Alison Young
Unitec New Zealand
March 1, 2006
Interviewed by Vicki Almstrum
The University of Texas at Austin
Segment length: 4 min., 3.9mb
File name:  Young01Mar06VAsnip.mp3

V:  OK, this is an interview with Alison Young from Unitec New Zealand conducted by Vicki Almstrum. This interview is being conducted on March 1, 2006 at Houston, Texas as part of the Computing Education Oral History Series.  Did I pronounce your name correctly?

A:  Yes you did, Vicki.

V:  An interesting aspect of your entire background is what an international playing field you are part of now.  When did it shift from being more of a national focus to a broader, more international focus?
6:44
A:  That was the mid 90’s.  We had spent a lot of time in the late 80’s are early 90’s introducing new programs.  Is programs an all right term to use?

V:  For a particular program of study?

A:  I introduced the first undergraduate degree in the country outside a traditional university into my institution.  And we were doing this quite a bit in isolation, a lot in isolation, because New Zealand itself is quite isolated.  And it was in 1988, 1990 we didn’t have the instant communication we’ve got today.  We’d have to write and wait several weeks until what do you mean by such and such? We couldn’t wait that long, so we did it ourselves, which is very, very New Zealand thing to do.  Because we are quite isolated we do a lot of things in isolation.

I could digress here and go right back to the mid 60’s where we wrote a lot of software ourselves because we couldn’t wait for six weeks for something to come by ship from America. So we would actually take the IBM operating system and re-write it the way we wanted to.  That was just not  unusual.  We did it as programmers.  We didn’t like the way it worked so we would change it.  And it didn’t suit the things we were doing. But this is a very, you’ve got to understand, think about the cultural thing here.  This was a very Kiwi thing to do. We didn’t think anything of it.  We just do it because, and I really think this comes from our isolation, our cultural background of people that immigrated to our country, the fact that we were isolated had to do with the type of  people that did immigrate were adventurous sort of people anyway to come half way around the world to set up a new place.

So when we changed to international is when communication got a lot faster in the mid 90’s, or the early 90’s, really.  We decided, “Hey let’s go out and see what the rest of the world is doing as well, and how we can adapt.  And make sure that what we are doing is now equal to the rest of the world.  Well, we’ve got the country all on an equal level playing field.  I can say that what Mary is teaching at her institution is the same as what I am teaching at mine is the same as what you are teaching at yours.  So that industry knew that if they got graduates from us they knew exactly what they were getting.  

So we decided we needed to benchmark this information internationally.  So we started exploring, finding out what people were doing internationally to bring back and see what we could learn..  Now the very interesting thing is, and I hope this doesn’t sound too arrogant, on our tape here, is what we learned here is that we were doing very, very well.  When we tried to benchmark internationally, we found that yes we did hit the mark and yes, we are doing well. And goodness me we are actually as good as some places.  And this is when we started researching and we started publishing and saying, hey this is what we are doing and we think we can benchmark quite well. That was early 90’s.