Laurie O'Donnell

I was going to be contributing some input to this evening’s Edinburgh #creativeconversation but had to attend a meeting London at short notice.

In anticipation of not being able to attend I sent my fellow contributor @olliebray a letter with some initial thought on creativity in general and the implications for Scottish education.

13 May 2012

Dear Ollie,

Edinburgh Creative Conversation, 16 May

Once again my apologies for leaving you in the lurch to do the Edinburgh Creative Conversation on you own. As discussed I got a late call to help a couple of inventor friends of mine to pitch a new technology in London and will probably still be queuing somewhere in Heathrow when you are wining, dining and conversing in Edinburgh.

I was looking forward to Tuesday and think the concept behind these events is inspiring, so I’m really disappointed that I can’t be with you.

I was going to make a video covering the points I would have made but thought a letter would be less obtrusive and save you the hassle of carrying that big screen on the bus again. [Free consultancy: The real knack to getting the most out of any technology is knowing when not to use it ]

My input would have started with the following observations and related questions for discussion.

#1 Don’t conflate creativity with ‘the arts’

In my opinion much of what comes from ‘the arts’ is little more than a rehash of other peoples stuff without any originality or ambition. Not to mention it is often trivial, mind-numbing and completely unchallenging.

The world of science and technology often shows much more creativity than that of the arts. Discuss

#2 Think creative mindset rather than creative people

People are multi-dimensional and may be highly creative in some aspects of their lives and entirely conventional in others.

I think we can all be more creative, learn how to apply our imagination to solve problems and make the world a better place. All the better if we have opportunities to collaborate with and learn from others who are also on this journey.

The concept of ‘the creative person’ suggests that creativity is some fixed or inherent characteristic that you are either lucky to have or unlucky not to have. Is this a helpful concept or do you think creativity can be taught and caught?

#3 Creativity is as much perspiration as inspiration

In my experience the people who demonstrate the most creativity have worked hard over many years to get to the point where they have the skill and wisdom to invent something new in whatever field of activity that they are passionate about.  They also tend to be good at connecting insights across their lives rather than being stuck in a single domain. It is this grounding that allows them to see how the world might be different and deploy their skills to do something rather than just dream about it.

What is the relationship between hard work (Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours) and being creative?

#4 Creativity and Education

It used to be that a good Scottish education (often represented by a handful of qualifications) was an inoculation against poverty.

Today the world is changing more rapidly than at any other time in human history and it is unlikely that a traditional Scottish education will be a sufficient condition for success in life.

We are still locked into subject-based silos, especially in our secondary schools. We still value compliance to education industry standards over genuine innovation in learning. We continue to distort school education by prioritising summative tests and qualifications over formative assessment and deep learning. Discuss.

Hope this is helpful for Tuesday’s conversation and that the event gives people some food for thought.

See you soon.

Yours

Laurie

I asked my very talented friends Andy and Neil at Glidden Design in Edinburgh to reprint my business cards recently.

The original design with my details on the front and a ‘word cloud’ of what I offer on the back has stood the test of time and only needed a couple of minor tweaks.

My original 2009 word cloud was based on what I hoped to be doing after leaving Learning & Teaching Scotland to become self-employed:

• Consultancy
• Research
• Learning
• Innovation
• Futures
• Leadership
• Advice
• Creativity
• Technology &
• Communication

The reprinted 2012 word cloud reflects more of what I have actually been doing over the last 3 years.  So in addition to everything from the list above I have included:

• Advice
• Engagement
• Well-being
• Games
• Media
• Teaching &
• Collaboration

I wonder what a 2015 list might look like? I’m just hoping that the portfolio of contracts and engagements that I gather together continues to be  as rich and diverse as has been over the last 3 years.

I also hope that I continue to enjoy what I’m doing and that means:

• Getting the chance to make a difference where it really matters
• Having the opportunity to work with great people
• Experience new challenges that take me out of my comfort zone
• Have a lot of fun and of course
• Make a living pursuing my passion for learning

I was interviewed recently by Keri Sutherland of Holyrood Magazine as a contribution to article she was writing on creativity in education. Full article under the title  ’Fertile Minds‘ was published in the latest edition.

