Laurie O'Donnell

I promised to return to Milton Chen’s ‘Education Nation’ once I had taken the time to read it properly so here goes.
This is book with an international flavour but its focus is on the largely dysfunctional US K-12 system.  Milton does not pull any punches in his description of the decline of  US schools from [...]

My former employer LTS, under instructions from Scotland’s First Minister Alex Salmond, has just published the address made by Jimmy Reid when he was elected as Rector of Glasgow University in 1972.
The address on the subject of ‘Alienation’ is an impassioned plea for a more humane society
The speech, described at the time by the New [...]

I have been doing some work with Bristol based Futurelab and one of my roles involves exploring work undertaken by the Lumiar Institute of São Paulo in Brazil.
I attended the Learning and Technology World Forum in London in January and really enjoyed listening to Ricardo Semler the Chief Executive of SEMCO talking about the the [...]

It seems like only yesterday that I blogged about my decison to leave LTS to work for myself. It felt like a big step on the 25th March announcing to the world that I was moving on after 8 years. I really liked being able to blog and tweet my departure (what did we do [...]

Lovely tribute from Merlin John on his great website MJO.
Being described as ‘Scotland’s ICT leader’ made me smile and I am sure will raise a few eyebrows (including my own!).

After eight great years with LTS I have decided it is time for a change.
I am going to leave my post as Director of Learning and Technology in the summer to start up my own business.
The plan is to develop a portfolio career picking up bits and pieces of work here and there and helping [...]

 
I just picked up the very sad news of Tom Conlon’s death today.
Tom was one of my lecturers when I was training to be a teacher at Moray House (along with Tony van der Kuyl who died last year at this time). He was a brilliant lecturer and the high standards he set for me [...]

I am in our Dundee office today trying to catch-up on a few tasks before the Scottish Learning Festival. It’s a beautiful clear day here with blue skies and the River Tay shimmering to a warm gentle breeze as my only distraction… well apart from email, the phone and a to do list that keeps [...]

 
Another book I picked up on holiday was Andrew Carnegie’s autobiography ‘My Own Story’. What a remarkable story of the man born in Dunfermline in 1835 of ‘poor but honest parents, of good kith and kin’ who becomes one of the richest people in history (a good story in itself) and then gives it all [...]

Started yesterday morning by running to catch the 0636 train from Broughty Ferry to Glasgow and ended it back at Broughty Ferry station on the 1730 train from Edinburgh. Rather then feeling tired at the end of a busy day I felt full of energy and even more enthusiastic about the future of education than [...]