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 [...]

This lovely book has just arrived through the post. The author is my good friend Milton Chen, former executive director and now senior fellow at the George Lucas Educational Foundation (GLEF). Those with a long memory may recall that George Lucas, the Star wars director, spoke about Glow at the US House of Representatives in [...]

In Outliers Malcolm Gladwell  suggests that opportunity plays a significant part in someone becoming an expert. He suggests that a 10,000 hour rule applies as much to the success of The Beatles (opportunity to play live 7 days a week in Hamburg) as to that of Bill Gates (opportunity to attend an elite school with [...]

Wearing my Futurelab Associate Director hat  I was invited to speak at the CoSN Annual Conference in Washington DC earlier in the month. I picked up one of the big themes I have pursuing for a number of year -  ‘Technology Push v Learning Pull’ [subject of subsequent post].
I was invited to have dinner at [...]

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 [...]

The back cover of this political thriller sets the scene for Rogue Nation by Alan Clements:
‘The year is 2014. The Republicans have recaptured the White House, the Conservatives have just won a second term at Westminister and hardliners dominate Russia. In a small corner of north-western Europe, the Scots have just narrowly voted for independence, [...]

I am starting to make some progress through my pile of summer reading as detailed in this week’s Times Educational Supplement Scotland and  finished ‘What Would Google Do? by Jeff  Jarvis over the weekend.
Since visiting Google HQ in Mountain View, California last August I have been  interested in how this company, which is barely 11 [...]

Just finished reading Carol Dweck’s ‘Mindset – The New Psychology of Success’.
I think this is an important book for anyone involved in education and very worthwhile for the general reader. Her theory is that there are two basic ways of looking at the world – or ‘mindsets’. One is a ‘fixed mindset’ in which intelligence, [...]

 
I had the had opportunity to hear Malcolm Gladwell’s keynote on his then recently published book ‘The Tipping Point’ at NECC 2004 in New Orleans. LTS had taken 10 ICT Masterclassers to the event as part of a study visit to see what was happening in the world of educational technology beyond Scotland. We all [...]

 
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 [...]