the Artist and White Cube

A 2017 opera titled The Naked Shit Songs by Dutch composer Huba de Graaff reconstructs a 1996 Gilbert & George interview. An excerpt from the libretto has the interviewer asking the pair, “What’s so scary about life?”

“It’s a terror,” Gilbert & George reply. “It’s a terror.”

“What’s a terror?”

“Everything.”

It’s difficult to ignore this sentiment. Everything is terrifying in the Jack Freak Pictures, which take the blue, red, and white of the Union Jack and hack it to bits. “Britishism” (2008) has the graphically busy and exciting quality of a death metal album cover. And the Union Jack here has been separated, shattered, and rotated so that if it still operates within the language of flags it is only because these new shapes have an echo of swastikas or anarchy symbols. The figures of Gilbert & George in this picture are blue and red. They are small and multiplied in such a way that their miniatures look like rows of teeth revealed by a mouth that is, what – yawning? Crying? Screaming? We’re getting beyond creepy here.

The Scapegoating Pictures present monochromes of Gilbert & George’s East London streets. The hard asphalt and metal of the scenes are softened by the fuzzy lines of spray paint that both reveal and reduce the flesh-tone figures of Gilbert & George. In these works they shimmer, and occasionally dance, while being rained down on by nitrous oxide canisters. “NCP” (2013) has them trapped inside a matrix of metal scaffolding. Their bodies are revealed only through floating Microsoft Paint-like lassos. Around them fly similarly shaped windows (vortexes, holes?) revealing another background in their favourite blood-red. They are dancing in this picture, but reluctantly – as if someone off-screen might be pointing a gun at them.

None of the figures in the New Normal Pictures of 2020 are dancing. Instead Gilbert & George appear as if they are being buffeted by invisible, menacing forces. On those same East London streets, they are struggling to remain standing, and in some pictures they have even failed, collapsing in the likes of a bus shelter. “Bag Day” (2020) has them decked out in pressed red suits, plonked down on what look like the blank bases for a couple of torn-down statues. Crumpled plastic zip-lock bags hover in front of a nuclear sunset. A pair of skinny looking dogs look left and right, as Gilbert & George look skywards. What do they hope to find up there? Except for the dogs, the unsettling factor here is low. The tone is more of devastation, exhaustion, maybe disbelief? Whichever, it hurts a bit to look at.

Gilbert & George, who married in 2008, will readily sing the praises of Margaret Thatcher, and it’s not hard to find texts on their interest in skinheads. Their word on those blank bases and the recent toppling of colonial statues: “Shameful.” They have spent decades making pictures that are intentionally, unforgivably confrontational, which say exactly what the artist wants to say. They have also used that time to construct an aura around themselves, as provocateurs. They will tell you, “We want our art to bring out the bigot from inside the liberal and conversely to bring out the liberal from inside the bigot.” One reason it might be so hard to pin down what the Gilbert & George figures in their pictures are thinking is because this is where they operate best: a monumental grey area of sentiment and intent. You’re meant to feel uncomfortable and to have questions – about them, and for yourself. But are Gilbert & George, their figures always front and centre, just as they were in that earliest, creepiest sculpture, the heroes or anti-heroes? Can’t they be both?