Laurie O’Donnell

Just back from an event in Glasgow’s Oran Mor organised by Scotland’s Centre for Confidence & Wellbeing. The speaker was Professor Barry Schwartz.

I have tweeted some of his quotes (@laurieod) and this post is my notes of what he said.

The ‘Paradox of Choice’  – too much choice in certain aspects of our lives (commodities/products etc) can make us miserable whilst  not enough choice in other areas (how we treat/are treated by other people) can also make us unhappy.

The official syllogism
More freedom = more well being
More choice means more freedom

• Consumer goods – choice has exploded into more areas of our lives:
• Healthcare – patient autonomy, direct marketing of drugs (prescription) to patients
• Work – anytime, answer an email or take a business call anywhere
• Liberal arts curriculum (HE in US)
• Close relationships
• Identity

But too much choice can lead to paralysis

• What Too much choice does: Satisfaction (not as much bang for the choice buck)
• Regret and anticipated regret (only way to get out is to defer decision)
• Opportunity costs (missed opportunities)

Escalation of expectations

• People do better but feel worse (Gap between expectations and reality)
• Only a marginal increase of happiness post the threshold of subsistence

Disappointment – Self blame

• Who’s fault is it – shift from the world, the product, the corporation to self

Maximising and ’satisficing’

• Best or good enough?
• Maximisers – consider more jobs, want more options , earn more, did better but feel worse …

How can choice be both good and bad?

• No choice life is infinitely bad, some choice makes life better, but increasing choice after a certain point makes people unhappy … relationship is non-monotonic
• No magic amount of choice (contextual/situational/personal/cultural)

The choices worth having

• We can’t do without character and virtue. Better rules or smarter incentives don’t work. Practical wisdom (Aristotle) is the key virtue.
• We are waging a war on wisdom
• Moral skill/moral will – Aristotelian ‘practical wisdom’
• A wise person knows
  • when and how to make the exception to every rule.
  • When and how to improvise – Wisdom is moral jazz
  • To use moral skills in pursuit of right aims.
• A wise person is made not born.
• Importance of context/situation

Rules and the war on moral skill

• Rules and procedures may be dumb but they are convenient for people who want to avoid thinking or taking responsibility for their action.
• Rules protect against disaster but ensure mediocrity.
• Rules are often imposed after people fail to meet an acceptable standard and designed to ensure a minimalist approach to quality, safety etc
• Rules don’t do the job and make it less likely that people use their judgement. (Hence no opportunity for growth/learning) and hence guarantees no growth in wisdom.
• Examples of completely scripted/lock-step curricula, eg no child left behind. Reflecting no confidence in the teacher and an insurance against bad teachers. But guarantees over time more bad teachers by driving out moral judgement.
• Need rules but need to be able to improvise to reflect context/situation/etc

Incentives and the war on moral will

• Financial incentives undermine moral commitment.
• CEO financial  incentives lead to irresponsible behaviours based. Doing the right think cannot based on monetary reward.
• ‘We must ask, not just is it profitable, but is it right’. Obama 18.12.08
• Banking has become demoralised. All self-interest. Losing morale of practitioners.

Remoralising work

• Ethics is taught in practice not in classrooms.
• Encourage both moral skill and moral will.
• Teachers should become moral heros.
• Teachers are always on stage. We are always teaching in everything we do.
• Work as job, career or calling
  • Job – work sucks
  • Career – positive trajectory
  • Calling – happy and work vital to identity
  • People doing exactly the same work have different levels of happiness
  • Happier to have a calling. Job and career look the same – both unhappy

What creating a calling requires?

• A sense of organisational purpose
• A sense of partnership
• A large degree of discretion and autonomy

Never let a crisis go to waste

• Imagining new possibilities. Reintroduce virtue & the importance of practical wisdom.
• Desire to make the world a better place. Has become hard even in the areas of work where this should be easy (health, education etc)
• Telos of education, nursing clear but more often conflicted as a result of losing the original purpose – hospitals become disease control factories rather than places where people become healthy.
• The telos of banking has become to make as much money as possible. Banking has lost it way.

Great stuff, thought provoking, stimulating and inspiring. Worth watching Barry Schwartz’s TED Talk on the Paradox of Choice  or on The Loss of our Wisdom if you want more …

Not been keeping my blog up to date recently – sign of being too busy.

I spent the week before last in London attending two events. The first was a Becta organised conference which was attended by 60 ministers of education including our own Maureen Watt, MSP, Minister for Schools and Skills.

