NZATD 2025: Jane Bozarth’s keynote
We are not training nurses so that nurses will have more success in the abstract; we are trying to help patients. We are not training long-distance drivers so that they alone will be safer; we are helping to protect everyone on the road.
As the first presentation in NZATD’s 2025 Tahu Ignite conference, this session set the tone for me. And it was great.
The title was Staying Human in the Tech Storm, and I confess I’d assumed it would be the same things I keep hearing lately: AI is big and influential, and we need to get used to it and good at using it, but also use it correctly and cautiously. Good things to say, but rapidly becoming very boring from repetition.
Jane’s speech was far more than that. It was a rousing call to act: to act by making our work accessible, by making it human, and by remembering that the end user of our work is not necessarily the learner, but the people the learner works with or for.
We are not training nurses so that nurses will have more success in the abstract; we are trying to help patients. We are not training long-distance drivers so that they alone will be safer; we are helping to protect everyone on the road.
I loved this reminder, and I’ve added an item to our regular team continuous-improvement discussion about how we can make sure our design process captures a reminder of the end users in our planning, so we can’t lose track of this. (I’m constantly amazed by how effective it is to just make sure our template has the cues for this sort of thing. It doesn’t have to be huge, as long as it’s there!)
On a personal note, having written and launched the NZATD Accessibility Toolkit over 2024/25, it was great to get the validation that it’s both needed and useful. Learning resources are of no use at all to people who can’t actually use them. Digital technologies for learning are no longer new, and there is no excuse for rolling out resources that exclude the people they are meant to support.