My new experience this week was to be instigator of the 43rd LTHEchat Learning and Teaching in Higher Education Twitter channel ( #LTHEchat  http://lthechat.com/) so this post is my way of reflecting on my experience as a self-development process in order to explore how my creativity featured in it.

I recently came across Tom Senningers simple but useful learning zome model (1) it made a lot of sense to me. It pointed out that in order to develop we need to stretch ourselves. Just chugging along doing what we always do will not do it neither will being pushed into a situation where we are at 6's and 7's. With the benefit of hindsight I can see that by agreeing to act as instigator of a Twitter conversation I was putting myself into my stretch zone as I had not done this before. The stretch zone is outside our comfort zone. It involves some risk, for example making a fool of yourself in public.  Its unfamiliar and we find it challenging and have to work hard to understand and perform in it. But it's also exciting and rich in affordance for exploring something new and for creative action, and having experienced it we will almost certainly have developed some aspect of ourselves. It's the zone which holds the greatest potential for our personal and professional development so it's worth accepting the risk.

Creativity is seeing affordance and development is
the process that enables affordance to be realised
 
When Chrissi Nerantzi, one of the organisers, invited me to act as an 'instigator' I did my usual trick of trying to imagine what 'it' (the twitter conversation) might look like. I have a habit of trying to connect things, which I suppose is where I think much of my own invention lies,  as only I am interested in the things I'm interested in and therefore take the trouble to try to connect them. In this way I can invent stuff that stands a good chance of being original, because I'm the only one trying to do it!
 
One of the ways I have come to understand personal creativity is the ability to see the affordance(s) in something and development then being the means to enable you to access and make the most of the affordance. I could see the affordance in connecting the #lthechat with my interests in creativity and my current projects - producing the April issue of Creative Academic Magazine and contributing to World Creativity and Innovation Week. I reasoned that if we stuck to the same general theme 'exploring creativity in development and innovation' then they would inevitably be connected in a synergistic way. So I sat down and thought about some questions which  provided the framework for the #LTHEchat. I also designed a simple on-line questionnaire to gather more systematically information on the creative beliefs of participants.

#LTHEchat 
The chat has been storified by Chris Jobling. Two hours before we started the conversation I posted this image and invited people to share their perspectives on the sorts of journeys that development took them on: because development always involves a journey. I didn't get many responses but I like to think that it prepared the ground for conversation and hopefully planted the idea that there is no single right answer where developmental journeys are concerned - only lots of possibility.  In fact the answer to this question is development takes you where you need to go - you may not know exactly where you want to go when you start but generally you end up at, or near, the right destination.

#LTHEchat is an interesting phenomenon because it is a co-operative co-created process that produces a tangible product - the ideas, perspectives, experiences, insights and visualisations that are shared and curated on Twitter, and intangible outcomes - the learning and development of participants. The conversational part of this journey is co-created by participants within which many ideas, perspectives and resources are shared. These things emerge in response to the questions and to what other participants post including their visualisations. It is an energetic and  highly emergent process.  Neither the instigator or the participants know in advance what will come out of the process so the idea of exploration is very relevant to this type of developmental process.
​
an explorer can never know what he is
exploring until it has been explored' (2) 

However, with over 500 posts in 60mins the information flow is quite overwhelming. I was definitely in my stretch zone it felt exciting and there was a sense of anticipation that something new would emerge every second of the process. But at times I felt I was in my panic zone wondering how to respond and not surprisingly I felt distinctly uncreative in responding to the odd post and making my pre-prepared contributions aimed at promoting further conversation.  ​But I was able to enjoy the chaotic way in which ideas collided and emerged through the process.

The final product of this fairly chaotic conversational process is preserved in the #LTHEchat page and storified. It's also synthesised by individuals who share their reflections on what came out of the process for them. But the effects of the process are much more than what is preserved in the web space. The effects reside in the way that individuals now think about the things that were discussed, in the new tools/mediating artefacts they acquired and will use again to think about these things and in new relationships that were formed. Thanks to the event I have 18 new connections on twitter. I also have a new collaborative relationship and access to a lot of new resources and to an experience on which I can reflect and develop further my understanding of the relationship between my creativity and my development. Its often the intangibles, like new relationships, that hold most potential for future learning, achievement and creativity. In this way development for the present is also developing new potential for the future.

Development is fundamentally a search for new  meaning aided by our creativity

But the developmental journey relating to the chat is longer than the twitter conversation. For me it included the preparation and design, participation and the enjoyable experience of reading posts the day after the event and responding to those posts I found particularly interesting. It also involved this reflective process through which I looked back on the whole experience to make more sense of it.