Some great speakers including:

• Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the world wide web, who called for more investment in the science of the web, the fostering of a culture of sharing/the commons of the web and for governments to open up their data for public use.
• Andreas Schleicher, Head of Indicators and Analysis Division, OECD PISA, gave a stunning presentation on how quickly education is changing across the world. It is clear that it is not enough for an education system to be improving if others are improving at a faster rate. Certainly no room for complacency if our children and young people are going to be able to compete in the increasingly globalised 21st century.
• Ricardo Semler, World Economic Forum nominated young business man of the year, owner of Brazil’s Semco and founder of the Lumiar foundation. Gave a brilliant talk on 21st learning and teaching and designing a curriculum around Formula 1, fashion, popular music of the 1960s, building a bicycle etc. Inspirational stuff and worth watching for the future as traditional curriculum structures continue t to come under pressure from learners, parents, employers and teachers as poor preparation for life and work in the 21st Century.

It was also a great opportunity to network and find out what is happening across the world from Saudi Arabia (making a massive investment in education), Japan (concerned about demographics), Finland (top performing in Europe but about to undertake a radical reform programme) …

The second event I attended was BETT. In previous years I have blogged about how little I get out of the exhibition but how much I appreciate the opportunity to meet pretty much everybody in the learning and technology world.

Apart from bumping into large numbers of the people I have worked with over the last 10 years I also met with senior executives from a number of IT companies including:

• Terry Sweeney, CEO of RM Education,
• Peter Isaacson, VP Global Education, and his colleagues from  Adobe Systems
• Herve Marchet and Mike Munn of Apple Europe

I also had the honour of having lunch sitting next to Prof Tim Brighouse – great conversation about how Scotland should respond to the recent TIMMS survey.  Also had the opportunity to listen to Tony Howell the current holder of Chief Education Officer/Director of Children’s Services with Birmingham City Council – got a real sense of the scale of the challenge he faces on a daily basis.

Brilliant week, fantastic opportunity and a privilege to have this job but I was glad when my plane landed back in Dundee on Friday night.

Sitting at home listening to BBC Radio Scotland’s celebration of the 250th anniversary of Burns’ birth – Auld Lang Sang.

We have just published some new Burns resources for schools (and others) to use on the LTS Online Service. The highlight for me is the Burns songs performed by “The Cast” ( one of Scotland’s finest contemporary folk bands – I am told that their version of Auld Lang Syne was featured in the recent ‘Sex and the City’ movie). These 6 songs are unique content, recorded especially for LTS and published on our website only …another LTS exclusive!

I usually get stir crazy after a couple of days at a conference but yesterday afternoon’s plenary session really was inspirational.

First up was Jorge Sampaio, this former president of Portugal and now elder statesman, who reminded us that we can’t take democracy for granted. As a student he struggled against the dictatorship in his country and today continues to work towards improving global citizenship, a cause that needs all of our support.

Dr Narenddra Jadhav, Hon Vice Chancellor of Pune University in India was next. This former ‘untouchable’ has a wonderful story to tell of a rise from the lowest caste to become chief economist of India’s central bank. His current role (one for which he had the honour of taking a 90% pay cut) places him in charge of an institution with 650,000 students – yes 650 thousand! What a challenge but also an opportunity to transform his country that he clearly relishes. Some wonderful work going on around rural development, volunteering, employability, modernising the curriculum and supporting people to escape from poverty.

Next up was Charles Leadbetter [keynote speaker at the Scottish Learning Festival in September]. He picked up on the themes from his ‘We Think’ (therefore we are) book. He started by discussing the slow progress of technology. Suggesting that it might takes time for internet technology to make its full impact on society (60 years?).

But just look at what has happened in the first 10 years of the internet – iTunes and music, google, e-bay, the decline of regional newspapers and massive changes to publishing just for starters.

So what is going to happen next? Leadbetter’s hope is that the ‘We Think’ approach develops and extends our human capacity to solve problems collaboratively but recognises that this is not the only possible outcome of the internet revolution.

The next speaker was Professor Lawrence Lessig, the founder of the creative commons licensing model of not for profit content reuse. Breathtaking in its range, presented at breakneck speed with sublime style. The main thread of this presentation was trust and in particular the mistrust the public has for politicians.  ‘Money has poisoned trust’.  He claimed that in the USA less than 10% think Congress is doing a good job. The major problems we face are not just technical. Better machines, for example, will not fix democracy. The problems are more fundamental and need human solutions.

The final speaker was Guido Jouret, Chief Technology Officer of CISCO’s Emerging Technologies Group. He discussed innovation as a process and the power of disruption [LO'D think about what iTunes did to the music industry or the car to horse drawn forms of transport].

