Laurie O’Donnell

There is an article by Melanie Reid in this morning’s Times Online covering George Lucas’ testimony to the US Congress.

Under the headline ‘The Force is with Scotland’s School’s intranet, says George Lucas’ the articles goes on to say:

‘In what must rank as one of the most heady compliments ever given to an education system, the film maker announced to members of the US House of Representatives that America should adopt Scotland’s pioneering school websites as a way to improve pupil access to technology.’

(:

Our press officer Lee-Ann has just sent me a pdf of a small news article in today’s  Herald with the above headline.

This is really the Glow section of the LTS website (or what we call the LTS Online Service). It looks pretty good and the new sections ‘Glow in Your Area’, ‘Glow in Action’ and ‘Learning about Glow’ will continue to develop as the programme develops.

 This one really made me smile

George Lucas mentioned Glow in his testimony before  the US Congressional committee on telecomm and the Internet a couple of weeks ago.

His testimony (6 pages) makes really good reading but the mention of Glow is on page 5 for those of you who are impatient.

On 24 June The Scottish Government public expenditure watchdog Audit Scotland published a review of 20 major capital projects including  Glow.

Overview
Audit Scotland noted that Glow had already been the subject of a number of external reviews including several using the OGC Gateway Process and that the programme was characterised by the close working relationship between the Scottish Government, LTS and RM Education.

Cost
In this category Glow received the highest rating – Good:
‘Still working within the £37.5m overall budget for the contract, currently £105k ahead of this figure. Milestone payments have been challenged where appropriate and delayed until deliverables have been achieved’.

Time
Glow received the middle rating  - Adequate – in this category:
‘Go-live has slipped by several months but costs have not increased due to fixed price contract agreed. Delay due in part to time taken for local authorities to sign up to the customer agreement.’

Quality
The Glow programme was again given the highest rating – Good:
‘The project has undergone several Gateway Reviews, with an initial review in June 2003.  Gateway 3 Investment Decision review in April 2005 and interim health-check prior to contract signoff in August 2005.’

Audit Scotland noted that lessons learned from each pilot phase have been acted upon and tested again in subsequent phases. The practice of tracking issues, progress and changes on weekly basis was also noted.

Project Management and Governance
Glow was also evaluated for project management and governance with three assessment levels available: Basic Practices; Adequate – Improving Practices; and Advanced practices.

Glow has been assessed as demonstrating  Advanced Practices for ‘Planning’, ‘Execution’ and ‘Business Acceptance’.

Glow is the only one of the 20 projects rated as demonstrating Advanced Practices for ‘Planning’, and is one of only two projects in the other areas to be deemed to demonstrate Advanced Practices for anything at all.

Glow was given the middle rating, Adequate – Improving Practices, for ‘Vision and Direction’ and for ‘Measuring and Monitoring’.

Conclusion
Great to see the hard work and excellent project and programme disciplines that underpin Glow being given due recognition by Audit Scotland. However, there is certainly no complacency within LTS and The Glow Team LTS will investigate the detail of Audit Scotland’s findings to ensure the continuous improvement of Glow and to inform the future development of Glow v2.

The second book in my pile of books to read over the Summer was Charles Leadbeater’s ‘We-Think’.

Charles is signed-up to be one of the keynote speakers at the LTS organised Scottish Learning Festival in September. The inside cover of the book describes Leadbeater as ‘one if the world’s leading authorities on innovation and creativity’ so just what we need to inspire the 7,000 teachers and others who will be at SLF2008.

I have enjoyed reading Leadbeater over many years and admire the way that he carefully constructs and illustrates an argument rather than just asserting an opinion.

To my mind this is one of the best books on the wider implications of the web. Most of the books I have read overplay what is different about the web, i.e. they have no sense of history. They also tend to see the web as either entirely positive or completely negative rather than a complex set of tools that will be used by people with conflicting motives to meet contrasting ends.

Leadbeater rightly points out that ‘many thoughtful and sensible people … have grave reservations about the impact and implications of the web’.  He argues, however, that whilst being mindful of the dangers the web is on balance a positive force for democracy, equality and freedom. I think this is right as tyranny thrives on controlling information, denying access to  knowledge and constraining communication.

