Ewan McIntosh | Design Thinking, Education & Learning

Celebrating 10 years of edu.blogs.com - could we have yesterday's time with today's thinking?

It's ten years today since I wrote my first blog post for me, and I wish we could have today's thinking with the space and time of a decade ago.

1999

I've blogged since around November 1999, one of the first users of a new, shaky service... Blogger. My first one was, as a student teacher, some kind of "making sense of Scottish education" affair. It was short-lived, audience-free, and felt presumptuous in the extreme. As a French and German teacher, I used the more stable Typepad service to run blogs with students on all sorts of field trips and school partnerships.

Early 2000s

There were various Paris-Normandy trips, the highlight of my teaching year, where we live-blogged from a Nokia 6230i with a 1.3megapixel inbuilt camera and extortionately expensive and unreliable 2G connection, while munching on smelly cheese and exploring the history of Omaha beach and surrounds. In the early years, mums and dads were sceptical of what it was for and why - most posts would garner barely 30 comments. Just one year on, though, the utility of the blog was clear to all: no more nervous phone calls to the school asking how we Johnny was doing, and literally hundreds of comments per blog. In fact, I've just spent the weekend at a wedding where I met many of the students from the 2005 blog for the first time since then.

Carol Fuller, a US teacher from South Cobb, near Atlanta, who I have never met, but to whom my primary school colleague John Johnston paid a visit over a decade ago, is still an online friend today. She got her students helping in a couple of projects where a US perspective on the world was essential to gain empathy beyond the pages of the textbook. The most popular post in one collaboration on politics was by far around banning guns. Plus ça change...

Her students took the often traumatic and insightful writing of our senior students' field trip blog to Auschwitz and wrote their own play on the back of it. It was pre-YouTube, so VHS cassettes flew across the Atlantic. Having the powerful writing of students still online, still being downloaded, feels important today as our world continues to struggle with terrible things happening in the world, viewed only through a screen. Laura Womersley's Confession is still one of the best pieces of writing I think I've ever read from a student, rendered more poignant than ever today knowing that just a few months later she died, suddenly, from an unexpected illness. Her words live on.

We used our blogs to publish the first high school podcast in Europe, maybe in the world. The wee lad who edited everything is now an accident and emergency doctor, and through micro-blogging - Twitter - is newly in touch with me this past year. He's no long a wee lad, either - six foot tall, and seeking his next challenges in life.

2005: the start of edu.blogs.com

It was only when I left my classroom to start a secondment with the Government, in the summer of 2005, that I knew I would miss sharing with other people. Until that point, it had always been through the conduit of my students' work. Now, I wanted to share whatever I might with a newly emergent group of educators, educators who wanted to share beyond their four walls. The first post was awkward (and indeed called "That awkward first post"). The early posts are bum-clenchingly naïve. But it was also the place that some small things were kicked off, and became big things. A few weeks after the first ScotEduBlogsMeetup, TeachMeet was born in a post in 2006.

Collisions

Early on, Loïc Lemeur, the founder of the blog platform I had been using for so long, invited me to speak at his emergent Les Blogs conference in Paris (now Europe's must-go-to tech conference, LeWeb). It's his birthday today, the day that I started my own blog - serendipity perhaps?

What followed my intervention there was the first sign that people might actually be reading and listening to what I was saying. James Farmer got stuck in, annoyed, I think, that a young buck was on the stage talking about classroom blogging (and he wasn't ;-). He was actually complaining about what everyone else on the panel had said, not what I contributed, which were just stories (much the same I what I try to contribute today). We didn't speak much after that, in spite of promises of beer in Brissie. 

I was fed up at how few teachers were sharing long-form thoughts and reflections on teaching, through blogs, and how a self-nominated cabal hectored those of us joining the fray "for not doing it right". Today, I feel that about the self-nominated if-Hattie-didn't-say-it-it-didn't-happen brigade. Back then my chief supporter in the collision with James Farmer and, later, Stephen Downes, was one Peter Ford - still one of my best buddies today, and working partner of the last three years. Collisions, I learned early on, are how we challenge ourselves to learn better. Heck, even Stephen came around to like something I did once... one of the best presentations he's ever heard. The content of it, too, came from collisions on this here blog.

I also had collisions through the blog with people who did not blog, namely my employers at the Scottish Government. I spent a few blog posts correcting newspaper stories in which I was misquoted, and many more writing my own thoughts on why the creation of a national schools intranet, a social network no-one outside schools could see, was doomed to fail. It did. Two years after leaving the education department, I was invited back by a new Education Minister to his expert committee that has overhauled the whole, expensive, useless venture. 

