Laurie O’Donnell

The managment and leadership literature often presents a real the challenge to the public sector reader. You often have to plough through assertions about the primacy of the profit motive, increasing shareholder value and the assumption that the prime motivator for staff is ‘financial compensation’. When the public sector gets a mention there is […]

A very worthwhile event and a great use of my time. I spend too much time in the Dundee-Glasgow-Edinburgh triangle and this was a superb opportunity to take a look at strategic developments in the UK and beyond. We already know that we need to get better at fostering innovation and creativity in our schools […]

On the early train to Glasgow this morning (0636 from Broughty Ferry) but flying down to London this evening to attend a conference on Tuesday organised by NESTA. The event is called Making Innovation Flourish.
The programme interesting with sessions looking at both the wider context of innovation (global economic trends) and the necessary preconditions (skills, […]

I had a really good day last Thursday visiting two schools just north of Dundee: Webster’s High School, Kirriemuir in Angus and Blairgowrie High in Perth and Kinross.
I spent the morning with Eric Summers, headteacher of Webster’s High and a group of his staff including Anne Collins, Bob Pond and Peter Flood. We had a […]

0530
Alarm goes off. Not travelling to Glasgow today so can sleep a little longer.
0615
Shower, breakfast then clear kitchen for builders to knock wall down.
0820
Amy to school with cello.
0845
Julie to school, Moira to the MS centre & then buy special light bulbs for the bathroom on the way to work.
0915
Parking at the office is a […]

Freakonomics by Stephen D Levitt & Stephen J Dubner (borrowed from Emma Walsh, Technical Development Manager at LTS).
Levitt is an economist and Dubner is a journalist. Levitt specialises in asking off the wall questions and then exploring the data to see what patterns emerge and then seeking interpreations, correlations etc.
The book is presented as a […]

I have been following Don Ledingham’s blog over the past couple of weeks as he explores the concept of accountability. Well worth a read (see link on the right hand nav). I commented this evening and want to explore this theme further myself over the next few weeks.
My comment was:
‘Enjoying your in depth exploration of […]

I don’t get out very often enough to the pictures and I really enjoy watching movies at home. Recently I watched one of my favourites, the 1962 adapatation of Harper’s Lee Pulitzer Prize winning novel ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ with Gregory Peck in the Oscar winning role as the lawyer Atticus Finch. Great story […]

Purpose of this blog? No single purpose but rather multipurpose.
First and foremost I will use it as a journal and try to make a weekly entry focussing on how LTS is taking forward the learning and technology agenda in Scotland through the two main programmes we are managing – Glow and the Schools ICT Programme […]

I started a blog last year but didn’t sustain it - a combination of (in reverse order) a poor user interface for the blog software we were using, no clearly thought out purpose for keeping it, a new laptop and a failure to commit the time to maintain and develop it. Since then I have […]