See below a selection of quotes from me:

“… schools were designed for (a particular) age – we still haven’t moved on very much. We live in very rapidly changing times. I would argue we live in times that are changing more rapidly and more turbulently than has ever been the case in human history.”

“The argument that you do well at school and you’ll get a job is not enough. I think what we need in this world is that spark of ingenuity and innovation, what some people call adaptive competence. So you learn something, but you’re able to adapt to the circumstance of change in order to thrive in today’s world.”

“One of the first decisions made by the authors of Curriculum for Excellence was to keep subject areas. …  the curriculum should have embraced …the idea of knowledge and skills in the round rather than in silos.”

“We still measure success by qualifications. … They are interesting and a useful proxy but for me they’re not a good measure of teacher performance or student success.”

‘Creativity can get too sated with connections to the arts … A lot in the arts is a rehash of something created 100 years ago. It can be very formulaic. I see lots more creative enterprise in the technology world where applied imagination is much more extensive in really inventing and innovating. We need to make sure creativity in schools isn’t siloed into the arts.”

‘We’re still doing reasonably well educationally [but in slow relative decline compared to other countries] …   If Scotland was doing badly then that would be a rocket up any complacency there was. You’d need to do something quite radical.”

Came across this short TEDx Youth Talk by philosopher Julian Baggini that I liked and thought worth sharing. Baggini debunks much of the popular psychology that promotes the idea of a fixed human core or essence and the fatalism that accompanies it.

Instead he argues that the ‘real you’ is more like a work in progress rather than a ‘thing’ which is fixed and unchanging just waiting to be discovered by answering a quiz in a magazine or by taking a psychometric test as part of a job interview process.

At our best we are learners, we gather experience, develop skills, try to make sense of our world and act to make it better.

Baggini ends this short talk with this lovely quote from Dhammapada:

‘Well makers lead the water (wherever they like);
fletchers bend the arrow;
carpenters bend a log of wood;
wise people fashion themselves.

Just coming to the end DML2012 and what has been a really interesting conference in San Francisco. I love the tagline ‘Beyond Educational Technology’ feels like where I have been trying to get to for last 25 years.

This the third year of this event and it has grown into one of the main events in the calendar for those interested in the next generation of learning. More than that I think it will become the cultural home of a group of educators and academics looking to take innovative practice from the edge into the heart of learning.

The opening keynote speaker was John Seely Brown had the wonderful title of ‘Cultivating the Entrepreneurial Learner in the 21st Century’ which he dealt with in his usual style drawing on the excellent work he has done over a number of decades.

The event has been funded by the MacArthur Foundation which has invested at least $85m in some excellent projects that investigate how to best utilise digital media for learning. Others including the Gates Foundation are now on board – although it appears to have a more scatter-gun approach to education, funding everything from ‘enhanced teacher accountability systems’ to more positive stuff more directly related to improving learning. [Aside: Interesting model from an outsiders point of view that these charitable foundations can spend billions of untaxed dollars on projects to influence policy and practice without much in the way of accountability. Great if what they are doing is for the common good but I wonder what checks and balances there are to ensure this is always the case.]

Anyway I leave feeling inspired, energised and better informed on state of the art with respect to DML. Also with a lot of good ideas about where to focus my energies over the next few years and how best to make a positive impact on improving learning.

Postscript
Introduction to the conference and the JSB keynote from YouTube

I was asked this morning to provide a list of around 40 words about me that could be used to create an info-graphic for a website. I put them into the wonderful Wordle and the graphic above is what popped out (after adding a few duplicates the words at the top of my list by way of emphasis).

I also provided the url of my blog and got something quite different. The size of ‘Glow’ makes me realise just how much the Scottish schools national intranet dominated my writing over the last 5 or 6 years.