So, collisions on the blog were vital to my job, when I had one, and for the creation of NoTosh, my company. For ten years of professional collisions, thank you. I really wish there were more of them in long form.

TLDR has become the norm as educational discourse takes place in machine gun ratatats-à-Twitter. Where once we had comment feeds, dripping ideas, thoughts and disagreement with our ideas each day, we now have a tsunami of detritus in which we must seek out the comments of yore, never connected directly to the original thought that sparked them. Ten years ago, the half-life of an idea, of a discourse, could be as long as a month. Today, one is lucky if a thought lasts twenty seconds before it falls off the fold of the electronic page.

In the past decade, though, something better has come along, I think. More educators are writing books than ever before. More than most genres, there are plenty destined to become pulp, but there are so many more than a decade ago that offer genuine insight, great ideas, years of learning to the reader for no more than thirty bucks. They even come to your screen in a flash, if you want them to. I wonder, sometimes, if teachers writing books is not the long-form blog post in a different guise.

To that end, I've wondered about going back over ten years of blog posts, ignoring the truly embarrassing ones and unpicking the contentious ones with a more mature head on my shoulders. I'd love to write a book that takes ideas that mattered 10 years ago to me, and see whether they might matter more to people today. I have no idea whether this would work, whether it would even be of interest to people - the same questions I asked in my parents' dining room as I set about kicking off this electronic version of the book draft.

Thanks to those of you who have read my stuff, especially the longest posts like this one. Thanks, too, to those with whom I have collided over the last ten years. And to those who don't read my blog any more, who have unsubscribed because you feel it is "no longer relevant" (that's the most common reason for an unsubscribe), peace be with you. You have no idea of the fun you've missed out on ;-)

When there just aren't #28minutes for #28daysofwriting

In 2007, I posted a picture of me blogging, with a one month old Catriona in one arm, one-handed typing on the other:

One year later, I had stopped writing on my blog regularly (until this month) for many reasons:

• At Channel 4 in 2008, I was so unschool in my work that I felt totally uninformed and uninspired to write about learning - this was daft, since every public service platform I funded and produced had learning at its heart.
• By 2010, having started NoTosh, I ended up with a crisis of living in two electronic worlds, at a time when many of us were really at the beginning of fathoming how to live online privately as well as publicly. The NoTosh blog (we used to have one, and it'll make a reappearance in 2015!) was where I spent most of my writing time until 2011, as my edu.blogs.com writing fell away.
• By 2012, I was on mega travel - nearly 250,000 miles a year - and the simple fact of being in the air without wifi thwarted efforts to write.
• By late 2013, with the stress of opening a new office in Australia (even if it was led by the wonderful Tom Barrett, who was also, without a doubt, feeling a tad stressed himself), and then expanding it in 2014, and adding an office in San Francisco later that year, both delivering great learning for educators and creatives, planning it and attempting to keep a team happy was proving tough - writing on a blog, if I'm honest, didn't make any sense. 
• One of the reasons for stopping transient writing was just that - I wanted more permanence. So I wrote my book, long form, as well as a new Masters course. 120,000 words in 12 weeks, while also traveling twice around the world. It helped me realise that writing was not the issue, but publishing it live was. 
• And so to February 2015. I turned 37 yesterday, on a plane, and with no chance to write 'live'. Today, I'm in meetings from 8am until 9pm. I'm not going to have the energy to write, so this, too, is a forward-post with my head spinning from jetlag in Hong Kong.

I wouldn't swap my life for the world. I'm very fortunate to have a family that has come to cope, somehow, with my travels, and a supportive team who I can lean on when I need to. But when push comes to shove, it is writing on the blog that has always had the shove.

Maybe that's what making things explicit and public is all about - you magically find time to do things, ditching others, and not giving up what is truly important to you.

Above all, writing every day has been a wonderful model for that little Catriona, and her new (well, now four years old) sister, Anna:

Expectations #28daysofwriting

This is what they call a "forward" post. I wrote it yesterday, when I had wifi and time, and am posting under today's date. I have a (reasonable) expectation that I will be alive tomorrow, and that this will not, therefore, freak out anyone unduly.

In the early days of blogging with my school students, back in 2002/3, I'd use forward posting on the foreign trips we made because mobile access to blogging software on my Nokia was so expensive. At the time I gauged our expectations of living tomorrow high, but was young enough and foolish enough to forget that, should our coach have gone off piste 88 mums and dads, notwithstanding the rest of our families, would have been rather taken aback to see us "happily arrived in Caen", and not in the mortuary. 