He suggests an innovation recipe consisting of:

Think big

Disrupt

Start small

Evolve quickly

Start lead and others will follow

Communicate often and simply

Believe with passion.

He also argued that if you can’t describe an innovative technology in 10 words you need to work harder at it.  [LO'D - Glow in 10 words? 'Connects learners, teachers and parents to support communication and collaboration.' Can anyone do better?]

Just got off a train from Stockholm to Oslo and about to get ready to go out to dinner before attending a concert to celebrate the Nobel Peace Prize (:

Having a very interesting second day at this event which has 450 delegates drawn from 45 countries.

Some of the highlights for me were:
Deputy Mayor of Stockholm
Capital of Sweden is made up of 14 islands.
There are 1.9m inhabitants in the region and 800k in the city itself (similar to greater Glasgow and the city itself?).
Stockholm has 1,000 parks and broadband penetration rate is an impressive 98% (need to check if this is the same as broadband usage).
It is also the home of the Nobel Prize.
The city is using technology to become greener and safer with a focus on improving public services, including more people and becoming more prosperous. (Sounds good to me)
Stockholm aims to become Europe’s most accessible capital by 2010 (a fantastic aspiration).

Simon Willis, CISCO VP, Public Sector Sales European Market
A very wide ranging talk covering the beginnings of human civilisation around the river deltas of the middle east to the development of the Mediterranean as a commons used to connect people, facilitate trade.

He argued that there is a need to better connect government & public sector with the private sector and others including NGOs and universities.

IT has some tools to contribute that support connectivity & collaboration. He characterised the internet as a new river delta, a new commons.

Prof Carlota Perez
Roles of Markets & States in Shaping a Sustainable Global Golden Age
Really interesting talk from an academic who it would appear has a model that predicted the current financial crisis. But unlike pretty much every other commentator she is hopeful for a positive outcome and in her terms ‘a golden age.’

She cites 5 technology revolutiuons
1771 – Industrial
1829 – Steam, coal, iron & railways
1875 – Steel & heavy engineering
1908 – Age of the automobile
1971 – Age of IT & telcoms
(Next one – Age of biotech, nanotech)

She claims that it takes 40-60 years for each revolution to spread & reach maturity. They transform the whole economy and society as well as the key industries and their underlying paradigms. Transforming opportunity, distance, ways of working, communication and living. Each brings a new set of life shaping goods and services at affordable prices (to some?).

The current shift from 1971 (microprocessor) was from the logic of cheap energy to the logic of cheap information and an increased preference for intangible value.

Each paradigm opens new routes for private profit and the marketing of ‘new’ desirable lifestyles.

She argued that the potential paradigm shift enable by ICT not yet been fully realised (fabrication of products, process industries, product profile, personal transport, freight, energy, urban development etc). This is in part because the new paradigm is still wrapped in the old paradigm . In 1990s we had cheap oil ($7 a barrel) & cheap asian labour – which allowed us to stretch the old paradigm. But we need 7 planets to sustain the model of natural resource consumption that underpins current practice.

So will the new paradigm prevail? Yes but only if a positive sum game can be established between business and society, ie sustainability must create economic opportunities and improve the quality of life at the same time.

She argued that each tech rev propagates in two different periods
1. Installation – Creative destruction (where we have been)
Led by casino capital

Turning point (where we are now with the financial and social crisis)

2. Deployment – Creative construction (where we go next – hopefully!)
Led by production capital

So the pattern is bubble prosperities, recessions followed by golden ages. For each of the revolutions a golden age follows a big financial collapse.

Food for thought…

I am in Stockholm and Oslo this week attending a ‘Public Sector Summit’ organised by CISCO.

Apart from having to get up before 0500 to catch a flight to London on the way to Stockholm this is a pretty good way to earn a living.

The event starts this evening in Stockholm and finishes on Thursday evening with a concert and dinner in Oslo to celebrate award of the Nobel Peace Prize.

The agenda looks really interesting with a combination of keynote. The highlights for Tuesday morning look like:

• Professor Carlota Perez – ‘The Roles of State and Market in Shaping a Sustainable Global Golden Age’

• Government 2.0: Roundtable discussion on New Directions for the Public Sector

On Tuesday afternoon I am attending a specialist session on ‘Achieving Access and Equality across Education’ – something very dear to my heart. Hope there are some lessons I can take home with me because this continues to be a major issue and a significant challenge for education in Scotland.

On Wednesday morning I get the opportunity to get on a bus and do some visits to ‘technology enabled innovations’ in the City of Stockholm. It is great to see this stuff for yourself rather than to just read about it.

Overall I am looking forward to the event for three main reasons.

