In the space of one school year in East Lothian, Scotland, we created one of the most vibrant and effective social media platforms schools' education had ever seen. How can the open culture it led to be replicated in education systems around the world? Our adoption strategy led quickly to large numbers of students, teachers and parents blogging, using wikis to collaborate and podcasting their student council campaigns.

Parents felt closer to the work their children were doing in class, students felt more in control of their learning, publishing their work, thoughts on how they could do better and making comments on the teacher's propositions and activities. Even the Head of Education started his own blog, reaching into the classrooms of every teacher in his school district.

Attainment has been helped greatly by the ease of communication and high aspirations for publishing (best quality) work to the largest audience possible. Students' self-belief and confidence in their create ability has been sharpened from pre-school to school-leaver. We created a 5000% increase in the number of people publishing online, a figure which continues to grow this year.

The big idea? How can we use a network of LIFTers to help spread this more open culture further afield?

Ewan's edu.blogs.com: http://edu.blogs.com
More detail on this project:
http://edu.blogs.com/edublogs/2007/08/blc07-mcintos-2.html