Rick and I are in Leith, a charming suburb of Edinburgh, where Ewan McIntosh has volunteered as our two-day tour guide through the small but growing portion of Scotland's public education system that is using social media to destratify public education and to decentralize it from the command and control style that most of us remember experiencing. To get some small sense of the level of Ewan's passion on this subject, just read his blog.
Ewan is 28, a newlywed and he seems ready to spend his life changing the status quo in Scotland. Rick and I could feel his effervescence on the subject, just minutes after he met us at out hotel and began ushering us around the local sites of town, which include Queen Elizabeth's retired motor yacht as well as this wonderful inlet from the River Leith. which is attached to the City of Edinburgh, the nation's capital and home to about a half million people.
Don Ledingham, head of a regional education authority that overseas about 15,000 K-12 students. Don has been a career educator, working himself up through the years from teacher to principal to administrator to running the show and containing a quantity for Scotland and changing the status quo of public education, by reigniting teacher passion and giving students great participatory roles in how they are taught and how their teachers will be graded. He's a poster child for what he has in mind. He is a prolific blogger and evangelizes blogging and social media for teachers and students alike.
After our tour was completed and we had coffees in a tavern where my attempt to tip the tavern keeper was politely spurned, we were joined by the amazing
He's also a bit of a Renaissance man with knowledge of poetry, rugby, Scottish history, bird songs (he caught the melodies of a thrush as well as the moans of a hoot owl at dusk), good wine and food and he talks prolificly on all these subjects without boasting.
Don brought us to the area of Scotland where he was born and raised and now lives with his wife Jill, son Lewis, an affection Labrador retriever assorted hens and a rooster that sleeps atop a basketball backboard. Jill would cook us a dinner consisting of the best lamb I've ever had, then we talked about education by the fire in his comfortable living room where the coffee table had been part of his father's blacksmith workbench and the wall was adorned with models of horse carts built by his great grandfather in the late 1800s.
We talked education and the challenges of disrupting a system that sucks the joy of teaching out of students and programs the thrill of teaching out of the people in the front of the room. Rick did a good job of drilling into the challenges this presents as I sat, fighting jet lag and wondering how the system's top guy would succeed in disrupting the system without being a top down.
If anyone can do it Don can, particularly by bringing in consultants of quality and texture of Ewan. My other real interest is to imagine what happens to Scotland, if Don and Ewan wildly succeed in their mission where there are currently a mere 150 or so teachers and students--as young as six years old-- using social media to connect with each other and extend conversations beyond their classrooms and hopefully their own country.
Where will Scotland, a traditional and relatively conservative country be, if its children grow up to extend their neighborhoods and relationships and conversations into the growing global pool of the blogosphere? At this point I can only imagine. Rick and I will learn more about it when we speak to teachers, students and government officials in a series of meetings today that Ewan has set up for us.
I could not help be struck by the juxtaposition of Don't view of the future with his love of the past. He lives in "The Borders," the plush, agrarian section of Scotland that runs along the River Tweed, where Sir Walter Scott, lived and died and, in between, was inspired to write some of the most memorable literature and poetry of the 18th and 19th centuries.
Don showed us a majestic area called Scott's view
, then took us to the 12th century Abbey where the famous Scott is entombed. Along the way, he filled our heads with interesting observations applicable to what he's trying to do in education. For example, why did the builders of ancient church's such as the one we toured, always have acorns planted on their grounds? Because the builders understood that the structures they so solidly designed and built, would need new timbers in about 300 years, and these wonderful trees would be the source of wood.
All-in-all, our first full day on the first chunk of our world tour was a most remarkable day. I'm up at 5 and am about to go for a waterfront jog before getting ready to move on. I'm also buoyed by the fact that my suitcase and I were reunited at midnight last night a mere 7. 5 hours after it had been promised by British Airways an organization that keeps reminding me of one big Monty Python routine.