I have begun working on the September issue of Lifewide Magazine which Julian Stodd has kindly agreed to guest edit on the theme of the 'Social Age of Learning'.  Julian has written a lot on this matter and his thoughtful blog is full of great ideas and visual representations and I knew we would not be short of material to work with. I read his e-book on the Social Age and also trawled through his blog before putting together half a dozen articles that I thought would capture some of the most important ideas. By doing this I was able to identify how we might add value to Julian's thoughts and interpret, translate and contextualise his ideas for the Lifewide Education community. Intuitively, I feel his writings have much to offer our approach to learning and developing but I must first apply them to my own life in order to understand how we might use them.

Social Leadership: an idea worthy of attention
One of the ideas that caught my attention was the idea of Social Leadership. 'The Social Age requires Social Leaders: leaders who work within and alongside communities to create meaning, to deliver.'1

All leadership is social,  its "a process of social influence in which one person enlists the aid and support of others in the accomplishment of a common task" 2 There seem to be two senses in which the term social leadership is used. '[it] has been used in a technical sense by researchers for over fifty years. More recently it is being used by community organizations and others to describe a much broader perspective on people-centred activities aimed at creating a better world. Beyond this, I would suggest that it has great potential for use within the technical vocabulary of leadership studies, as a framework for the construction and evaluation of more comprehensive ways of understanding what it means to lead.' 3

My sense is that Julian is using the term as part of the conceptual vocabulary of what it means to lead in the Social Age whereas I believe that social leadership needs to be connected to a social purpose. For example, social leaders are "leaders with a social purpose who seek to change some aspect of the[ir] world"4 or 'social leadership means to devote one’s life and talents to improving society'5.  Social leadership 'must also take into account human values, both ethical and aesthetic. Ethical values are usually expressed in terms of what we think is right, or good......Aesthetic values refer to such concepts as harmony and beauty, elements that are essential to our perception and appreciation of the world around us...'3

My role as founder and leader of Lifewide Education Community Interest Company is consistent with conceptions of social leadership that are motivated by social purpose. I have ideas and a vision for how our educational system could be improved and have tried to enact that vision through my work as an educator and social leader. I am seeking to influence others by sharing my ideas and attracting other people who share my values and beliefs and I am trying to create the conditions where people who would like to develop and apply these ideas can belong to a community of shared interest. Our purpose as an organisation is to serve our community of self-identified people who are interested in the idea of incorporating a lifewide learning perspective in formal education.

The NET Model of Social Leadership
Figure 1 Julian Stodd's NET Model of Social Leadership1

Julian's NET model of social leadership is concerned with the WHAT and HOW of social leaders but not so much the WHY? His NET model of social leadership contains three core concepts Narrative, Engagement and Technology and nine components -  Curation, Storytelling, Sharing, Community, Reputation, Authority, Collaboration, Social Capital and Co-creation.  While I agree that all these components (and more) are associated with social leadership I am not clear why the core components have been selected. The NET model does not so much provide me with the answer to my question, 'what does social leadership mean to me?' rather it provides me with a useful aid to thinking about the idea of social leadership in the context of my role as founder and leader of Lifewide Education.

Importance of social purpose
I have a 'social purpose' and I am 'seek[ing] to change some aspect of the world' and the reason I established the Lifewide Education Community Interest Company was to create an organisation to help me engage 'the world' to try to raise awareness of the idea of lifewide learning and personal development and convince people and institutions (particularly universities and colleges) of the value of a lifewide approach to encouraging, supporting and recognising learning in higher education.

Social leadership without a purpose is of little social value. Social purpose and value which inspire a vision of a better society, need to be at the heart of any model of social leadership. Without these there is no compelling reason for people to do anything different or to commit to being part of something they believe will lead to change that is consistent with their ideals for the society they want to live in.

My representation of social leadership. All this stuff goes on, some of it will be planned and co-ordinated but much of it will be emergent and improvised. The social leader creates new ecologies for learning, developing and achieving the social change he desires. Comments and suggestions for development welcome.

My representation of the dimensions of social leadership (Figure 2)   has SOCIAL PURPOSE & VALUE at its heart and four interconnected core elements: LEADING, COMMUNICATING, ENGAGING & DEVELOPING. These elements act together in a coordinated and integrated way to enable social leaders to create new ECOLOGIES6  for achieving the social change they and others desire and in the process they help co-create new ECOSOCIAL SYSTEMS.

1 Social leadership is about 'leading'. It's about envisioning and articulating a sense of purpose, direction and more concrete goals, then creating and working with others to co-create the conditions that encourage movement towards these goals. It involves all the things you associate with leadership like planning, securing and managing resources, building capacity to do things, contributing time and effort to make things happen, monitoring and evaluating progress and making self-accountable to the community. Actions speak louder than words -  It involves modelling one's own behaviour in ways that demonstrate you believe in what you are doing. Reputation and authority are personal rather than organisational and they have to be earned through things that a social leader does.

