Remember the $40,000 FOIPOP? Actually, the price tag the Cape Breton Regional Municipality (CBRM) slapped on a local man’s freedom of information/protection of privacy request was $42,804.50 — a calculation of the value of CBRM employee time that seems to be worked out to the last fraction of a second. SydneyRead More
Okay everyone, take your seats — we have a lot of material to get through today. What’s that? When’s recess? Where do you think you are, Finland? Today, as promised in the headline, we’re going to look at the promise and perils of Big Data in the education sector. Read More
The world we find ourselves in today is often difficult, sometimes frightening and frequently disturbing. It’s hard to watch the evening news and then sleep well at night or even follow our Facebook newsfeeds without realizing that our friends have sharply divergent and incompatible political views which mirror the disagreementsRead More
Occasionally, it takes us a while to accept something that is hard to understand, does not jibe with our script of the world, or plainly, just doesn’t make any damn sense. And I am here to say now, finally, over a month into this springtime of our discontent, that IRead More
As kids, we weren’t very impressed by our mother’s “war stories” of walking six miles to school after feeding the chickens and having a big bowl of porridge (she hated it so much we were never forced to eat it). She didn’t talk too much about her life as aRead More
Old King Coal I was so puzzled today when I reached into my mailbox and pulled out a 1720 edition of The Cape Breton Post. “King coal” screamed the headline on the front page. Hallelujah, a coal mine has opened on the island! I searched excitedly to see what otherRead...
It’s Wednesday and you know what that means — time to beat the Business Cape Breton (BCB) drum! This week we’ve learned that BCB is both an outside organization immune to the rules governing departments of the Cape Breton Regional Municipality AND the CBRM’s “economic development entity,” immune to theRead More
In my October column, “Roads to Hell: Nuclear Waste on the Move,” I reported on legal efforts to block shipments of highly-radioactive liquid waste from the Chalk River Nuclear Laboratories in Ontario to the Savannah River National Laboratory in South Carolina, a journey of over 2,000 kilometerss passing the GreatRead More
What is this PowerSchool of which Nova Scotian teachers speak? The datafication (a word I thought I’d made up but which turns out to be real) of P-12 education happened after my time in the Nova Scotia public system, so I had to do some reading (a little skill I pickedRead More
The Nova Scotia New Democratic Party made a freedom of information application to the Nova Scotia government last December requesting: All communication (including emails, letter and other electronic messages) briefing notes and other documents related to An Act Respecting a Teacher’s [sic] Professional Agreement. The request referred to legislation that Education MinisterRead More
