Last week I attended a funeral of Peter Wright who I had worked closely with over 20 years ago when I was a member of the Higher Education Quality Council's (HEQC) Quality Enhancement Group. Peter was the senior member of the team and very much a father figure who acted as a sort of mentor and intellectual guide to the rest of us who were at least ten years younger. He was a lovely man full of whit and endless anecdotes many of them very funny. I would often hear him talking to colleagues in the adjacent office and roaring with laughter. It made for a very enjoyable work environment and we were as a team seriously productive. During the last two years of our existence between 1995-97 we engaged in what was called the Graduate Standards Programme (GSP)  a large scale research project into the way academic standards were perceived and the ways in which they were constructed and assured in a higher education system that had undergone massive expansion in the previous six years. It was my first taste of how to engage a whole higher education system in discussion as we all participated in conversations and discussions the length and breadth of the country. The numerous reports we produced informed the National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education Chaired by Sir Ron (later Lord) Dearing and some of the Committee's recommendations relating to assurance of standards  that later became the foundation of the Quality Assurance Agency's regulatory framework, can be linked to the GSP work. Yet there is virtually no mention of this work on the internet, or HEQC for that matter. It's as if it never existed. So, as a tribute to Peter, and the work of our small GSP team, I decided to scan (with the help of my daughter) the two final reports published in 1997. REPORTS
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The death of a friend and former colleague is always sad but it is a great stimulus for reflection and for reconnecting with people you once shared your life with and they with you.

The photo shows members of the Quality Enhancement Group in 1997 The core members of the GSP Team were Robin Middlehurst (leader - front row second from right), Peter Wright (back row third from left) Robin Jackson  and myself (back row first and second from right), Alan Crispin (fourth from right) and Vivienne Rivis (back row second from left).

I've had a break over the summer from writing - actually that's not true I have done quite a lot of writing but its been in the form of a book about my family's history that I have been completing. Well its just arrived from the printers and I'm pleased with the way it has turned out. I learnt a lot about my family in the process.
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Even though I'm retired my work patterns seem to be in sympathy with the academic cycle. In the last couple of weeks I have been working on a plan for Creative Academic's work in the coming year with co-founder Chrissi Nerantzi. It's been a very energising process as we have generated and connected ideas, then approached people we thought might be interested and getting feedback and usually commitments. While a plan is only words on a page the affordances contained within it are huge, what it does do is build a picture or a vision of what might be in a year's time. It's both the vision and the concrete steps that make the plan both a motivating device and a tool for engagement.  http://www.creativeacademic.uk/2016-17-programme.html

So much of my learning is social. I'm working on an article with Rob Ward and this afternoon he sent me something he had written and I followed up a link to a Youtube recording of a talk given by Randy Bass on e-portfolios https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWJN6Aap9nU  I found it quite inspiring in the way he argued for the redesign of higher education for 2030 and his ideas linked well to my ideas on lifewide learning, creativity and learning ecologies It's well worth watching and it's got me thinking of how we might draw on some of his ideas in our creative pedagogies and learning ecologies project. Once you have a plan you have a tool for both imagination and integration.