2 Social leadership is about 'communicating'. Social leaders have to be communicators, how else will people know what they stand for and understand what they want to achieve?  They have to turn abstract ideas into stories that people can understand and care about. Communication is about trying to influence the way people think and see the world and offering alternatives to what currently exists. Social leadership is about creating and co-creating narratives that explain the proposition for social change and inspire and compel people to get involved. These forms of communication facilitate development of relationships connecting people to the purposes, values, ideas and challenges that underlie the social enterprise. Communication takes many forms - written, spoken, visual and may involve many different media using many different tools.  

The internet and technological tools of the Social Age provide many aids to this process and enable social leaders to reach out to people in ways that would not have been possible even a few years ago. As Julian Stodd points out the social media we now have access to enable 'social collaboration and reach [and] socially collaborative conversations, about the co-creation of meaning in communities, about supporting engagement and development in these communities and about collaborating, to achieve more than we ever can alone'1 They help social leaders accomplish the social changes they are seeking.

3 Social leadership is about 'engaging' people: Having identified a purpose or cause that will connect to what people will believe and value the role of the social leader is to try to involve people in bringing about social change. This is about the ways and means or capabilities that leaders and their teams can bring to the task and these will reflect the nature of the proposition and the cultural practices of the domain. Engagement may involve such things as distributing information, holding meetings and conferences, creating on-line forums and blogs, conducting inquiries, surveys and other research, sharing practices, collaborations, co-creative activities, campaigns and other forms of collective actions, utilising tools and technologies of the Social Age. The social leader is also responsible for ensuring that the products and results of such activity are curated and utilised in the further pursuit of social goals.

Through these processes, relationships and activities people who are interested begin to form community - at one level this may simply be declaration of interest in an idea and a willingness to receive information and stay connected and informed. At another level it might involve advocacy, campaigning and the creation of new practices. Eventually, if sufficient people buy into the ideas and ideals, social change may occur.

4 Social leadership is about developing ideas so they can be turned into new social practices:  social leaders take ideas and purposes that motivate them and develop them, with the help of others, so they can be applied more easily.  Development  means a progression or movement from a simpler or lower to a more advanced, mature, or complex form or stage. Development is a process to achieve certain goals in certain ways or a trajectory along which certain things change or are accomplished. It  is the process that enables everyone to change themselves and the social worlds they inhabit. It is the process through which new things - material or virtual objects, social practices and performances are brought into existence or changed. 

Social leaders share their thoughts and ideas and encourage others to criticise or offer different perspectives. They seek to underpin their ideas with research and enquiry and involve themselves and others in developing evidence to support their propositions. They connect to authorities that are willing to lend their support and they collaborate with people who are willing to show how ideas might be applied. They experiment with their own practices and evaluate the results.The process of developing and applying ideas with others leads to the co-creation of new meanings and deeper shared understandings. It is through development that people begin to see the world differently and they begin to embody this change and eventually this is how social change is accomplished.

5 Social leadership is about creating ecologies for changing existing eco--social systems: Inspired by their vision for a better society, social leaders create new ecologies comprising their processes and contexts, relationships, networks, interactions, tools, technologies and activities that provide them with opportunities and resources for learning, developing and achieving something of social value (Figure 3). As they embrace and include people who share their spirit, values and beliefs into their learning ecology they establish new eco-social systems for change.

My representation of a learning ecology. Social leaders are creators of new ecologies and eco-social systems 6

Jay Lemke7 describes the important features of ecosocial systems as:
•     the different contexts and communities in which individuals co-exist in relative stability and inter-dependence 
•     a set of overlapping but distinct spaces/places each with its own rules, affordances and constraints 
•     a self-regulating system that consumes, recycles [and creates] resources 
•    an organisation in which change occurs over time, modifying individuals and inter-relations, without destroying the overall    
     cohesion and balance – ie the ecosystem is both adaptive and resilient to change 

A social leader creates new senses of what is right and what should be in existing ecosocial systems and helps create the conditions for their adaptation. Their significance is to 'modify... individuals and inter-relations, without destroying the overall cohesion and balance' of the ecosystem.

One final thought, implicit to the pursuit of social change in the ways I have described above, is the notion of social capital. 'Effective social leaders have high social capital and develop it in others. This generosity and humility reinforces reputation and authority'1 It is not something I would claim for myself but  social leaders need self-belief and self-efficacy to sustain involvement in their social project.

 Invitation
These thoughts have been inspired by Julian Stodd's thoughtful blog on social leadership. I welcome views and further perspectives on these ideas. normanjjackson@btinternet.com  

Sources of ideas
1 Stodd, J. articles on Social Leadership http://julianstodd.wordpress.com/?s=social+leadership
2 Chemers M. (1997) An integrative theory of leadership. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers
3 Campbell, R. A. (2012) http://ezinearticles.com/?What-Is-Social-Leadership?&id=7155665
4 Clore Social Leadership Programme http://www.cloresocialleadership.org.uk/about.aspx
5 http://www.thesocialleader.com/social-leadership/  
6 Jackson, N. J. (2013) The Concept of Learning Ecologies, in N. J. Jackson and G.B. Cooper (eds) Lifewide             Learning, Education and Personal Development E-book  Chapter A5 available on-line at http://www.lifewideebook.co.uk/conceptual.html
7 Lemke, J. (2000) Across the Scales of Time: Artifacts, Activities, and Meanings in Ecosocial .  Mind, Culture and Activity 7 (4), 273–290 available on-line at http://www.jaylemke.com/storage/Scales-of-time-MCA2000.pdf

What does social leadership mean to me?

