OllieBray.com

#EduPic11 - First Reflections and Key Messages

I was involved with Laurie O’Donnell and David Cameron’s #EduPic11 event today. The purpose of the event was to paint a picture on Scottish Education and centered on three main questions.

 

1) What could Scottish Education look like at its very best? (Re-imagining the future)

2) Where are we now? (Reflecting on the present)

3) What could we do to make it better? (Closing the gap)

 

Those of you who are close to me in Scottish Education will know that the last six weeks of my life has been taken up entirely with work around the Scottish Government Technologies for Learning Strategy and the more recent the Glow / ICT in Education debate.

So for me #EduPic11 came at exactly the right time. It was good to re-visit some of the bigger questions in Scottish Education. To was good to imagine where we what to be, identify the barriers and road map the way ahead.

The day was illustrated by my good friend Graham Ogilvie who has an amazing gift of being able to listen, summarize and then draw the key messages from any conference or debate.

I photographed and key messages that Graham captured from #EduPic11 and have embedded the pictures below. They are also available on my Flickr Account (licensed under Creative Commons) if anyone wants to use them.

Although all of the discussions were important the three messages that are very important to me are:

1) We should break down school walls...

I believe that schools should be the centre of the community, that facilities should be shared and that we need to really start preparing for 24/7 learning.

 

2) Lets prepare for an unknown future...

I still belive that we spend a lot of time educating children to live in the past. Thing sare going to get tough, really tough and our young people need to be taugh to be kind, agile and resilient. 

 

3) We have talked about inequality for many years...

We have and this is a hard wicked problem to solve. I worry about this and worry that we are still not getting it right (athough GIRFEC is a step in the right dircetion). But I also belive that education is the best chance we have of solveing inequality issues. But in the UK this has to start from pre-birth upwards.

More on #EduPic11 at som epoint soon...

#EduPIc11 - An Open Discussion on the Future Scottish Education?

 

As well as being an advocate for on-line CPD and personal learning I also get invited to a lot of face-to-face CPD Events and have the opportunity to contribute to a lot of events as well.  Increasing due to time pressure and other work commitments I have to turn a lot of things down but #EduPIc11 has certainly got my attention. Its taking place in Glasgow on Tuesday 20th September at Oran Mor.

Being organized by two people who I have a great deal of time and respect for Laurie O’Donnell and ‘The Real’ David Cameron and being billed as a fringe to the Scottish Learning Festival I think this will be an event not to be missed.

Laurie describes the event in more detail on his blog.

“The idea of the event is bring together around 100 people to share ideas and have a conversation about Scottish Education that goes beyond the details of how to implement Curriculum for Excellence."

 

The format of the event will be a conversation around three questions:

1) What could Scottish Education look like at its very best? (Re-imagining the future)

2) Where are we now? (Reflecting on the present)

3) What could we do to make it better? (Closing the gap)

 I like the idea of starting the conversation with “What could Scottish Education look like at its very best?” far to often we focus these discussions on what we could do better? Or What we have done wrong?

I’m also a big believer that “we are where we are” and after the Imagineering around the first question about what could Scottish Education look like I hope that the attendees of #EduPic11 will be willing to have an open and honest discussion about where we ‘actually are’ now?

As well as the topic up for discusion the format of #EDPIc11 is very appealing to me as well. It is different to most traditonal conferences and has been designed to maximize active participation from participants. There will be no keynote speakers or roundtable discussions from ‘education experts’ and everyone regardless status will be on an equal footing with all experiences and thoughts both valued and up for discussion.

Finally, I was delighted to see that Graham Ogilvie (the conference cartoonist) and creator of our successful Internet Safety and Responsible Use Cartoons will also be capturing the event - which means at the end of it we should have a Real Education Picture (EduPic) for people to take away and reflect on.

 

Anyway, More information about the event on Laurie’s Blog or you can sign up here on the EventBrite Page (tickets go up by £10 on Tuesday - so book fast!)

And if you are going to #EduPic11 - hope to see you there!