One of the thoughts I had during the #LTHEchat conversation was that development was a process through which we searched for, discovered and attributed new meaning to what we are doing or what we have done. Whether we invent new process, perform something or make/produce something we are investing meaning in what we are doing and what we achieve. In this case I am interested in how my own creativity featured in my development process and this was my focus for reflection. In my synthesis of my own developmental process formed around the #LTHEchat I can recognise a number of steps within which I can appreciate how my creativity was involved in my development.

  In my synthesis picture of my own developmental process I recognise a number of steps within which I can appreciate my own creativity.
​
Step 1 involved me using my imagination to see the affordance in my life: affordance that enabled me to connect my involvement in the #LTHEchat with two other projects - production of the April issue of Creative Academic Magazine and the other work I'm doing for World Creativity and Innovation Week. My creativity was used to visualise a future and connect up things that I wanted to be related.
 
In Step 2 I explored ideas and made a design for the conversation based on 6 questions (and some supplementary questions / statement) and some visual aids I wanted to share. Creativity again involved imagination but this was also combined with reasoning in order to create a design that I hoped would work. I also prepared some visual aids drawing on and adapting materials I had used before and creating some new material.
 
Step 3 was to actively engage in the conversational process and try to respond to the wealth of ideas that populated the #LTHEchat  space. This was the hardest part for me - responding in real time is challenging when you are trying to read the material that is being posted, respond to posts that grab your attention and add the contributions you want to make. I did not feel creative at all in this part of the process. My one creative moment was when I saw the affordance in the artistic talent of one of the participants and invited him to contribute to Creative Academic Magazine.
 
Step 4 After the event I had time to look at the posts and assimilate some of the ideas. I had the time to compose a response and also to connect to people. I also undertook my own analysis to draw out the key ideas (when completed this will be posted as a pdf attachment) and I wrote this reflective piece and produced my narrative picture to capture the essence of my developmental process. This is my way of learning and creating personal meaning from the experience and it involves thinking in an integrative way combining imagination, analysis, reasoning and feelings and it most definitely feels like I am thinking creatively and producing something new. Its not in any way innovative but I am bringing things into existence that were not there before.

This final step in the development process enables us to see the whole rather than only the parts. It enables us to appreciate how well we have realised the affordance or potential we believed these particular circumstances offered and we can used this knowledge in future. Perhaps this subtle change in our understanding is where much of our creativity lies and yet this often goes unrecognised as a dimension of our creativity. Having reflected on my development process I was struck by how similar the overal pattern was to Zimmerman's (3) model of self-regulation - forethought, action and reflection - which of course is the normal pathway for how we learn in situations that are new to us.
 
I have always thought that I am creative in finding and persuading people to work with me and on this occasion, I am delighted to say, I found a new collaborator - Simon Rae @simonrae whose creative illustrations added humour and insight to the conversational process.

Thank you to everyone who participated and made this such an enjoyable experience.
  
Invitation
If you would like to contribute to the April issue of  Creative Academic Magazine on the theme of Creativity in Development please visit http://www.creativeacademic.uk/magazine.html

Sources
1  Senninger, T. (2000). Abenteuer leiten – in Abenteuern lernen. Münster/Germany: Ökotopia. Learning Zone Model. http://www.thempra.org.uk/social-pedagogy/key-concepts-in-social-pedagogy/the-learning-zone-model/
2 Bateson, G. (2000 reprint. First published 1972). Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology. Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press
3 Zimmerman B J (2000) Self-regulatory cycles of learning. In G A Straka (ed) Conceptions of self-directed learning, theoretical and conceptual considerations. New York, Waxman 221-234

​My Narrative of #LTHEchat43

Chris Joblings Storify

There is something really invigorating and uplifting about being amongst enthusiastic people who care about students, and teaching and learning. We all need to experience this from time to time to reinforce our beliefs that what we are doing is worthwhile. I know that I don't do enough of this so my resolution this year is to do it more often, so yesterday  I participated in the MELSIG Digital Narratives conference in Nottingham where I was exposed to some very interesting examples of how social media might be used to enhance learning. My practical takeaway was being introduced to storify by Sue Beckingham and then in the workshop to begin making my own story based on my recent experience of the #creativeHE course, using the storify platform. I can see that this will be a useful tool in my work.
 
Everyone's narrative of an experience will be unique and selective - like my narrative. Through the presentations and the conversations I had, and my general knowledge of what is happening in higher education I can see that there is much interest and experimentation in the use of social media and many universities are developing frameworks, strategies and capabilities for supporting the use of digital technologies influenced by many of the people who were at the MELSIG event.  These are the key to systematically incorporating social media into teachers' and learners' ecologies for learning and achieving.

