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 [...]

I love this TED Talk from Charles Leadbetter – who in my view is one of the best radical thinkers on the future of education. Charles covers a lot of ground including how the 19th Century Prussian (’Bismarckian’) model of education that dominates the developed world is not scalable to the developing world. He also [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

International Podcast #15 interview with Michael Hallisay. Discussion of ICT developments in Scotland around June 2009.

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]