- Aurora Your last meeting of the week Your last meeting of the week, and not the kind you are picturing. No boardroom, no deck, no cocktail. A small sailing boat on Port Phillip Bay, one big problem each, and quite possibly a stranger sitting next to you. That is the plan for the final calendar entry for Friday afternoon - a Session on the Sea There is… 07 October 2026
- Aurora Bluey meets Red Bull TV? Six students, one impossible brief, and a map with the X scratched out A making-of, for a show that does not exist yet. COLD OPEN. Six students, spread across enough time zones to make a single shared meeting a small act of diplomacy, are handed a brief that opens, more or less, with a confession: we have no f… clue how to pull this off. Which, for a student team, is the perfect… 03 October 2026
- Aurora A cannon on a sparrow Seven students, on three campuses, none of whom had met, and not one of them a sailor, spent four weeks this winter building the case for something they had never seen and, in at least a few cases, may have needed to look up: a youth sailing programme with enough boats to take a full patrol to sea for more… 02 October 2026
- Data on Deck The difference between nice reading and a report worth paying for The difference between a report that reads nicely and one worth paying for is usually the method — the part that says how you know what you claim. Most people are never handed that expectation. I wasn’t either. I saw the gap most clearly in a piece of desk research I’d set a group of students. I asked them to… 08 September 2026
- Data on Deck Do I give away what I told the university to "sell"? The content is largely free now. Not because I think it should be — because it is. The models, the frameworks, the standing advice to check everything: none of it is behind a wall, and most of it is a search away. That is the fact this series has been circling. What’s worth paying for is the part that can’t… 08 September 2026
- NEXUS III Two university systems, and what it's all for - or better: who. Where you stand changes what this argument is. Two universities mark the poles. Humboldt, in Berlin, is public and state-funded. It charges no tuition, to anyone, and treats education as Bildung — a public good, the forming of a person. Humboldt is no accident here — the history kept pointing back to him, and, by chance, I studied there myself. 08 September 2026
- NEXUS III How you could build the modern university None of that — inquiry, judgement, resilience, the check on the machine — is built by a better lecture. It is built by real work, real dependence, and honest feedback. The same idea in three settings: a real-world problem where someone downstream depends on what you produce; a small piece of live research, handed over early; and the university as… 08 September 2026
- NEXUS III What's gone, and what's gone with it When the content is free, the obvious thing goes first: the university’s oldest job, passing on knowledge, can be done outside it, faster and cheaper. Reduce a university to delivering content, or to making people job-ready, and you have built a trade school with worse economics. A second thing has gone, more quietly. Forming a person — independent, resilient, willing… 08 September 2026
- NEXUS III Three times the ground has shifted The lecture was built for a world short of books. This is not the first time the ground under the university has moved. It is the third. Start with the word. “University” never meant universal knowledge. Universitas was a guild — a union of masters and scholars. Bologna, usually called the first, was a guild of students who hired their… 08 September 2026
- NEXUS III What is a university for when the content is free? Almost everything a university teaches, you can now find online. Cheaper, faster, often free. Sometimes better. So what is a university for? Start with the oldest habit in the building: the lecture. The word means a reading-aloud — lectio. For most of the university’s history, books were scarce, copied out by hand, one at a time. So the master read… 08 September 2026
- NEXUS III The road to a symposium on Higher Education Thriving in Uncertain Futures: Education, Employability and Professional Agility — a symposium at the University of Melbourne The food-scenarios work convinced me of one thing: the hardest part of the next twenty-five years is not technical. It is the not knowing what’s coming. And we do nothing meaningful to prepare our youth for this. I have one key personal flaw. 02 September 2026
- HBTX A third of Australia's bananas never make it to a shelf Australia throws away about a third of its bananas before they reach a shelf. Not because they’re bad. Because they’re bent, or freckled, or too short, or too long, or curved the wrong way for the box. The fruit is fine — it fails an audition, not a food-safety test. Roughly 30% of the crop is turned away for looking… 28 July 2026
- Field Notes Why a shrimp company got me interested in education In mid 2024 I spent a few months building scenarios for what the world eats in 2050. Twenty-five years out. Which sounds like a long time, and reads like somebody else’s problem, right up until you turn it around. Twenty-five years back is Y2K. Most people my age can tell you where they were that night. It does not feel… 22 July 2026
- UNCHARTED Finding Outdoors Victoria - UNCHARTED S01E11 With the student project wrapped and a punchy conclusion in hand, Gregor wonders: where on earth do you present something like this? He’s used to virology, immunology, biotech, pharma, and startup conferences. But this is… what exactly? • Youth health? Sort of. • Public health? Not in a classical epidemiology sense. • Education? He’s not technically a teacher. Eventually, he… 21 February 2026
- UNCHARTED Aurora Meets Academia - UNCHARTED S01E09 Early 2025. Enter Jancy from Swinburne University by text message: “You always have great ideas. Would you have a good research question our Health Sciences students could work on?” Gregor, already in “academic supervisor mode” for his biotech startup SHRMP.bio, responds instinctively: “How many do you need?” “How many do you have?” Out of five real-world project ideas, one stands… 13 February 2026
- UNCHARTED Port Melbourne Yacht Club: The Accidental Kids Sailing School - UNCHARTED S01E03 Parallel storyline: Port Melbourne Yacht Club. Lily has had enough of “relaxing family cruises” that always become survival training in big wind and waves. She refuses to sail with her parents. Gregor and Marit hatch a win–win plan: Lily can do Sailing School while they sneak off to sail together. Tiny flaw: the yacht club’s course is full of adults… 23 January 2026
- SHR!MP SHRMP.edu – Spicing Up Student Lives - SHR!MP S02E07 With the pivot decided, SHRMP.bio's board approves (re)capitalising the company sufficiently to build the prototype and continue with the development for 2025 - subject to finding a home to build it at within Q1/2025 (= 6 remaining weeks). So we get going. From a reasonably short target list, I try to get in touch with any course coordinator who I… 05 December 2025
- SHR!MP Victoria the Innovation State - SHR!MP S02E06 Is this what’s embossed on our licence plates? No. It’s also not: Victoria the Technology State (or even the Biotech State.). And after living here for nearly 20 years, maybe I should have taken some pointers – if not from my own hard experience in technology innovation, then maybe at least from what my home state keeps on telling the… 03 December 2025
- SHR!MP Unsung Heroes - SHR!MP S01E06 To avoid losing the initial momentum SHRMP had until Buildmate started, I was looking for a way to sustain it. Through my early involvement with NAFI, I met our first potential intern, whom I was eager to provide with a worthwhile opportunity. From previous experience, I knew that hosting one intern typically required about the same overhead as hosting several,… 18 October 2025
- Field Notes From Brain Implants to Wilderness Trails: A Day at Outdoors Victoria 2025 "By 2050, there will be quite a few people with brain-computer interfaces out there. And I think this could be a problem - because we may not know what is uploaded into their brains anymore and how this could unconsciously change their behaviour." The most forward-looking strategic thinking I have seen in a long time around here. Not a biotech… 19 August 2025