I had another powerful experience of co-creation this week at Sheffield Hallam University (SHU) Learning and Teaching Conference and I am thinking that creating processes for co-creation is a manifestation of learning and producing in the social age of learning (see julianstodd's blog).  The invitation to speak at SHU was unusual in that the organising team led by Andrew Middleton wanted to try something new - they wanted to link an idea I was presenting (learning ecologies) to a series of workshops in which conference participants could apply the idea to their own life and development process. Through Andrew's facilitation I was able to work with the organising team to devise a workshop that seems to have worked well though the organising team are still gathering feedback.

Working this way involves a lot more work than just turning up and presenting something but, as I facilitated one of the workshops, I realised it gave me a great deal of satisfaction to see and hear participants turning abstract idea into meaningful conversations and representations of lived experiences (some of them deeply personal). As a speaker I often have no way of knowing whether my ideas have any relevance to the lives of my audience but the workshop allowed me to see that at least on this occasion some of them did.

But the conference was also remarkable in the way I was able to involve many participants in sharing their knowledge and beliefs using an on-line survey administered just two days before the conference. I think the fact that the conference was imminent encouraged a very good response rate - 135 of the 300 people responded.  I used SurveyMonkey for the first time which meant the data were analysed and processed in real time and I was able not only to present the results to those attending the conference but I could give the contributors a link to the survey report. I think this new capacity to create, administer, analyse and use data from surveys has revolutionised the way I will approach my public speaking. It should also be acknowledge that the design of the survey had been informed by another collaborative exercise in which 8 SHU staff had contributed to an email survey on the meanings of personal and professional development. The feedback gained through this survey has reinforced my view that personal development is perceived as an ecologicial process - over 30% of responses to a question on what three words best describe the meaning of personal development used the terms growth and growing while another 27% used improvement and enhancing.

Using my experience to think about co-creation

Julian Stodd offers a perspective on co-creation in his Seven Strands of Co-creation blog He writes that 'social learning spaces do not just bring us together to share what we have learnt, they bring us together in spaces where we co-create meaning, Where we write a story together'. That is certainly true of this narrative of co-creation. Julian creates a conceptual tool with seven elements which provide a useful aid to reflect on the process of co-creation in the context of my experience.

Co-creation requires vision. Not the vision of the individual, but rather the shared vision of the community. A desire to learn, a desire to share ideas and do something worthwhile. We come together in these spaces because of the vision, to be inspired by others, as well as to offer inspiration ourselves. It’s also about our field of vision being wider with more eyes: more people bringing a wider range of experience, a wider range of sources, creating more wisdom and meaning. The breadth and differences within community make it stronger. Vision inspires us. JS

While I completely agree that vision and imagination is essential in any creative process I disagree with Julian when he says its not the vision of the individual but the vision of the community. In the co-creation processes I build and facilitate it has to be both. The vision of the individual who leads and facilitates co-creation is in the imagining of a process that can recruit, connect and harness the potential forces for collaboration and co-creation. It is in the imaginings of an ecology within which people will be motivated to contribute and to learn. This does not happen willy nilly - the conditions and opportunities have to be created.

The social space [containing the potential for co-creation] was the university's learning and teaching conference. The space for the purpose of sharing knowledge about learning and teaching provided me with opportunity to share my ideas and to refine (develop) the ideas further through the interactions and sharing of knowledge. Purpose also seems to me to be important - this may be a feature of the space but it also a feature of the process (see below). 

Shared value also sits at the heart of communication, we need to share value to understand each other and to develop more refined ideas. Social learning spaces allow us to share value and encourage us to do so by letting us understand the value of other participants. Shared value fosters cooperation and lets us build progressively more complex constructs, based on the foundation values, knowledge and understanding that we share. This is a co-creative process.

Standing in front of an audience certainly required me to state and share my values and I like to think that my values resonate with anyone who cares about the education and learning of our students. I agree with JS that people buy into your values before they cooperate and the high level of engagement of participants suggests to me that this certainly happened.

Part of refining our ideas and narratives in social spaces is that of editing things down. We can use social spaces in this function as we rehearse ideas.....Each time I tell the story, I get feedback and I refine what I say. The process of editing makes my narrative stronger. As my ideas reach maturity i should be able to edit them to the point that i can explain them concisely and with clarity. This only happens with careful editing and is central to the co-creative processes at play in social learning spaces.

This is certainly true I cannot give the same presentation twice I have to customise it for the audience and add new ways of explaining in the hope of clarifying ideas more than I was able to do before. I use pictures to help me and my refinements are usually in my images.

[In] our understanding of how people learn, reflection is a key but often neglected part. We need to take the learning and reflect upon it, to stand up the new learning against what we already know to be true and to develop our thinking accordingly. We may accept or reject new knowledge, but it’s an active process that takes reflection.

