Laurie O'Donnell

Had a busy start to 2010 -  which tends to be a good thing when you are self employed.  Already been to London three times including a week at BETT2010 and the Learning and Technology World Forum which has been great but my blog has been suffering. My aim is to do a lot better in February with a post at least once a week.

The Inmates are Taking Over the Asylum

Been reading a lot recently and one book I would recommend is  ‘The Inmates are Running the Asylum‘ by Alan Cooper. It is one of those books that tells you what you are already know but  improves the conceptual framework that underpins your thinking. A must read for anybody interested in why so many technology products turn out to be so incredible difficult to work, to the point where they really are unusable

The book is  about 10 years old now but the central argument continues to be relevant today. Cooper is an advocate of interactive design and he contrasts the mindset of the [stereotypical - LO'D]  engineer/programmer (homo logicus) – who wants control and accepts complexity as a trade off – with the rest of the human race (homo sapiens) who want simplicity and accepts less control as a trade off.

Cooper makes a powerful case for an enhanced role for design in technology – design for pleasure, design for power and crucially design that puts people back in the driving seat to ensure the end product is not just usable but also meets human goals.

Big lessons here for educational technology and a methodology that if applied rigorously would dramatically improve the lives of students and teachers across the world.

What a year it has been. Every year is significant but some years seem to me to be more memorable than others. These years stick in my mind, at least in part, because of a big step I took in my life – usually a step that felt pretty scary at the time.

1979 was the year I left home to go to university.
1986 was the start of my career as a teacher.
1990 was my first real promotion at work.
1991 I got married.
1993 and 1996 were the years my children were born.
2001 was when I started with LTS
…

Of course other things happened in each of these years;
1979 the election of Margaret Thatcher felt really significant especially in Scotland as it heralded a seismic shift in the economy and the start of an era of mass unemployment.
1990 Nelson Mandela was released from prison to become the greatest statesman of my lifetime.
1991 Tim Berners-Lee announces the advent of the World Wide Web and the beginning of this great communications revolution
1993 Bill Clinton became US president.
1986 was the year of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster
2001 was of course the year of 9/11, a pivotal event in world history.
…

2009 will stick in my mind as the year I gave up a well paid, secure job in the public sector to enter the world of self-employment. It felt just as scary as starting off as a teacher but not nearly as scary as becoming a parent for the first time ☺

This time last year I had already intimated to my boss that I was ready for a new challenge and having dipped my toe into the water of job applications decided that a portfolio career was the path I was going to follow.

Six months on from leaving LTS I am loving the challenge and have never been busier. I really miss my colleagues and friends at LTS and the buzz of leading the learning and technology directorate. I don’t miss spending 12 or 16 hours a week commuting from Dundee to Glasgow. Nor do I miss the corporate noise that big organisations inevitably generate or the interminable regime of internal meetings. All of that was worth suffering to have the opportunity to make a positive impact on an education system at a national level. I consider myself incredibly fortunate to have had that opportunity for over eight years and I know I gave it my best shot. It still feels like I did the right thing for the right reasons in leaving LTS when I did and can honestly say (but not sing in tune) je ne regretted rien.

For the world I am left with the impression that 2009 is the year that will be remembered as the one in which our elected leaders ignored the evidence of the catastrophic effect that polluting the world is having on our fragile climate.

I already have some exciting and challenging work lined up for the first few months of 2010 and can’t wait to get started on another year. I’m hoping that 2010 is a memorable year for me and for the world, memorable for all the right reasons!

In the meantime I wish you and yours all you would wish for yourselves. Have a happy, healthy and prosperous 2010.

Attended a great event last Tuesday evening (it’s been a busy week so just sitting down now to reflect on it now).

The event started with the YouTube video narrated by Lorraine Kelly which is full of the great stuff that is happening in this small post-industrial city on the north-eastern coast of Scotland – from a branch of the V&A Museum and the computer games cluster around Abertay University to the reconnection of the city centre with the beautiful River Tay.

The theme of the evening was ‘The Learning City’ with three speakers Tom Schuller (author of ‘Learning Through Life’), David Dorward (CEO of Dundee City Council) and Pete Downes (Principal of Dundee University).

Tom presented on the inquiry into the Future of Lifelong Learning and his take on what needs to be done is worthy of a much longer post. I was struck by the proposal to move towards a categorisation of the key stages of learning as: up to 25; 25-50; 50-75; and 75+. As always you can argue at the boundaries but his rationale made good sense to me and seemed to fit with my own experience (still in the 25-50 category but only just). Crucial to lifelong learning is the need to rebalance resources fairly and sensibly across the different life stages. A tough one to crack as schools and universities grab most of the pie and always need more.

David set out a vision for Dundee to become the best small city in the UK with great passion and energy. Also with a sense of how this has to a be a civic partnership not just something the council can do on its own. In a city of 140,000 there are 24,000 students attending two universities and a large college but also 48,000 people living in some of the most deprived communities in Scotland. The two sides of the post-industrial coin.

Pete reminded us of the importance of the bio-tech sector in Dundee (16% of the Tayside economy). Dundee University boasts 800 life-scientists and the largest cluster of bio-tech companies in the UK outside of the south-east of England.

How this city has changed over my lifetime, even since I moved here almost 20 years ago. It’s great to see that Dundee is still on the move. Go Dundee ..

LTS announced earlier in the week that Glow is set to have a bit of facelift and get some long overdue new features.

The addition of blogs and wiki functionality will strengthen Glow as as a platform for communication, collaboration and sharing across the whole educational community.

The extension for a further two years of the contract with RM Education will provide a better return on the substantial  investment made by the Scottish Government. It will also give some more time for our learners and teachers to take advantage of the full potential of the world’s first national schools intranet.