My sense is that a creative teacher who is confident with the technology and willing to experiment, can find many ways of using social media to enhance their students’ experience of learning but that, for some contexts it might seem artificial to do so. So choosing the right context and having a clear understanding of why social media are being used within a pedagogic strategy, and communicating this to students and securing their involvement, are all essential.  Using social media highlights the importance of the process of learning and using technology to assist in generating, selecting and making sense of knowledge. This means that attention has to be paid to the process and experience of learning (HOW & WHY), as well as the content (WHAT) of learning. Something that higher education is generally not very good at.
 
James Walker, in his excellent presentation of his 'Dawn of the Unread' project, quoted someone as saying 'if the 20th century is about knowledge the 21st century is about experience', and the way we convey our experience and the personal knowledge and wisdom we have gained from it, is through the stories we tell about it. It seems to me that we don't do nearly enough in higher education to encourage our students to tell their stories of how they have learnt and why they have learnt what they have learnt.  Narratives are not just annotated content they are the story of the how we developed our understanding of this subject or situation. I felt that James, and other presenters, offered insights into how this might be achieved but we need to adapt the outcomes of a student learning experience accordingly if narratives of learning and achievement are to be recognised and valued.
 
#melsigntu was a most enjoyable experience with lots of interesting perspectives, useful ideas and practical examples offered in a warm and friendly spirit of collegiality demonstrated by participants' willingness to share their own resources. Well done to the NTU digital practice team, Andrew Middleton  and all the contributors for providing such a good experience.

Image credit - great cartoon posted by Simon Rae ​https://twitter.com/simonrae_

If the end of the year causes us to reflect on the past, the start of the year draws our attention to the future. While the past is known and familiar the future is unknown and uncertain. I can look back on last year and see what I have done and what I, often with the help of others, have achieved. I can anticipate continuity in some of my projects but have little idea about what that continuity will mean because the detail will be made up as I do it. Part of me enjoys this uncertainty because I love the idea that many of the things that make my life interesting just emerge from the circumstances of my life. So I go forward in the belief that if I put myself into situations that have potential for new things to happen, my life this year will end up full of stuff that I cannot imagine.
 
But I am old and wise enough to know that emergence doesn't happen by itself. Recently, I have been working with Nikos, a postgraduate Greek student on our magazines. It has been a great experience and I have been able to make some interesting things happen for him. Looking back he claimed that how it all happened was a mystery to him... but it was less of a mystery to me because I had been instrumental in making things happen for him. I am aware of emergence being a property of complex systems and it seems to me that emergence is an fundamental and important property of an ecology in which people are interacting, doing things together in ways that lead to new ideas and new things. Our ecologies for learning and developing are complex systems of contexts, situations, relationships, resources, to create or access the affordances we have for learning and developing in the circumstances of our life.

Putting myself into situations with potential, is partly passive - like building a website and showing what I'm interested in and hope that it will attract visitors who are interested in the same sort of things and this will increase my potential for new things to emerge. Some of it is more deliberate like producing a book and then promoting it with the purpose of connecting to people who care about the things I am talking about, or finding and following a link on a blog and engaging the author.
 
In the past I have made a rough plan of what I want to do and achieve in the coming year but when I look back at the last few years most of the interesting and important things I have done did not feature in my plan. So this year I'm going to trust that as long as I keep putting myself in situations with good potential for new and interesting things to emerge - good things will inevitably emerge if I let them and once I recognise them I encourage them to flourish.
 
I think we need to be aware of new possibilities and looking back I can also see that I devote quite a lot of time to capturing the stuff that emerges in my life - perhaps this is a measure of how much I value the things I do or that happen to me. I keep track of some of it in my blogs and then use the information to try to see the bigger picture more clearly. I am effectively creating a narrative using my favourite digital tools. The narrative captures both the detail and the meaning making that emerges from the detail.
 
My current substantive writing project, 'exploring learning ecologies' is very much formed around the emergence, development and connection of ideas over several years. Similarly, the latest issue of Lifewide Magazine 'Our Creative Life' was not planned, rather it emerged as an idea 6 weeks ago as a result of participating in an on-line course that I was invited to participate in only 12 weeks ago. It's because of such experiences that I trust that the things that give meaning to my life will emerge again.
 
Next week I'm doing something active to put myself into an area with potential for new things to happen by participating in
MELSIGs Digital Narratives Workshop  By meeting new people, encountering new ideas and tools and generally informing myself about  other people's practices I anticipate that new things will emerge as long as I can recognise them.