Expectations are funny things. We all like to believe we have different expectations, but some of our expectations are just hardwired, like the pentatonic scale, into our beings. This year, the case was proven when I felt obliged, finally, to remove my kid from her local school and attempt to fund a better future in a local private school. The principle reason for this move, against many education bones in my body, was that state education in my neck of the woods feels like it has lost its sense of expectation for every kid. Our expectations are realistic, perhaps, and the intention of supporting all children to achieve will help the lower 20% become a much more able lower 20%. But there will always be a bottom 20%. And if our efforts are in setting expectations for the middle, all kids will  tend to aim a little below whatever we set them. In her new school, Catriona is flourishing, with expectations set at a stratospheric level and a hidden understanding that, really, the goal isn't to meet them at all. There's something else going on.

This ties into what we consider 'normal' expectations. My expectation of being alive tomorrow (today) when this is posted are high. I place trust in my pilots, my plane and my fellow passengers, not to do us any harm.

My expectations of living another day along with my students back in 2002 were equally high, but not entirely shared by nervously grinning colleagues when they knew what I had prepped for future-posted blog posts.

My expectations for my kids' own learning are stratospheric. At 4 and 7 years old, I expect them to be able to do anything that they want, as long as... and there is the tough bit. What are the conditions for expectations that mean some schools succeed in pitching them perfectly, and others, on a systemic level, fail completely?

This is not a pushy parent, or a doting dad post. This is all about helping my kids learn earlier than I did what Steve Jobs put thus:

"When you grow up you tend to get told that the world is the way that it is, and your life is just to live your life inside the world, try not to bash into the walls too much, try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money...

"That's a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact:

"Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build things that other people can use.

"Once you discover that, you'll never be the same again."

Crazy, stupid... innovation. The imperfect perfection of Tower Bridge #28daysofwriting

I've had a lovely week on holiday down in London with the family, being proper tourists. Under the dreich weather of Monday we ventured Thames-side and towards the terrifying but fun seethrough walkways of Tower Bridge. Along the side of the walkways were photographs of some of the world's great bridges, together with some of the history about how this iconic bridge came to be.

What did we learn?

This landmark, required to cope with the overwhelming population growth on either side of the river and increased river traffic to the upper parts of the Thames, was borne out of many, mostly failed, prototypes, most in the form of sketches.

Thank goodness we didn't stop at the first prototypes submitted to the public competition. The dual lock system would hardly have helped with the drastically increasing river traffic of the industrial revolution:

And a system of hydraulic elevators would have failed in the other sense, not really foreseeing 2015's automotive traffic needing a quick north-south crossing:

Some designers simply did without a bridge and went for the tunnel - perfect for traffic throughput in the longer term and not disruptive at all to the river traffic. In the end, though, it was feasibility that killed these tunnel ideas off - the runways required to descend human and horse-drawn traffic into them were so long that they ate up most of the land either side of the river:

As the final designer was chosen, even his first drafts were off the mark on the aesthetic side:

In the end, the rules for killing ideas and honing the kernels of interesting ideas down haven't changed since the bridge's completion in 1894 and today, as I describe them in my book: desirability (do they want or need it?), feasibility (can we do it?) and viability (should we do it?).

The result, is an imperfect perfection that we recognise in an instant:

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I voted

Scottish Independence is not just what I voted for today. It might not even be what we get. Whatever happens, my country is a better place for it already.

I voted for a nation that has taken the notion of 'democratic debate' to the extreme that few in the Western world have ever, genuinely, seen.

I voted for a dialogue that values hope and ambition over fear and incredulity.

I voted for a nation that has been having a deep dialogue about its future for no fewer than three years, while others 400 miles away assumed the status quo was in the bag.

I voted for the shivers-down-your-neck cheers of hope and optimism in George Square on Wednesday night. I voted for the "chance of hope" of which a certain no voter wasn't so sure, in the same Square that evening.

I voted for the quiet chats and discussions, in the backs of taxis, in pubs and cafés, outside schools between mums and dads, while we wait for our kids to leap out. 

I voted for a highly visible and social dialogue, where the influence of the Establishment, a ridiculous but very real entity growing out of central London, is diminished to the point of laughability by the people, men, women, children and teenagers alike, who tell it as it is.