 I think it is essential but it is more than thinking about something after the event it is thinking about it while it is happening and if necessary adjusting some aspect of process or performance in order to make the process better for co-creation. If you don't engage in the metacognitive process then you miss opportunities.

Tempo  has a role too: one of the ways to drive up engagement in social learning spaces is to restrict the length of time that a community space is available, to give it a definite end. This helps drive up the tempo.

Most processes have a natural cycle and the conference had a definite time frame. There was a long lead in time but apart from preparation most of the action took place in the few days prior to the conference and during the conference. The social space for co-creation was indeed deliberately constrained. But I don't think it always has to be.

Challenge  is a vital part of learning: it’s something that is done well, if constructively, in social learning spaces. We can challenge ideas, argue our case and co-create a shared narrative out of it.

Trying to interest and engage 300 busy people in an organisation is undoubtedly a challenge. The process of public speaking expects challenge and the live twitter stream ensured that challenges and alternative ideas and viewpoints could be posted and viewed in a very public way.

So what's missing?
For me it's the notion of a process with purpose - a purpose that people buy into because they can see the value in doing so. Spaces are necessary - they provide the context for any co-creative exercise but so are processes that empower and enable people to contribute and within that process the resources and tools that are used to stimulate and engage people, and eventually gather and process knowledge that is shared. What is missing is missing from Julian's conceptual aid is the idea that co-creation is an ecological process involving people interacting with each and with the social space, tools and resources that have been created for the purpose of supporting co-creation. When I look back at the ecologies I have created over the last 12 months all have been social spaces and habitats for co-creation - the idea of developing knowledge through collaboration has been at the heart of the ecology. Such ecologies not only grow new knowledge and perspectives they facilitate access to the products of co-creation so there needs to be provision for collation, sense making and open access curation to enable future ecologies for co-creation to prosper. They connect the past with the present and provide the seeds from which new ecologies can be grown. For example already I am seeking to find out if others have conducted similar surveys on the meanings of personal and professional development.

Finally there is one more perspective I want to offer - the advent of social media has opened up entirely new possibilities for sharing views particularly in conference social spaces. This was brought home to be very forcibly when I reviewed the twitter feed  for the #SHULT14  conference as a whole and for my presentation in particular. For the first time I could see what people were taking from what I was saying albeit on a highly selective basis and it has given me confidence that my ideas resonate with at least a few people. I quite like this one.

Hilary Cunliffe ‏@hilary_cunliffe  Jun 19
#SHULT14 learning ecologies and the dreaded PDP. So how many program specifications include creativity? Go for it Norman Jackson!

What next?
Every learning ecology should contain within it the potential for further growth because of the relationships and resources that have been developed and the questions that have been raised. So I should also ask myself how can I make this ecological process even more powerful as a vehicle for co-creation? This is something I thought about as I was fulfilling my duties as the cleaner this morning!

Clearly there is still work to be done on analysing and reporting the survey but beyond this I thought that we might produce an issue of Lifewide Magazine on the Ecology of Development theme and invite workshop participants to contribute a narrative and a visual representation and perhaps extend this into a co-created chapter for the Creativity in Development e-book? I can also use a similar methodology in another talk I'm giving in a few weeks time - adapting the questionnaire in the light of this experience. In this way I can continue to build perspectives on the meanings of personal and professional development within universities. I also put out an enquiry into the SEDA Jisc mail list to see if anyone else had done any surveys or research - I was encouraged to have four responses back very quickly. Let's see where these ideas and actions take me.

It’s interesting how new relationships form. Like many other things that are meaningful in life it’s a co-creative process. A few weeks ago while working on the production (co-creation) of the next issue of Lifewide Magazine I came across Julian Stodd’s blog (1). I immediately saw the value of his thinking for our work and emailed him to see if we might draw on his blog for an article in the magazine. He readily agreed and over a week or so I wrote an article based on extracts from three of his blogs. In fact this article then shaped the title for the issue ‘Using social media in the age of social learning’. I shared the piece with Julian and he was happy for me to have taken and adapted his work in this way. I this way I had appropriated some of his thinking and writing and contextualised it for our own purpose. We also added a couple of illustrations that I commissioned from our community artist and finally another person formatted the article and incorporated it into the magazine. So ultimately four people were involved in this simple example of a co-creative process in which, the crystallised thoughts of one person shared through a blog were adapted and repurposed by another, illustrated by another and packaged by another to create a novel product (our magazine) that could be used to communicate with and engage others. In Carl Rogers' words, ‘a novel relational product has grown out of the uniqueness of the individuals and the circumstances and materials of their lives.’ (2)

During this process Julian said he’d like to meet up to share some stories and invited me to participate in a workshop he was running on the theme of co-creation, music and agility. I decided to take up his offer and on Wednesday I joined nine others in a conversation that was masterfully facilitated by Julian supported by Cath a singer/musician. What emerged was a rich and enjoyable conversation that was animated and illuminated by the insights and stories of participants. In other words together we co-created our experience even to the point where, after a little experimentation and guidance we collectively produced a simple tune using the ‘keezy’ app.