I was very fortunate to be invited back to LTS in Glasgow yesterday to join a delegation from Australia who were across to have a look at our national schools intranet  Glow. The delegation was led by Greg Whitby, CEO of the 80 schools in the Parramatta Diocese of Sydney.

This was a really inspirational session and it was great to hear an educational leader with some vision for today’s schools.

Rather than repeat what is already out there I refer you to:

Neil Winton’s post on GregMeet

Ollie Bray’s post on GregMeet

Those of you on Twitter can also find some great tweets by searching for #GregMeet

Another interview with Merlin John on innovation at LTS. This time for Futurelab’s online magazine.

It sits well with the interview with Michael Hallisay in my previous post as a good description of what we were trying to do when I was at LTS. It’s for others to judge the success or otherwise but few countries have an event like The Scottish Learning Festival or a national intranet like Glow.

It’s always a pleasure to be interviewed by Merlin. I have always admired people who are great at their job whether they be plastering my ceiling or teaching my children. Like all highly skilled people they make the highly complex and difficult look straightforward and easy.

TeachNet.ie

In the week prior to leaving LTS in June I was interviewed by Michael Hallisay, Director of Dublin’s Digital Hub Development Agency and partner at H2 Learning.

The interview was published last week as International Podcast #15

From my point of view it is reasonable description of the state of play in terms of ICT for education in Scotland at the time – good progress but still much left to do.

Michael’s questions give me an opportunity to say something about what we were trying to achieve and some of the thinking behind the approach we took – learning pull rather than technology push.

It is also interesting to see how Glow and the other developments in Scotland are perceived from across the Irish Sea – world leading!

Overall the TeachNet.ie Learning Blog is well worth a visit and if you have time the other 14 international interviews provide a great insight into educational technology developments elsewhere in the world.

SLF

Another really great SLF. It felt  really strange just walking around meeting people and enjoying the event without having any responsibilities.

I ended up spending a lot of time catching-up with old friends and former colleagues and for a change was not dashing off to chair a session or attend a launch.

Apart from the very important social and networking dimension of the event, it was a really good opportunity to find out what was new in the world of education and to be inspired.

It is always hard to pick out highlights but I enjoyed:

• Prof Carol Dweck’s keynote – I think her research on growth mindset and fixed mindset is really important.  I was sitting on the balcony in the Clyde auditorium and the teachers sitting beside me all thought her message on how to use praise would change the way they work with children. I have posted in the past about Carol’s 2006 book Mindset and would recommend it to every parent and teacher.
• Frank Dick’s keynote was a contrast in style to Carol Dweck’s. His background is in athletics coaching rather than academia but his messages for parents and teachers is equally important. He defines winning as ‘being better today than you were yesterday – everyday’. He takes the concept of the personal best and climbing what he calls ‘your own mountain not somebody else’s mountain from the world of sport and applies it to life in general.  ‘You are the best in the world at being you try to be better at it’. I also like his notion that sports coaches have 20-20 double vision – working simultaneously on today’s milestone and tomorrow’s dream. There is a close link for me to Curriculum for Excellence -  teachers should not only be planning  forward but also planning backwards from where we want every young person to be by the time they leave school.
• Andreas Schleicher of OECD provides for me a really important perspective on Scottish education. His key message for me is that it is not enough for an education system to improve if others are improving faster. We really do live in a global economy and demand for jobs that are low skill, routine manual is declining. The future workforce needs to be able to compete for jobs which are non-routine analytical and interactive. The industrial model of schooling still prevails today. School as a sorting device is no longer fit for purpose in the 21st Century. It is no longer sufficient to remember what we have been taught we need to be able to apply, interpret, contextualise and extrapolate knowledge.
  
• SLF Live – LTS pulled together a number of feeds from attendees who were blogging, tweeting and posting pics to Flickr. I managed to post a few tweets @laurieod and it was great way of keeping up with what was going on around the festival.

I am not involved in SLF10 but already have the dates in my diary. SLF is now without doubt the unmissable event in the Scottish education calendar.

I’ve been blogging about Glow for quite a few years now and have celebrated small each step along the way as the world’s first national schools intranet slowly became a reality.

This evening I was delighted to see my 13 year old daughter log onto Glow to do her maths homework. Although she decided to write the answers (and show the working) in her jotter this time I’m sure it won’t be long before she will  work online and email the answers back to her teacher. Maybe she will start using some of the additional functionality of GlowLearn soon after that.

Anyway one small step for Glow but a very important one for me

Now into my second month and beginning to find my feet in this new world of self-employment.

One of the roles I have added to my portfolio is that of adviser/consultant to Do Be Ltd, a small Fife based company working in the area educational resources and training/cpd. It’s a new kind of experience for me moving from a national public body, funded to provide free at the point of use resources, to a  small business that has to identify a market need and then generate sales in order to survive. The work with Do Be gives me an opportunity to look at some of the issues around educational resources from another perspective – maybe even from the other end of the telescope.

Do Be Teach It

Do Be’s latest product is Teach It a photocopy-able  pack and associated website featuring 40 technology lesson ideas. The lesson ideas cover the use of Google Earth, audio, video, computer games and the internet in a step by step guide that could be used either for direct teaching or as a learner led resource. As always with Do Be the design is great and it’s presented in a very colourful and easy accessible way.

What makes this resource different and perhaps even unique is the combination of bringing all of these technologies together in the same pack and the straightforward introduction to how they can be used in the classroom to support learning and teaching. Using GoogleEarth for example is not in itself difficult but the pack provides a gentle way in that many teachers will welcome.

I am always interested to see how teachers use new resources in the classroom, often in ways that are more inventive than considered even by their inventors. I look forward to seeing how Teach It ends up being used to brighten up learning -  or in Do Be terminology to ‘take learning to the next level’.