I've been involved in two iterations of #creativeHE and both times I have been struck by the relatively small number of active participants compared to the number of people who registered their interest. Until I read Lisa Barone's blog(1) about lurkers which introduced me to  the 1% rule.  The 1% rule is a rule of thumb pertaining to participation in an internet community, stating that only 1% of the users of a website actively create new content, while the other 99% of the participants only lurk. Variants include the 1-9-90 rule (sometimes 90–9–1 principle or the 89:10:1 ratio),[1] which states that in a collaborative website such as a wiki, 90% of the participants of a community only view content, 9% of the participants edit content, and 1% of the participants actively create new content. 
 
 
This tallies very well with my experiences of online discussion forums. There is nothing wrong with not participating, although it can make those who are participating feel uncomfortable, but the challenge for any discussion event to create the interest and conditions where more than 1% of non-moderator participants want to share their thoughts or experiences through a post.
 
Sources:
Barone L (2010) How Can I Push You From Lurker To Participant?
http://outspokenmedia.com/online-marketing/can-i-push-you-from-lurker-to-participant/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)
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Its Day 4 and my reflection today is still on the #creativeHE jam jar with its affordance for conversation to emerge from participants' interacting with the activities and each other.

A conversation has affordance for involving you on a journey. You don't know where it will take you but you have to get involved in order to realise this potential. Conversations happen in a context like #creativeHE an if you don't get involved you miss the opportunity to have that conversation forever. Here is an example from Day 3 #creativeHE.
 
A conversation has to begin somewhere and this one started when a participant shared an experience and a challenge she was tussling with. She shared her ideas and the tools she had used to create a picture. She talked about fieldwork and maps which was something I could relate to as I have been a geology teacher in the past. In fact I love maps - wherever I go I will buy a map and I love wandering around with a map as I did recently in Barcelona.
 
Importantly she invited other people to share their ideas so I did and received an appreciative thank you. I then shared some of my own experiences about using maps and this brought others into the conversation and the idea of maps suddenly took on a life of its own. I wanted to keep the conversation going so made a post about using maps and invited comments responses from another participant really opened up the idea. The important things that emerged for me were:

• reinforced belief that you have to get involved to have a conversation that takes you in the direction you would like to go and opens up directions you had not imagined
• conversational relationships with two different people from which other conversations might flow
• the wisdom that more and better ideas can generated in relaxed but purposeful conversation and facilitated group conversations
• links to new resources that I could use in future
• new insights about maps and the ways they might be used to help students think and learn
• some interesting contexts and practices that can be used to stimulate students' imaginations and the integrative thinking so necessary for creativity

 
Through this process I made my own thinking explicit.  Regardless of whether we are travelling through a landscape/townscape or a scape of concepts making and using maps is essential to exploring new territory especially when it is COMPLEX. I also realised that my awareness of what I had learnt, my ability to reflect and draw out my learning, had been enhanced by making a map of the conversation as it unfolded (see pdf file below)

TODAYS ACTIVITY (DAY 4)  Model makers: Watch Prof. David Gauntlett’s Food for Thought clip around today’s theme at https://youtu.be/wbBhOSRS7dI Capture your responses through creating a model out of raw and or cooked pasta shapes and other bits and pieces. 

In the spirit, but not to the letter, I MADE REPRESENTATION of this conversation about maps through a picture - my preferred medium of self expression. I did try making the physical model but the symbolism felt artificial so I returned to making a picture. It shows three people in a conversation in which we each drew on the maps we hold of our experiences and selected from our experiences some that could be connected in the context of the conversation. By sharing and discussing we co-created meanings.

The insight I gained from doing this was through purposeful conversation you end up with a BIGGER/BETTER MAP OF YOUR WORLD that you didn't have before.

If creativity involves changing our understandings, seeing the world differently, then we must recognise that the sort of scenario I have described involves creativity of the mini-c variety (Kaufman and Beghetto 2009)

Kaufman, J.C. and Beghetto, R.A. (2009) Beyond Big and Little: The Four C Model of Creativity. Review of General Psychology 13, 1, 1-12.

This week I'm participating in a 5 day version of #creativeHE  Its day three and Chrissi has posted the daily activity​

Storymaker: Read an interesting article and re-create the story using 3 photographs/cartoons/doodles, with captions and share here in the community. Comment on stories contributed by others. Reflect on this experience at the end of the day. Where could this experience take you?

I decided to read and create a story around the posts made for the Jam Jar activity on day 1. A summary is provided at the end of the post.

JAM JAR STORY
 
One day a group of people who shared an interest in creativity in higher education teaching and learning were invited to share the contents of their jam jars.  Several people looked around in their immediate environment and found jam jars that they used. They described their contents creating and sharing meaning in the process.
 
Their stories revealed that jam jars are used to accumulate and store resources. These include materials (like screws, bots and tea-bags) and tools like scissors, glue sticks and digital tools, that have potential to be used, in the right context, to enable us, or others, to use our creativity.  It seems that creativity is more likely to emerge if certain resources are readily available in our immediate environment and we have the desire or need to design, make or fix things. In other words, jam jars (both physically and metaphorically) are important in the ecologies we create to learn, develop and achieve.

From a higher education teaching perspective, perhaps the wisdom in the story is that the role of the teacher is not only to create jam jars containing resources for themselves and their students to use, but also to encourage and enable students to create their own jam jars full of things that they will need to tackle the problems and challenges they will encounter in their life.
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From a professional development perspective we have to keep on developing our own jam jars and finding jam jars that others have created who are willing to share their affordances. Perhaps the #creativeHE itself provides us with a good example of a collegial jam jar stuffed with affordance for learning and development which are open and accessible to anyone.