The We-Think website  claims that the book  ‘explores how the web is changing our world, creating a culture in which more people than ever can participate, share and collaborate, ideas and information.’ Leadbeater put this into practice when he published a draft of the We-Think online for comment and inviting further collaboration on the text via the website.

At the heart of ‘We Think’ is the concept that ‘ideas take life when they are shared’ and the web makes that process both instantaneous and global.

The book and website are well worth a read/visit. It made me think a lot about how much further we have got to go to embrace mass collaboration in Scottish education and our wider society.  I am looking forward to briefing Charles prior to SLF2008 and to hearing what I am sure will be a brilliant keynote on Thursday 25 September in Glasgow.

PS The next book on my Summer reading pile is lovely new translation of ‘War and Peace’ that I got as birthday present. I loved reading Tolstoy’s ‘Anna Karenina’ last year and if ‘War and Peace’ is half as good then I’ll be delighted. However at over 1300 pages it might be some time before I get around to blogging about it

I took  most of this week off to catch-up with stuff around the house and the garden. It was the first week of the school holidays in Dundee so a great time to be on leave.  I still haven’t got over the feeling, from my time as a teacher, that the first week in July is the start of the summer.

I associate the school summer holidays with reading and have just finished Oliver James’ ‘Affluenza’. It is a good read and makes a lot of sense but left me thinking that there was not much that he had to say that I didn’t already know.

His basic premise is that we have become infected to a greater or lesser extent with what he calls a ‘virus’ that makes us confuse needs with wants. As a psychologist he goes on to claim that the values of what he calls ’selfish capitalism’ are closely associated with growing levels of ‘emotional distress’: ‘the extent to which a developed nation is Selfish Capitalist and infected by Influenza is crucial to the well-being of its inhabitants’.  He makes a lot of the importance of early learning, parental bonding  (drawing on attachment theory)  and the importance of ‘being’ over ‘having’ as vaccines against the virus.

Other vaccines on Oliver’s prescription include:

• Be beautiful (not attractive)
• Consume What You Need (Not What Advertisers Want You to Want)
• Educate Your Children (Don’t Brainwash Them)
• Be Authentic (Not Sincere), Vivacious (Not Hyperactive) and Playful (Not Game-playing)

All sounds like pretty good sense to me. Next step, use the rest of the Summer to educate my children (not brainwash them) so that they only consume what they need (not what the advertisers want them to want)! What do you think my chances are?

Last Thursday and Friday I had the pleasure of attending the P6/7 school show at Eastern Primary School in Dundee. The show was called ‘Hot Dates’ and the story follows a group of primary teachers on the first day of term planning the big (’hot’) events of the school year - from the nativity play to the school sports. It’s a great script for a P6/7 show because the children understand the context of the school, get the jokes and have such fun playing the familiar parts of teachers and pupils.

It was a brilliant show, P6 were on stage throughout as the choir with all of the children in P7 getting a chance to perform each night and many changing roles between the two performances. On the Thursday my daughter Julie was an angel (only very slightly out of character) and on the Friday she was a dinner lady/waitress (pretty much totally out of character).

As a parent I have loved watching my children in school shows and concerts. Eastern Primary has given them both great opportunities to sing, play musical instruments and act whether it was in the school hall, the local church, the theatre and even in Dundee’s famous Caird Hall.

I have organised (more than?) my share of school events in the past from parents’ evenings and prize givings to concerts. So I really appreciate the amount of work that goes into a successful performance. Without taking away any of the credit from the children themselves - it really was their show - you really do have to take your hat off to the teachers, parents, school staff and other volunteers who give up so much of their own time to make sure everything is alright on the night. They have worked tirelessly to find a great script, manage the venue, lead the rehearsals, design the costumes, do the make-up and much more besides. All of this takes place on top of the day job. So much for schools winding down as the summer approaches!