One of the things I like about Julian’s blog is the way he makes his thoughts visible using a word picture. These provide simple but powerful tools for reflection and analysis. The thing I like about them is that they are provisional. They provide a starting point not a conclusion and they contain within them the space and opportunity for improvisation. We started the day with his creation figure.

I did not agree with Julian when he said creation is not a process. The very act of constructing a process for learning or achieving something is a creative act. It brings the means to achieve something into existence and then executing it and inevitably adapting it along the way gives meaning and continuity to this act. And it's certainly about will and intention to think and act in a certain way to achieve something that is valued and meaningful. But stuff happens along the way that is not anticipated that we can latch onto and let it take us where it takes us so it's also about working with emergence.  Co-creation involves the thinking and doing of two or more people over a period of time in a context bound together in some sort of purposeful relationship. It might be a relationship that is invented for the purpose - that grows through the co-creative experience or it might be an existing relationships in which purposes are grown by people who already know and are involved with each other. The ten people involved in the workshop spent the best part of seven hours together talking and sharing ideas and perspectives on the topics we discussed drawing on our own past histories and projecting our imaginations into the contexts and situations we had encountered or created in the past or might see ourselves in, in the future. While we worked within a process designed by the facilitators what emerged from the process was the novel collective product of all the individuals who participated. I'm sure we have all gone away and reflected on and perhaps acted on what we have learnt so the effects of that time bounded process continue and who knows where it will take us (this blog for example or perhaps future collaborations involving participants). In this way one co-creative process spawns others. That is why it all feels ecological to me 4.

Julian's 7 stands of co-creation image (3) seems to contain many of the salient features of co-creation - assuming that it is all about people in purposeful and intentional relationship in which the intention to pay attention and add value to the products of each other's thinking is paramount. What is missing from the conceptual aid is any representation of the dynamic of how two or more people in a purposeful relationship bring into existence 'novel relational products grown out of the uniqueness of the individuals and the circumstances and materials of their lives.’2  It's all subsumed within the word 'co-creation.'




Another context - In the workshop we used the ‘process’ of making music as a way of capturing important aspects of co-creation something I can relate to through my experience of being in a band. On Thursday evening my band came together for a practice. We hadn’t practiced for over a month following our last gig – several members had been away. Over the years we have been together we have discovered that although we enjoy the experience of just playing together we get bored and demotivated if we do not have a purpose – like rehearsing for a gig or a recording session. Practising the same stuff over and over again is not enough to hold us together. Fortunately, we have a couple of gigs coming up so we have a purpose and one of these involves introducing new songs to our repertoire (chosen by the host) and an invitation to write and record a song for their daughter. So we have a real challenge and a context for co-creation relating to both adaptation (new cover songs) and invention (creation of a song that has never existed before). The first process is fairly straightforward and does not involve too much creativity – it’s more of a technical exercise to replicate a song that is usually well known to us perhaps with a few tweaks although generally we try to faithfully reproduce what already exists. Co-creativity here involves the blending of our skills and sounds to make music that others would recognise. The dynamic of co-creative invention is quite different – I would describe it as ecological. Paul our singer had several conversations with the host to build a picture of their daughter for whom the song is being written then went away on holiday and wrote some lyrics. Simultaneously and independently our most prolific song writer created two new tunes and also wrote some words. The two of them then met up and tried to connect their two independent contributions. At our rehearsal they shared their ideas as work in progress and we all added our interpretations until a coherent sound began to emerge. We didn’t go very far with this on Thursday as it’s a work in progress and we trust that it will evolve over the next few weeks (because we have done it before).


It illustrates the sort of co-creative process we use to produce our music. Invention and originality generally takes place in the minds and embodiments of one person, who then works with another to develop and refine until the products of this process are shared with the other members of the band who then build on it. Perhaps we might call this phase ‘development’. The product of our collective efforts gradually emerges over a period of time usually several weeks. As we reach agreement on the overall sound our efforts turn to replicating the song in exactly the same way each time we do it and this is eventually codified in a recording (production/reproduction). We seem to be following a well trodden path as this seems to be the way that Lennon and MaCartney and the Beetles worked -  so we are in good company. Through this process we have all contributed to the ‘novel relational product’ but in different and unequal ways. You can hear an example of our co-creativity ‘Song for Ollie’ here http://freeworlders.weebly.com/

1 Julian Stodd http://julianstodd.wordpress.com/
2 Carl Rogers (1961) On becoming a person. Boston: Houghton Mifflin
3 http://julianstodd.wordpress.com/2013/02/26/seven-strands-of-co-creation-reflecting-on-how-we-learn-together-in-social-learning-spaces/
4 Norman Jackson (2014) Creativity in Development: An Ecological Perspective in N J Jackson Creativity in Development: A Higher Education Perspective, Lifewide Education Chapter 1 Available online at: http://www.creativityindevelopment.co.uk/

This week we (the editorial team) have been working on the next issue of  Lifewide Magazine which is formed around the theme of personal and social technologies. We have been assembling and editing contributions for a few weeks but its now reached the interesting stage where we can begin to see how it all fits together. I call it the 80% stage where there is still a lot to do but for the first time we can see how our initial abstract vision is becoming a concrete reality.  Looking back I can now appreciate the process as an ecology driven by the shared goal of producing and distributing a collection of related articles that are more than the sum of the individual contributions because of the way they are organised, connected, illustrated and commentated.


