I live now in a small regional capital in a sparsely populated country on the bottom side of the globe. So getting the gig to podcast Macworld 2009 in San Francisco was like heaven on a memory stick. Everywhere you turned there was that buzz of Mac aficionado innovation, and everyone you ran into – regardless it seems of who they had actually voted for – had a sense of some Obama-inspired renewal about to wash over the country.

So it came as a bit of a shock when we did this interview with Alan November, the name behind November Learning and one of the US’s top educational commentators, and heard instead a very different story. Shot in Moscone West, this chat paints a picture of complacency and lack of vision in American education, and suggests some real concerns about the capacity of the system to make positive and significant change.

This podcast episode is a little different to our usual format. For a start its video rather than straight audio. And instead of one of us Aussies putting the questions to Alan, we have as our guest interviewer Chris Walsh. President of Epoch Learning, Chris was a co-founder of Brightstorm and a founding director at the Google Teaching Academy. Chris tackles some hard issues with Alan in this two-part interview, though they have a lot of fun doing it.

Alan November has his Building Learning Communities Conference coming up in Boston at the end of July, with a cast of high-powered keynotes and a promise that the event will be a ‘jam session’ of stimulating ideas. It sounded so interesting we even let Alan do an escalator promo for it at the end of the interview!