Just made a small donation and downloaded Code Hero from Primer Labs (thanks to Matt Seeney at Knowledge Nation for sharing the link).

The concept behind Code Hero is quite simply that young people can extend their capabilities and have a better understanding of their world if they learn how to actively create rather than passively consume. Computer coding can provide a very powerful way into this world but is often difficult to get into and involves a very steep learning curve (Logo springs to mind as a notable exception from my days as a teacher).

Alex Peake the founder of the Primer Labs, the company behind Code Hero, is certainly a young man on a mission to make a difference. If you have 17 minutes watch Alex as he takes us through a history of the worst decisions made by humanity, a whistle-stop tour of Code Hero and an introduction to the wonderful Gamesbridge Unityservity:

I came across an article in today’s Dundee Courier which referred  to research published in the journal ‘Laterality’ by two academics – Hardie & Wright  - from the University of Abertay . The Abertay website headlines with  ’lefties more likely to look before they leap’ and suggests that people (like me) tend to be better decision makers in times of crisis. It makes good reading and I would of course have to agree:)

The article made me smile as I reflected on what it has been like to be a leftie. The first time I remember it being an issue was when I was at primary school aged 8 and being told by my teacher that being left-handed was bad. She decided to ‘help’ me to write ‘properly’ – giving me the belt everyday because my handwriting was not neat enough. She only stopped when my mother came in an told her that I was definitely left-handed and that was just fine by her.

Otherwise I remember having a feeling that I was more clumsy and awkward than everybody else. I couldn’t cut paper in a straight line, I always seemed to smear my page with ink when using a pen.  Looking back my writing was always at an angle because I wasn’t allowed to turn my jotter or body to angle that would allow me to write straight. It was only after I left school that I realised that although I would probably still have been a messy writer this was something I shared with other lefties.

I also remember in the 1980s going on holiday to a Greek island and having the shop assistants cross themselves because I was signing with my left hand. Apparently the superstition didn’t make me evil enough to stop them accepting the cheque.

Then there is all the research about more left-handers being more creative, more likely to be rich and even more electable –  with 5 out of the last 7 US presidents being left-handers. Unlike the Abertay research a lot of this stuff appears to pseudo-science, at best inconsistent and often completely made up as far as I can see.

Overall I like being left-handed . It is easier to type with one hand on QWERTY keyboard and a it is apparently a huge advantage playing golf with right-handed golf clubs (still hoping to fully realise this one). On a more serious note it has given me a strong sense that our world has been designed to suit right-handed people. If tools and books are the product of human decisions then why not everything else. Our world is not the natural order but the result of human action and inaction – often based on selfish interest rather than the common good. People make the world the way it is and people can always make it better.

My final thought is that I really hope that there are no teachers today trying to force naturally left-handed children into becoming ambidextrous (natural left-handers forced to use their right-hand?). Even that little change would at least represent some progress towards a slightly better world.

Been re-watching some of the RSA Animate videos and came across this great one by Steven Pinker. I don’t always agree with his analysis or for that matter all of the conclusions he makes, but to my mind he continues to make a serious contribution to our understanding at a very deep level of what it is to be human.

In this video he turns his attention to the role of innuendo in human relations. His hypothesis is that even obvious innuendos are useful devices for maintaining fictional relationships as they are based on ‘individual knowledge’. Direct speech provides a different level of understanding, what Pinker calls ‘mutual knowledge’, and on this basis relationships are either maintained or nullified.

Made me think that one big advantage of living in Scotland is that most of the time you know exactly where you stand – for good or for bad.

I wrote a short piece on Glow Futures a couple of weeks ago and it was published today in TESS under the headline  ’Glowing into the future may be easier said than done’.  I tried to be constructively critical and hope it is read in this spirit.

Original text of article submitted to  The Times Educational Supplement Scotland (TESS) and published on 14 October 2011:

Glowing into the Future

I was not completely surprised to read last month that the Cabinet Secretary had decided to cancel the Glow Futures procurement (‘Glow Futures snuffed out as Russell pulls plug’, TESS 9 September 2011).