In the jargon of wikimedia the process is akin to crowdsourcing 'the practice of obtaining needed services, ideas or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people, and especially from an online community.....combin[ing] the efforts of numerous self-identified volunteers...., where each contributor of their own initiative adds a small portion to the greater result'. Our Magazine is dependent on this happening every three months!

The enterprise is one of co-creation and co-production and involves a lot of learning on the part of the production team. Firstly, the editorial team created a vision and identified possible content and these formation documents were deposited in google docs so that the four members of the team could access them and comment on them. Then the guest editors used their professional and social networks to engage possible contributors able to provide personal narratives and perspectives on their use of social technologies. For this issue most of the contributions were placed in drop box so that they could be viewed and edited. We also made good use of blog posts several articles were sourced in this way and social interactions with bloggers resulted in new collaborations. Our content also made use of content on YouTube and other social media sites.

We publish our Magazine under a Creative Commons license and once produced we post it on our Magazine website and distribute the link to our community via email and through mail lists, twitter, facebook, LinkedIn and other social media platforms and we hope that our readers will do the same. To make the most of the content we will use twitter to distribute selected articles and try to promote discussion about key ideas in some on-line forums. By tagging our own illustrations we know that in future people will be drawn to the Magazine and overtime thanks to the analytics embedded in our website we can see who is visiting and downloading our Magazine and where they are coming from.

In this way the life of an issue of Lifewide Magazine is greatly enriched and its value and reach extended by utilising the social media that is now part of the everyday world of community publishing. I find the process of co-creating and co-producing the Magazine a stimulating and rich learning process. 

The goal of producing the Magazine which is a thing of beauty is all I need to motivate myself and sustain my interest over many weeks. I put a lot of thought into the content and spend a lot of time searching for materials and adapting them if necessary. The editing process is one of trying to shape and add value to someone's contribution by helping them make a better fit with the whole. This process requires new relationships developed with people I have never encountered before (like Julian Stodd in this issue). It also involves conversations with Kiboko our community artist as ideas are considered, tried and sometimes rejected and eventually the best ideas (or the ones I think will fit best) are surfaced and developed. And sometimes it involves designing and participating in our own research studies. All these things require, time, energy and intellectual effort and all result in ownership and love for the relational product that is produced.  

The evolving ecology which produces the Magazine is an act of co-creation which can be visualised through Rogers (1961) contextualised concept of creativity ie the editors' self-determined and self-expressed process for achieving tangible goals, within which we create our novel relational products [our Magazine and our own learning and development] grown out of our individual uniqueness and the materials, events, people and circumstances of our lives.  There is something quite magical about starting with an idea and ending with a Magazine.

It's funny how some of the big events in life sometimes don't inspire you very much to write about them. It's almost as if they drain you of energy and enthusiasm for thinking about them any more. Our recent benefit gig for Ollie feels like that.. by our own measures it was a success. We packed the hall with nearly 150 people. We raised £2300 for the two cancer charities we were supporting and the feedback we received was very positive and sometimes highly complementary and people genuinely seemed to be having a good time. Our music was some of the best we have achieved and we combined really well with two other musicians, and we sold over 40 CDs. The effort was considerable from everyone involved - the band worked hard and we were all wiped out by the end. All my family helped with the organisation and sales of drinks and making sure that things ran smoothly. I was very proud of them.  Furthermore we had good publicity on local radio and at least two more gigs on the back of it as well as a new working relationship with the musicians that we worked with. I thought I would find writing about it a joyful experience but for some unexplained reason I can't muster the energy. This lethargy is also affecting other things I'm doing. It's a strange experience for me and I can't explain it. 

To rekindle my energy and enthusiasm for writing something I thought I'd look again at Ollie's unfolding story on his website, Facebook page (which has 149 friends) and the YouCaring webpage hosting 410 donations given by friends and people who don't know Ollie or his family. I found the messages of support, love and friendship, and the stories of things that people had done to raise money truly inspiring. Many people had not just given but organised or hosted some sort of event like raffles, auctions, pub quizzes, table top sales, coffee mornings. One person had run a marathon and a group of office workers had donated their lottery winnings foregoing the pleasure of a fun night out. Ollie's illness and the journey his family are making have touched many people and made them want to give and in some cases create events that encourage others to give. So that one little boy's fight against cancer has spawned a whole ecology of action aimed at raising money both directly for the Lovis family and more generally for charities that are helping other children with cancer. This is a wonderful story and it shows how a horrible situation can inspire many people to do something positive and good. And it made me feel good that I and my band have been a part of this ecology of love and support to achieve something worthwhile on behalf of friends in need.

The band was happy to keep going with the fund raising using the Song for Ollie as a way of focusing attention on the issue of children with cancer. I set up our own YouCaring webpage and linked this to the Freeworld's website which now hosts 8 tracks of our CD which can be downloaded free with encouragement to donate. I set ourselves (myself) the target of raising £1000 for Children with Cancer and my sister was brilliant in kick starting the campaign with a £100 donation. 

