Learning halfway around the world: heading for New Zealand

From years of reading technical documentation, error messages, GitHub issues. From years of speaking to machines more than to people, I've ended up building myself a rather peculiar kind of English.

Actually, right now I speak like a robot — precise with instructions and technical vocabulary, but in real trouble with everyday words. I can run a session on software architecture concepts, but asking for directions in the street...

These days, I'm looking to practice beyond the French-speaking world. That's why I'm going abroad.

But this departure isn't just a language immersion.

Teaching

I've been teaching computing for a few years, in fairly varied places (see About).

This trip is also a chance to go and see how things happen elsewhere in teaching.

It's a fine chance for me to wear both hats at once — the learner's and the teacher's — something that, to my mind, a teacher benefits from doing regularly.

The history of teaching in France is as rich and complex as it is fascinating. But beyond the papers I've read in specialised libraries, what's it actually like elsewhere?

For that, New Zealand is good terrain. It's the other side of the globe; seasons are reversed, the time zone is flipped around. And above all, it's a country that, when it comes to education, has followed a singular path.

The trajectory

In New Zealand, computing is taught to all children since 2020, from age five, for ten years. In France, it comes later, in pieces, and not to everyone.

Deciding that a subject matters enough to be taught to everyone, and that from childhood on, says something about a country. And it raises concrete questions for people who teach elsewhere.

I'm going to see how a country passes things on, and how it adapts to current pedagogical challenges.

In the pipeline

The next article: how to leave Messenger/WhatsApp for an open-source, resilient solution that even our parents can use? (spoiler: we're going to use the Matrix network.)

The one after that, sometime in May: a longer piece that digs into what's left of specifically human value, at a time when machines are getting better and better at recombining what we've taught them.

I don't guarantee any regularity in my posts ;)

See you next time!