Arts

Scottish designer’s art for windows

As a child, Sarah Campbell spent her summer holidays on the Isle of Lismore. On walks, she and her artist mother would pick tufts of sheep’s wool from the barbed wire fences and take it home. There they would wash, card and spin it, turn it into fabric on a loom and dye it.

Now working as a designer, Sarah has woven those childhood lessons into the one-off “textile paintings” doubling as window blinds that she creates in her workshop on the tiny island which sits under the mountains of Morvern in the Firth of Lorne for her company Mogwaii Design.

Social Affairs

Flawed Interviews 2

An eminent expert witness told Jackie Kemp that paedophile cases in Scotland are being dropped due to flawed interview techniques. This is actually an addition I filed to the piece in the Herald below but it was too late to make the paper.

Social Affairs

Albie Sachs Interview

Life sentences –  GUARDIAN SOCIETY 

The celebrated South African judge is still setting liberal precedents with a ruling that parents should not be sent to jail, because of their children’s rights – which, he tells Jackie Kemp, has important lessons for the UK.

Albie Sachs, South African writer and judge. 

Albie Sachs: ‘Judges are the storytellers of the 21st century’. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe

 

Social Affairs

Albie Sachs – lecture transcript

This a slightly abridged text of the lecture given by the ANC veteran and South African constitutional court judge Albie Sachs at the National Gallery of Scotland on June 25 2009 in Edinburgh, transcribed from my shorthand note.

Social Affairs

Tobermory’s Tweecher

The Herald June 16 2009

NEW HORIZONS: Social networking and blogging are an increasingly important part of classroom life for both pupils and teachers.
The pen has always been a mighty instrument. But in this internet age, when daily musings are so freely dispensed through Twitter, Facebook and blogs, it is easy to forget the power of the written word. The brightly painted town of Tobermory on the Isle of Mull has recently been reminded of this, after the local paper published a series of messages that had been sent by Lynne Horn, a principal teacher at the local high school, through the social-networking site Twitter.

Teachers banned from Twitter after indiscreet tweet
Social Affairs

Teachers banned from Twitter after indiscreet tweet

Council imposes ban after teacher’s comments cause outrage in rural community

from the Guardian Education online

Fellow ‘tweechers’ have responded angrily to the ban

Tweeting teachers in Scotland are incensed by reports that Argyll and Bute council has banned teachers from blogging about their work.

The move came after tweets written by a teacher appeared in the Oban Times.

Comments made by the head of the language department at a local high school, to her friends on Twitter – “Have three Asperger’s boys in S1 class: never a dull moment! Always offer an interesting take on things” – have caused outrage.

Social Affairs

Pressure mounts on Scots

Media Guardian

Scotland’s national newspapers are in crisis as readership falls, jobs are cut and London-based titles muscle in.

Scots, once the biggest consumers of newsprint in the world, are losing the habit, with the slump hitting home-grown titles the hardest. The writing could now be on the wall for one or all of the three daily Scotland-wide titles, the Scotsman, the Herald and the Daily Record.

Social Affairs

Kitchen Nightmare on Lismore

Education Guardian

What children put into their mouths at lunchtime has become one of the touchstone political issues of our age and a money-saving plan by Argyll council in Scotland to shut six Hebridean island school kitchens was recently shot down by parental anger.

Social Affairs

Mechanical enginering at Dundee

From the Guardian University Guide

The University of Dundee has motored up the mechanical engineering tables, coming from outside the top 20 last year to third place.

This is the first year that students have built a formula student racing car to race in a university competition at Silverstone – a project that the department head, Robert Keatch, says they are hugely enjoying and which is helping their team-working skills.

Social Affairs

Cracking cocaine

Most of the pupils at Girvan academy are smartly dressed in school uniform, shirts and ties, and it seems an unlikely place to find juvenile cocaine experts.

But this school in Ayrshire has piloted an anti-drugs programme on cocaine that is to be rolled out across Scotland. Pupils have worked with the Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency and Learning Teaching Scotland (LTS), the government-funded body that develops the curriculum, to come up with a programme that focuses not on the health risks of cocaine use but on its environmental and social damage.

Social Affairs

Kathleen Marshall Interview

What they long for is people who care’ – Education Guardian

Kathleen Marshall, the first UK children’s commissioner to leave office, tells Jackie Kemp she has never been a fan of playing safe

The ground-floor office a few doors up from the Scottish parliament on Edinburgh’s Holyrood Road has neat venetian blinds and two doors. One is unashamedly dull. The second, smaller door, is shiny, has a bejewelled handle, and is painted with images of mermaids and enchanted forests. Just inside, where other offices have coatstands, is a cardboard wishing tree. Someone has written on one of its paper leaves in a round, firm hand: “I wish I had more one-to-one time with key children.”

In praise of wild camping
Travel

In praise of wild camping

The Herald Magazine. Hiking off into the purple yonder with nothing but a sleeping bag and a loo roll – that is camping as it once was and, for some, what it is becoming again. There’s a resurgence in so-calledwild camping in Scotland as the countryside access laws bed in. Forget the designer floral tent with matching curtains, the elegant plastic wine goblets and the pre-cooked lasagne – leave them at home where they belong and head for the horizon with just a toothbrush in your pocket.

Louise Richardson Interview
Social Affairs

Louise Richardson Interview

Education Guardian.

Louise Richardson, the new head of St Andrews, will bring ‘American attitudes’ to admissions and to red tape, she tells Jackie Kemp.

University of St Andrews

St Andrews University … Louise Richardson was previously the dean of a Harvard college

Arts

A new system for reading music

Every Good Boy Deserves Failure.   And All Cows End Gorily – or is it Eat Grass? Generations of children have struggled over mnemonics designed to help them translate five black lines and a series of dots into music. Some accomplish this feat; some – like me – remember little except these disjointed sentences. But that could soon be history, according to a charity that’s introducing a music notation system to the UK from Finland that is accessible enough for the youngest children to understand. “A revolution in music education is under way,” says Brian Cope, of Drake Music Scotland.

Social Affairs

School-age drinkers with adult problems

A prominent Scottish professor will denounce the use of education cash to fund “mumbo jumbo” in a public lecture tomorrow.

Professor Sergio Della Sala, Professor of Human Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Edinburgh, will use part of a prize-winning public lecture to voice his concern that Scottish schools are paying thousands of pounds to train teachers in controversial techniques such as “brain gym” and “neuro-physiological psychology”. The professor – the first winner of a prize for science communication, named in honour of Tam Dalyell, which will be awarded by the former MP tomorrow – is angry public money is being paid to those he called “pranksters”. Prof Sala says he is “outraged”

Social Affairs

A nativity play for our times

All the fairytale-land characters have come together to put on a nativity show. Little Red Riding Hood is playing the part of Mary, Goldilocks is Gabriel, the Three Little Pigs are the wise men and watch out for the innkeeper – it’s the big bad wolf!”

Politics

Tartan and home truths

Oh, the swing of the kilt and the skirl of the bagpipes! The tens of thousands who gather annually to try their strength at tossing Scottish cabers around … in Leipzig.

A mania for “the heedrum-hodrum Celtic twilight”, which is afflicting parts of northern Europe, is one of the topics to be researched at a new centre for the study of the Scottish diaspora at Edinburgh University.

But since its launch at the end of last month, the new centre, funded by a £1m donation from a Scottish financier, has been caught up in controversy. Its founder, perhaps Scotland’s foremost historian, Professor Tom Devine, announced in the opening lecture that he intended to challenge the “Burns supper” school of Scottish history. As a result, he has been subject to attacks by nationalists accusing him of “unionist revisionism”.