So on reflection all sorts of actions, new ideas, new products, new relationships and friendships have grown out of this ecological process. Ollie has inspired many people to do many new things. He is the inspiration for much human enterprise and creativity and has enabled many people to feel better about themselves because they have connected in some small but deeply human way to his life story. 

This story has given me another perspective on the idea of ecologies for learning and achieving something we value so I wrote a piece for the next issue of Lifewide Magazine

When we launched LWE two years ago one of our goals was to support the people working in HE who are helping learners develop themselves through all their experiences. Our ambition was to try to bring people together to share their experiences and perspectives. Last week we ran our first ever conference  in at Birkbeck College London - so our Learning Lives conference  enabled us to achieve an important goal that we set out at the start of our existence.

Overall I felt the conference was a success - we attracted 65 people, we broke even on the costs, the contributors created an attractive programme and participants seemed to enjoy the day. They engaged and interacted well and their feedback to me was positive.

But in achieving the goal you realise that a conference is a process not an event. For the organisers it requires planning, designing, organising and promoting over a long period of time. It requires relationships to be made with people who are contributing and conversations about the nature of the contributions. It requires new infrastructures to be developed like the conference website.

For the contributors it requires them to invest time and effort in preparing their talks so that their personal knowledge can be shared in the most engaging way in the short time that is available.

For those who attend it involves engaging in the unfolding narrative and contributing their own stories to the narrative. In this modern age participants also play an important role in broadcasting through twitter the things that they find interesting so that others might learn.

So a conference is much more than an event. It is a tremendous collaborative, collegial, value-based effort that benefits not only the participants who are involved in the event but many people who we will never know who will access and make use of the resources we have created in future. 

A flavour of the conference can be gained from the conference tweets 
@lifewider
#lifewideeducation

To commit to something is to harness your own willpower to pursue and engage with a purpose, a cause, a problem, challenge or opportunity. By committing to something you are reducing your freedom to engage with other things. Fundamentally committing to something is a choice - we may feel obligated or coerced but we are still making a decision to engage with something conscientiously and to the best of our ability. We usually commit to something because we care about it and it's personally meaningful and or has deep intrinsic interest or value. Commitment to something is deeply relational whether it is with people, ideas, objects or enterprises. When we commit to something we usually know that it will involve us over a significant period of time.For some things we want to know exactly what are commitment will be before we agree to getting involved but for other things, particularly involving relationships that are most significant to us, we are willing to enter into a commitment without knowing the detail of the obligation. 

Developing something is a major focus for commitment. It requires us to commit time, energy and effort (physical, intellectual and emotional) and it usually involves reducing our involvement in other things. Life is never simple and all the things that are important to us require our commitment so we end up with lots of commitments that jostle and compete for our attention - our families and relationships within them, our jobs, our own interests and aspirations. So everyday life is made up of lots of commitments that connect and span our lifewide experiences. Our commitments are closely associated with what we perceive are our purposes which are ultimately the things that drive us and give our life substance and meaning. By taking on new commitments we are extending our learning ecologies.

These thoughts were prompted by my recent involvement in an on-line 'course' called 'bring your own device for learning' (BYOD4L) designed and organised by Chrissi Nerantzi and Sue Beckingham. When I reflect on the experience as a development process  commitment seemed to very important - perhaps because by joining the course I was adding to my existing commitments and that required effort above and beyond what I was already doing.

The course required commitment to sign up, familiarise myself with the design and expectations, engage with the resources and the learning opportunity (in my own way), and try to record my own learning process and what I think I gained from it. The commitment to try and apply what I learnt and to keep trying even when something didn't seem to work and overcome the inevitable barriers of using these new forms of social media for someone who is not particularly adept. 

During the course I was conscious of juggling this new commitment with my other obligations - like the two days I look after my daughter's twins and various work obligations and I was conscious of the opportunity cost in engaging with technology initially to be competent and confident in using it and then to apply it. I had several instances during and immediately after the week when what I tried didn't work and I felt frustrated and demotivated because I hadn't made the progress I had hoped for and these feelings of negativity had to be overcome.

I was thankful that one person tweeted that they had had trouble with an app. I often have trouble trying to make things work and this aspect of learning often gets glossed over in the enthusiasm for the technology. The things I valued most - that encouraged me to persist and therefore facilitated my development were: 
1 The resources. Sue's collections of tools and the introductory videos are a great resource that I have embedded in my own website for future use. 
2 Examples and illustrations of the use of the technologies.. these were great in showing what could be done. In particular some of the curatorial tools like scoop.it and paper.li. which I have tried to apply. 

It was also great seeing the enthusiasm, commitment, teamwork, care and attention and personal support the facilitators gave to the process and the people in it. A real lesson in the energy, passion, care, dedication and expertise necessary to make these sorts of learning experiences work. And hopefully I could use the experience and insights to design my own on-line learning experience. I was particularly appreciative of the fact that I was able to navigate through the resources and prompts in my own way. There was a structure but no one forced me to follow the linear pathway. I could chart my own 'course'.

Offline I had some good conversations with my son who managed to spend a bit of time looking at the resources and tuned into the twitter conversation most evenings. So it achieved that objective. 