It is absolutely right that the Cabinet Secretary seeks smarter ways of achieving the same or even more ambitious ends for Glow. It would be good to see some of his thinking on this elaborated. What advice did he get on what could be done better and how the savings might be realised while at the same time improving Glow as a public service? What other voices did he listen to beyond the hyperactive technology super users?

Given that the existing contract with RM ends in September 2012 the Cabinet Secretary should have been sufficiently concerned about the capacity of his officials to complete the procurement process within the timescale that they had left themselves. The initial Glow contract was signed two years before the service went live. Technologies have moved on from 2005 but there was a clear danger that completing the procurement project and getting the new service in place was going to be extremely challenging.

When it comes to listening every politician is subject to the full range of opinions and I’m sure he heard it from all sides on Glow. Everybody that I know has been arguing for many years that Glow needed to change radically, despite the fact that it already incorporates some of the same open source collaborative tools that will feature prominently as part of the new approach.

The Glow Futures procurement called for a more flexible and adaptable solution that better matched current reality and I’m sure that was reflected in the bids that were made. To my mind the Cabinet Secretary should have unstuck the procurement process at least 18 months ago. Allowed the market to be tested properly against a highly ambitious specification for Glow Futures. Then used the negotiation phase to get the flexible, adaptable and usable solution we all want. If there was less money to spend then let’s be up front about that and negotiate what we can best afford. Often less cash stimulates more imaginative and creative solutions.

The mainstream tools that are available free on the internet are fine, but to be usable in an educational context they should work off a single directory. It is also important that your stuff can be found easily irrespective of where and how it was created. Culture, confidence, practice, behaviours and engagement are also important but so is having the right tools, in the right place at the right time. Today’s open tools far too often become tomorrow’s commercial services. In many free services, such as Facebook, the user is less ‘the customer’ and more ‘the product’, with their personal data (preferences, pictures, contacts and habits) up for sale to the highest bidder. Not so bad if you sign-up for this as a private individual but perhaps not something the Scottish Government should be doing on behalf of our children.

Glow is a real partnership between local and central government. So all the more disappointing that the first the local authorities knew about the decision was through YouTube. This video service can be viewed through Glow (contrary to TESS Editorial of 9 September) but continues to be blocked by some local authorities. If ubiquitous broadband for every home, school and business got the same attention as another bridge over the Forth then the local authorities would have no excuses left for blocking such valuable educational content.

If we made mistakes in the past let’s be open in discussing them and also honest in recognising the context and what was available in 2005. Glow as a highly-scalable private cloud was pretty radical back then and required major software development as no such solution was available off the shelf at that time.

The numbers around Glow are significant and growing despite the long overdue need to refresh the technology. We might not have reached the ambition of having every student, every teacher and every parent using Glow every day but the level of engagement dwarfs the number of people who have contributed to the largely disappointing #eduscotict wiki that was set-up following the announcement.

The Cabinet Secretary calls for a solution that is not based on ‘big companies investing in big projects’ but all the options on the eduscotict wiki appear to centre on either a Google or Microsoft based cloud solution. RM, the current Glow provider, may be a FTSE 200 company but is tiny in comparison with either of these giants of the global IT industry. I also wonder if the 3,500 Scottish employees of ATOS, another one of the bidders for Glow Futures, see themselves as working for a big company that has not kept up with the latest developments in technology?

Looking forward positively we need the best possible solution to keep Scotland at the cutting edge of learning and technology. Not for its own sake but as a central means of enhancing the life chances of our young people. Let’s hope that in a few years time Glow continues to be recognised by Audit Scotland as a rare example of a well-managed government funded IT project.  Let’s also hope that it also maintains its hugely positive international profile.

If the Cabinet Secretary is open to hear the voices of those who are committed to building great public services for the future then there is every chance of continuing success for Glow and I for one will be absolutely delighted.

Laurie O’Donnell
Learning and Technology Consultant
LTS Head of Future Learning & Teaching/Director of Learning & Technology (2001-09)