I voted for a future dialogue that values the views of all, even if they're not in agreement with us, and a mutual respect for importance of getting our thoughts out there to debate in the first place.

I voted for a new breed of media industry that mocks the bias, the interested parties and the in-crowds, and presents information as it is on every day, not just polling day.

I voted for a growth mindset that believes the country of over 5 million is capable of as much economic growth, invention, ingenuity and promise as a land of 60 million.

I voted for a country that will never have nuclear weapons on its soil.

I voted for a country that will value green renewable energy over anything else, and provide 25% of Europe's green energy.

I voted for the reality that my vote in a General Election will actually elect a government that is close to what I chose.

I voted so that, never again, will I see politicians from another country tell me that I am not capable of running my own affairs (or at least, I won't care what they say).

I voted to get out of the arrangement whereby I should be grateful for every penny that I am given, while contributing more out of my pocket than I receive.

I voted so that we could punch above our weight, and not be told to be quiet.

I voted to put up with the hard times as well as the good, because at least they'll be our hard times to work through together.

I voted for a risk, a risk I know is like all other risks - they pay off with time.

I voted for the risk to pay off some time, but maybe not in my time.

I voted so that we could get on with this venture together, especially with those who didn't think we should do this at all. Without the 'nos', we are nowhere. It was Salmond who said in 2011, "we have won a majority of votes, but we haven't the majority of wisdom". That will still be true, more than ever. 

I voted so that my company in Scotland can thrive as an equal to my company in the United States, that my country can thrive as an equal to every other nation on the planet, not as the cousin who speaks up at the Christmas dinner and gets told to pipe down and let the big boys get on with it.

I voted so that, even when the mega businesses, who believe they rule our planet and maybe even do, tell us that we're wrong, we can smile, say "thank you", and get on with our idea of a quality life instead.

I voted so that one of the richest countries in the world can eradicate the poverty that is on its doorstep (and I'm happy to put my money where my mouth is to do it, when I know every penny is doing what it was intended to).

I voted so that my children can identify themselves with two cultures who value equality above all else: they are Scottish and French. Liberté. Égalité. Fraternité.

I voted yes.

I voted.

Why not?, and the power of getting on with it

We are all artists. But not all of us should exhibit.

So says John Hegarty in "There Are No Rules", which I continue to dip into during my break in Tuscany. I laughed when I read this line, because, in my own drawing/sketches case, it's too true. We can all be creative, but not all creative produce is equally stop-you-in-your-tracks creative. The thing is, you don't know until you start to create, whether or not it's going to be worth exhibiting. You've just got to start. And this is why starting is so hard - we can be fearful that what we produce will not be worth exhibiting, so we don't even bother to start it off.

But when I'm on holiday, I don't care so much about what other people think. Most tourists display this characteristic, with their clothing choices perhaps, or their behaviour in the bars on the Southern Spanish coast. I display this characteristic in "having a go" at things I'm normally afraid of wasting time on: writing, drawing and sketching.

I tend to create more on holiday than I do during the working year, the audiences being smaller (Facebookers are also on holiday, the readership lower, the conferences closed for another season) and the canvas being less daunting. One of my favourite holidayish things to do is to draw on paper placemats before my meal arrives, using my daughters' coloured pencils to create whatever comes to mind. I've spent this week on honing my horses skills, learning how to draw them again (when I was 3, I could draw a good horse, jumping over a hedgerow).

During the working year, all of this would draw a simple question: "Why, Ewan?". But during holidays, no-one questions WHY I want to draw horses. On placemats.

It's the distinct lack of "why?", in fact, and the implied criticism that seems to come with those three letters, that relaxes me, helps me concentrate, helps me focus my efforts on one thing, and doing it best I can, and often a little bit better than that, in fact. No devil's advocate. No "have you thought about doing cats instead?". No "why?".

Just a "why not...?"

Cross-posted to the fabulous NoTosh Facebook wall.

You can pre-order my new book, to be released in August: How To Come Up With Great Ideas And Actually make Them Happen.

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5 Years Old: No More Worksheets (Please)

Catriona's just finished Primary 1 (Kindergarten) and was asked to give her feedback on her learning, for the benefit of the school. It's a fab school - 360 feedback is something I'd love to see in every school, more often. I just loved her comment, and hope that every teacher she ever has, from now on, pays heed: Catriona, and most other children, are not so keen on worksheets.

Help! Missing: trust in young people

I'm currently attempting some "holiday" in France, but the downtime has had my brain whizzing with sights that are more or less unfamiliar, certainly not from the time when I lived here over a decade ago or from my wife's own upbringing.

