Harley Acheson

Harley was born in Ocean Falls, BC, but grew up in the Cowichan Valley. He attended University of Victoria and then opened a video store called “Now Showing” (still in operation!) that specializes in classics, hard-to-find, and foreign films. At just 20 years old, he was heavily involved in the local Chamber of Commerce, was vice-president of the Cowichan Valley Arts Council, was on the Cowichan District Hospital Foundation board, and had run for Duncan city council twice—losing by less than 40 votes each time.

Since then, he has been involved in several other successful businesses and computer ventures on Vancouver Island and, after 20 years of computer programming experience, he applied for the position of “Computer Technician” at Shawnigan Lake School and was hired by Shawn Wright in April 2002. He lives with his wife Cindy, and their daughter, Laurel, in Duncan.

Harley writes most of the custom software found throughout the School network, and he is the principle architect of the School’s “Intranet,” a completely dynamic social publishing system that works within the School and that has been in continuous development for the past few years. Harley reports that, “almost all of the students use the ‘Intranet’ every day, and the majority of the teachers use it for class work for some purpose, whether it is online lessons, notes, and files, or for homework submissions. The most-viewed page is the ‘Noticeboard,’ which is a very complex portal that shows customized schedules, notices, dining hall menu, birthdays, real-time changes to the intranet, live news feeds, weather information, random quotes, editorial cartoons, comics, daily sudoku, and much more.

“Every member of the School community has a publishing area and contributes and collaborates in different ways to collectively create a very rich system that wouldn’t be possible without such a decentralized design. The system directly supports traditional web page.

“I firmly believe that as we enter a demographic trend that will see greater competition between boarding schools, how we use technology will become of critical importance. Technology can aid both teaching and learning. It can improve communications and lower costs associated with admissions, advancement, accounting, and all other areas of school life and administration.”