I am left with the image of the children on the stage taking a well deserved bow and looking so proud of their achievements. It is an image that will stay with me for a long time as this was the last ‘hot date’ that I will attend as a parent at Eastern. In many respects I will really miss being the parent of a child at primary and can’t believe that it is 11 years since I attended my first event at Eastern. Happy days for sure, but secondary school beckons and I look forward to many happy days ahead.

My colleague Ewan McIntosh’s post on ‘Quirkology - there is no career path just luck‘ makes for interesting reading.

I left the following comment:
‘My take on what most people call luck is that it’s where preparation meets opportunity. Hard work is (usually/often) a necessary but insufficient condition for good luck. By and large you also need to have the awareness, self-confidence and attitude to risk to make your own luck.’

I think the work of Martin Seligman is important here. Seligman writes on positive psychology and what he calls learned optimism. In the Scottish context the work of Carol Craig and the Centre for Confidence and Well-Being is also significant.

Seligman provides a great message for anyone in education, ie that we can escape from the legacy of low expectations and low self esteem, learn to be more optimistic and as a consequence be happier. The optimism that Seligman promotes is not not blind decontexualised optimism but rather a more balanced approach to life (there are aspects of life and circumstances of living that lend themselves to a healthy pessimism as well as an aversion to risk).

The strength of Craig’s work is that it is located within the Scottish cultural context, is research based, provides a narrative on how we got here and, for me most importantly, does not oversell the benefits of positive thinking.

For Scotland to prosper we need to escape from the self-destructive fatalism that was best expressed by an old school friend of mine who once said: ‘why bother eating healthy food - you might get run over by a bus tomorrow?’

Both Seligman and Craig provide insights that need to be understood and internalised across the Scottish public sector. In the educational context this means getting them embedded into the curriculum and promoted more generally as key components of a Smarter and Healthier Scotland.

One of the great jobs I have in LTS is leading the Scottish Learning Festival. The event is now in it’s 9th year and has evolved from being an exclusive ICT event into the major national showcase for Scottish Education.

SLF2008 takes place over two days, 24 and 25 September, in Glasgow’s SECC. This year the event will be opened by Cabinet Secretary Fiona Hislop and the SLF programme will feature international keynote speakers, 150 seminars and an exhibition of educational resources.

The main theme of this year’s event is Curriculum for Excellence with Glow in support.

We already have 30 out of the 32 local authorities signed-up to take part in practice sharing/showcasing Education Village. Specialised areas will also be dedicated to Health, Early Years and the national cultural sector.

Over the last couple of years an SLF Fringe has started to develop and this year we expect to see the 3rd TeachMeet event at SLF as well as something happening around education futures.

SLF was recently evaluated by George Street research and levels of satisfaction were around the 90% mark with a high proportion of attendees reporting a positive impact on their classroom practice.

We currently have 1125 advanced bookings (with over 300 new attendees) - double the number at this time last year - and expect more than 7,000 to attend over the two days. Advance bookings for the seminars are being taken online and already some seminars are filling up. Last year a number of seminars were oversubscribed so get your booking in early to avoid disappointment.

As we get closer to September I will blog some more on the SLF programme and pick out what I consider to be the highlights.

I had an interesting conversation recently with a friend who is a teacher. It started with her saying that the difference between us is that I am ambitious and she is not. My response was that it is impossible to be in education and without being ambitious - or rather it should be impossible.

She had of course linked the concept of ambition exclusively to the practice of seeking a promoted post in a school - ambition as the desire for personal power and status rather than as the desire to make a difference.

I know for a fact that she wants the children in her class to be successful and for her school to thrive - in many ways she is an exemplar of the ambitious teacher, she just doesn’t want anything to do with what she sees as the hassles of being a school manager. [There is a major problem for the education system if the best teachers associate the role of promoted staff with bureaucracy and fire fighting rather than leading learning. A topic for another post?]

Anyway we agreed that we are both ambitious for children and young people. The only real difference was where we had decided we could make the biggest difference and contribute the most to achieving success. She has decided that working directly with learners is where she can make the biggest impact. My role is to make sure she gets the best possible advice, support and resources that LTS can provide.