One such thing is what you can observe in the photo I took in a book shop in a city centre mall. This was the third shop we'd been into where we observed the same pattern:

Children and teenagers, though never adults, would diligently and without having been told to, take their bags to the entrance and dump them in a pile before going about their shopping.

I remarked that in pretty much any other country, a) the bags would be stolen within minutes, or b) they'd be removed as a bomb threat, and almost certainly c) any young person asked on entering a store to leave their bag would cry foul, civil liberties and assumptions of innocent-until-caught-with-a-loot-of-school-supplies (this was a stationery and book shop; hardly the stuff of hardened crack heads or hungry desperadoes).

France is certainly struggling at the moment. Her economy is dying, her politicians panicking, her entrepreneurs leaving by their hundreds every week on the Eurostar.

But success might be more likely to appear some day soon if it can do one thing for the taxpayers, citizens and workers of tomorrow: trust them as equal citizens in a Republic built on liberté, égalité and fraternité.

NoTosh is 3! The story of a toddler startup and the long journey down under

Three years ago, nearly to the day, I registered my dream with Companies House: my new enterprise NoTosh was conceived on December 21st, 2009, with that magic serial number that, at the time, means so much. Of course, once the mortgage payments become due, the romanticism goes out the window: a company is only a company when it grows.

Anyone can conceive a company. It's when they turn over some cash that they get born, and so NoTosh was really born on January 5th, 2010, when I went to (paid) work for the first time. The first client was Northern Film & Media, growing their digital strategy to something that still makes up a large chunk of their revenues and investments. NoTosh worked with them on loads of innovative strategies, including the creation of the world's first ever iPad Investment Fund, something that has kick-started several successful businesses. I'll be forever grateful to Agnes Wilkie and Tom Harvey for taking the plunge with me and my nascent venture at such an early stage, and putting enough cash in the bank to allow me to start taking some risks.

Wanting to take advantage of a Christmas gift I'd asked for from my wife, I cycled to work in Newcastle from Edinburgh, through some of the most bitter, deep snow. I left the house at 0610 in the morning, realising by 0620 that I'd never make my train on time at the speed I could muster on the slippery roads. That was also NoTosh's first ever taxi receipt claim.

It is rather apt that, 3 years from that date, Tom Barrett is arriving bleary-eyed in Melbourne to kick off NoTosh Australia. It's not -4C, as it was on my first day off to work, but more likely 40C+ as he heads into a summer heatwave. But one thing remains the same: his flight arrives from Dubai at 0610 - the same time I set out on my bike for that first day's worth of work.

Tom joined NoTosh on May 1st, 2011, his initiation spent in the buzz of the world's biggest ever election swing (33% swing in 100 days flat!) that NoTosh helped lead with the SNP political party. He saw, fast, that this was no ordinary "education consultancy". Over the next six months a lot of Tom's time was spent getting aquainted with the books and with his own core clients. It was November, in the taxi to the airport at the end of a long trip to Taiwan and Brisbane, our first big foreign trip together (boy, those are fun!), that Tom said, quite emphatically: "We will live here one day, I'm sure. It's just a matter of when."

By April, we were working intensively on a new project in the fashion industry, helping a behemoth company see how it could help people learn better about themselves. Tom and Peter, who had joined us that winter, had come for a few days lockdown in Edinburgh as we worked out our masterplan for this huge programme of work. Working away from home is mostly fun, but not seeing your family is very unfun. Tom had just come off a conversation with his family, a little bluesy, and we got talking about how we could make that better. We'd both been having several trips downunder that year, and Tom's wife had long harboured an ambition to go there. Was now the right time? Would it work for NoTosh? Would it really be possible?

Yes. We make things happen for ourselves. And that was that. 

It goes to show what a complex process it is to get things started overseas, and we're far from finished with the practicalities of setting up a subsidiary in Australia. That conversation was eight months ago, and there's much still to do. The first task is no doubt for Tom to do some unpacking! But already we're speaking to those districts and schools who, like NoTosh's first clients in 2010, want to help create something unique and fresh downunder, with the experiences from our truly global work.

Far from "leaving the UK" (there have been scores of tweets along the lines of "UK's loss, Australia's gain"), Tom's change of base, change of home, means that we can bolster and amplify the amazing work Tom and the rest of our team has been doing in Australia, the US, the Middle East and around Europe. It means that we can all spend a little less time in planes. It also means, I think, that more of the amazing work we've already started in Australia, but which isn't widely known back home, might be brought to audiences in the UK and elsewhere.