1. Opportunity to look at service innovation across the public sector (I spend most of my time immersed in education/children’s services and value the opportunity to find out what is happening in health, central gov etc)
2. Opportunity to look beyond Scotland
3. Opportunity to reflect on how we are doing strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats

I have not given any time to my blog over the past few weeks and I hope to post a couple of times a day as there is a wireless network at the venue.

Just had a couple of wonderful days in Glasgow at SLF2008. We have evolved the festival into a showcase for Scottish education over the last 9 years and I think we now have a model that works pretty well with continuous improvement built in by design. This year the focus was very much on Curriculum for Excellence and innovative classroom practice.

The highlights for me this year included:

• The Cabinet Secretary for Education and Lifelong Learning, Fiona Hislop, responding to questions from the floor of the conference for over 30 minutes. Welcome to living in a democracy and politicians being open to challenge, support and able to hear new ideas that have not been filtered through the civil service or an organisation like LTS. I though she gave a confident and self-assured performance and responded in a very open and supportive way. The video of her keynote is on the SLF2008 website.
• I really enjoyed Charles Leadbetter’s keynote and liked his message that learning is fundamentally about relationships which are strengthened when young people: feel that someone cares for them; they get recognition for who they are and what they have achieved; they get opportunities for meaningful participation; and of course they feel motivated to learn. Charles also reminded us that those most likely to benefit from innovation in education are those least well served by the status quo. Educational reform is at its heart a campaign for social justice.
• TeachMeet08 was wonderful. Over 120 teachers presenting for 2 or 7 minutes on something they have done in a classroom and without promoting products or using powerpoint – it is just so refreshing. I think this SLF fringe event will over time become closer to the core of the festival. This year we had 170 practitioner led seminars. Next year we could add 1,000 mini seminars on the TeachMeet model. This was Ewan McIntosh’s last TeachMeet in the role of facilitator and he got a very warm send off from the assembled masses.
• Ellen Moir from the University of California, Santa Cruz, was inspirational and again gave me hope for the US education system. Another little glimmer of light peeping through the dark curtain of No Child Left Thinking.
• The exhibition of over 250 suppliers of resources, products, services, cpd into education continues to amaze me. The rich diversity of what was on offer from public, private and voluntary organisations is quite stunning. It is good to see the exhibition, which is organised by Emap Education, starting to reflect the breadth and depth of educational resources and placing ICT into a more realistic context as one among many excellent additions to the repoitoire of the teacher.
• Professor Richard Teese gave a very thoughtful and timely keynote on the risks of curriculum reform. One of his key points was the role of universities in maintaining the status quo – through the qualifications system they ’substitute the production of success for the prediction of success’, i.e. they use public examinations for young people to provide access for those who are most likely to succeed anyway, often despite the efforts of the university.
• It was great to see how far we have come with Glow over the last year. There is a real buzz at the event about some of the early classroom practice. We have always said that the success of Glow will be down to how teachers and learners choose to use it. We have provided a more secure and stable national online environment,  some tools and little support but it’s the creativity of those who use it that will in the end prove its worth.
• Finally, it’s the opportunity to network, collaborate and share that is always a crucial aspect of the festival.  We have around 7,000 delegates drawn from all 32 local authorities and I love having the opportunity to meet new people, find out what is happening in the world of learning and of course to bump into my many friends and colleagues from more than two decades in education.

It would be great to hear about your highlights from the festival and anything we should be doing to make it even better. Comment is free!

I spent last week in the States with my friend and colleague Andy Pendry, LTS Glow Technology Adviser . The purpose of our visit was to:
•    Help develop our thinking on how we might evolve Glow over the next few years (Glow v2)
•    Explore trends in the use of technology for learning
•    Get a better understanding of how the educational landscape is changing in the US (and how that change is being managed and supported).
•    Take the opportunity to the visit the George Lucas Educational Foundation and follow-up the recent recognition of Glow as a world leading educational programme.

Our itinerary took us to New York, San Francisco and Seattle for:
•    Extended briefings and discussions with some of the major US IT corporations: CISCO, Apple, Google and Microsoft
•    Shorter meetings with HP, Oracle Foundation and IEARN USA
•    A visit to Mercer Island School District
•    A series of meetings with the George Lucas Educational Foundation (including a visit to Skywalker Ranch)

We also managed to have spend an evening at a High School football match and catch a little bit of the tennis at Flushing Meadow between flights.

So a really busy time but a fantastic opportunity to escape from the day job to reflect on how we are doing and spend some time thinking about what we need to do to secure the future of Scottish education.

Over the next few days I want to capture some of my initial thoughts about the visit through a short series of posts.

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.

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.