It's tremendously exciting, and the next three years will undoubtedly prove as exciting as the first three. By then, we'll no longer be a toddler. Heck, we'll be about old enough to go to Elementary School. 

 

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To the moon (but not back, yet): a year in the clouds

For the past six new years I've taken an interest in how much I'm sitting on a plane each year, destroying the planet that my children will inherit. Travel is an increasingly inevitable part of business, particularly in tough economic climates where, if you're not prepared to jump on a plane I fear one might lose any momentum worth talking about. For all the Google Hangouts, Skypes and Facetimes in the world, my team and I at NoTosh have found that online interactions lead only to one thing: people want to cement relationships face-to-face at some point.

2011 was already a headying number of miles to crunch, mostly at the back of the plane, I hasten to add. This year makes last year's 130,000 miles or so look like a stroll in a large park. Heck, by June this year I'd already covered 30,000 miles more than that.

10 times around the world, one trip to the moon (but only a little bit back towards home), and about 10 trees to plant: that's what 2012's 242,226 miles represent.

Why so much travel on planes?

NoTosh has been growing this year. 2011 saw Tom Barrett join the family, this year another great addition in Peter Ford. I've never been a fan of "hiring help", having a company website listing legions of 'staff' who, actually, are part-timers or an occasional extra face when the lone consultant at the top of the pyramid ends up over-stretched. As someone who's hired consultants from that kind of "broad church", I've rarely had the experience I thought I would. As a teacher "being given PD", I've felt the painful lack of continuity between a string of different consultants brought in, lacking any connection between their message, research or impact. With NoTosh, a tight-bound team who very often live out of each other's pockets, people have been able to play off the different personalities of the team. This means that all of us have been traveling more, as more people ask for seconds or thirds on the learning we've been doing with them.

A non-existent Scottish / UK market, and a booming clutch of global clients has led to many more trips through to Scandinavia, the Middle East and Australia. Scottish revenues at NoTosh are tiny - maybe around 5% of our total this year. The UK as a whole contributes a lot less than 50% of our turnover. It might be down to the economic squeeze - although we work in countries with far more squeeze to their purses than Scotland or the rest of the UK - or it might be a degree of tall-poppy-syndrome for which we are famous. It's more likely down to the fact that we've not yet really made an effort to sell anywhere in the world, let alone Scotland. Everything NoTosh has achieved so far has been down to kindly word of mouth, great partners and superb teachers that have put in the hours on interesting, impactful practice. For that, we are grateful. Even if it means that we get a bit clogged up with airplane aircon.

Australia is in itself big reason for a well-worn seat 14F. We've purposefully been looking to Australia since early 2011 as a place that a) has a heritage of great education innovation, b) realises there's always more to learn, and c) shares some of the educational heritage of Scotland. This year has been back-to-back Australia, working with schools throughout Brisbane and Sydney's Catholic Education Departments, as well as with independent schools there. We've also been working on creative projects with political parties and other groups, something we want to expand upon. 

Will we reduce those miles? Yes.

If you don't want to travel somewhere, you live there. 2013 should see fewer of those trips to Oz and back - there was a point earlier in 2012 where I'd done seven return trips in 12 months! Tom Barrett moves in a matter days, with his family, to engage schools and creative groups who want to help build NoTosh - permanently - downunder. I'm grateful to Tom beyond words for the commitment he's made to our team in doing this - it was a case of stars aligning between his and his families wishes, and our opportunity here and now. I'm sure the promise of sunshine and the occasional beach might soften the blow for him and his family.

We're likely to hire again, too. We've spotted some talent that we're interested in, and now need to find those larger clients or groups of schools who, over a year, say, want to begin engaging with us on some deep projects on assessment, design thinking or creativity. We're also sure that there are more schools and groups of schools in the UK with whom we could build as strong a relationship as we have elsewhere.

We're building incredibly exciting UK-based programmes. Peter Ford has been a lead on three significant projects over the past nine months that have involved our whole team. We'll be sharing these in the New Year, along with their global expansion in 2013. For us, it's just great to see more, larger, bigger scale learning programmes taking hold in the UK, in spite of the recession.

There are a few other surprises, too, that my team and I will keep under wraps for the moment. If they're any good, you'll know about them in good time, I guess. All of these, though, are geared up to keeping our landing gear down, firmly planted on solid ground as much as possible. Wish us luck!