I did try to reflect on my own thinking and practice in the contexts of my own circumstances and I set up a dedicated BYOD4L blog for this. 

The proof of learning is in the doing. It's one thing to know how to do or use something but another to apply that learning. Since the course I have continued to use paper.li and develop 'lifewide zine' a twitter-sourced companion to Lifewide Magazine. I also felt more confident in using twitter and I spent more time on it. I felt that I understood it much more. I taught myself how to embed twitter feeds and tweet buttons into our websites and then populated resources like e-book chapters and magazine issues with tweet buttons in the hope that when people come across them they will retweet.

I also 'played with' paper.li  With Chrissi's help I set up a Lifewide Zine as a twitter-based companion to Lifewide Magazine. There is still lots to learn but I got over the initial hurdle. I also continued to develop my use of explee animation software creating and embedding several animations in our websites.

These three tools - twitter, explee and paper.li have opened up a whole new area of communication for me that if I had not committed time, energy and effort would have remained hidden. The value of commitment to personal development is in being able to do something I couldn't do before and in this way improving my ability to continue working with my higher purpose - to promote lifewide education.

Sometimes the development of an idea falters because it is just too expensive to turn the idea into a practical reality. But good ideas are never lost they just get put on the back burner. About 18 months ago I started a business project called storyshare. The basic idea was to help people create stories that were personally meaningful and help them bring their story to life through illustration, sound and animation. I made a business plan and attempted to find some illustrators - one of these became our LWE community illustrator so this part of the process was a success. But at the time I failed to see how I could make it a commercial success as I could not animate the illustrations without a great deal of expense and I knew that the potential market would not buy the service at a price that would cover the costs and make a small profit. So the idea was put on hold - until this week when I discovered the explee animation tool. I can now see how it will be possible to animate the illustrations in an inexpensive way so the cost of the service would be limited to the illustrations themselves. I thought it was a great example of how advances in technology can suddenly liberate and idea.  I offer my story as an illustration of what explee can do.  The illustrator is Kiboko Hachiyon. Thanks again to Chrissi Nerantzi who drew my attention to explee.

If creativity is a novel relational 'product' growing out of the circumstances of our life (Carl Rogers 1960) then development - the ability to be able to do something new,  is an example of such a product.

Sunday was mostly a wet and windy day so I spent quite a bit of time on my computer. I began exchanging emails with Chrissi Nerantzi about the possibility of creating an on-line course and over the space of a few hours she sent me and my son, who is also working with us, a whole pile of links to various web tools and examples of what the tool was capable of doing.  Here's an example
From: Chrissi Nerantzi
Sent: 05 January 2014 22:23
Subject: You have received a YouTube video!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dksXr4GQMfk&sns=em
Something like this might also work for the conference? 
Chrissi

My son followed the link and gave me a glimpse of what it could do. It's a powerful, intuitive drag and drop tool for creating short animations which can be uploaded to youtube. I love animations and over the years I had financed and collaborated in a number of animation projects and I know how expensive and time consuming they are to produce so I was really excited about the possibility of being able to produce one for myself.

This morning I had a go at making my own animation through a process of trial and error. Over an hour I managed to create a 40 sec clip introducing our conference which I embedded in the conference website. In doing it I knew I was trying to achieve something specific. Looking back I can see that I had engaged in a piece of personal development through which I learnt how to make an animation using this software. It was very satisfying to make something so quickly and so easily. I also felt that I was being creative and the clip I produced, being entirely new to the world - was creative.

So my development and creativity emerged and merged from and through the circumstances of my life. Thanks to Chrissi who drew my attention to the tool and my son for showing me how easy it was to use, and having the time, interest and a potential use for the product - I engaged in and completed a piece of impromptu personal development and was able to be and feel creative in the process!

A contribution to the Creativity in Development Narrative Inquiry
http://www.creativityindevelopment.co.uk/

I suppose it's inevitable as we come to the end of year that we look back on the year. It sort of emerges through the process of receiving Christmas cards as friends and family send their circular newsletters recounting the significant events in their life. We never produce a letter but we do have family conversations looking back over the year, and the same thing happens when you meet up with friends who you haven't seen for a while. This year has been particularly eventful with a wedding, serious illnesses, visits to family in Australia and visits from family in Iran and many other smaller events and achievements that connect us as a family in interesting and unpredictable ways.

This reflective mood is also triggered when I make myself take stock of the progress we have made with Lifewide Education. A year in the life of a project is a significant chunk of time to think about and evaluate the effects of trying to turn ideas into reality.

During the year our community of interest grew steadily and we currently have around 320 registered members. We maintained our existing websites and our presence on Facebook, Linked-in and Twitter and we added our Values Exchange website which enables us to be part of a global network of Vx sites concerned with values and ethics in education. It also gives us new capacity to undertake on-line surveys.  Since April we have undertaken four surveys. It has proved to be particularly useful in engaging people before an event so that the results of the survey can be utilised in the presentations - for example a keynote presentation at the annual SEDA conference was formed around the results of a survey into creativity in educational development.

Under the editorial stewardship of Jenny Willis, we produced four issues of LIfewide Magazine each dedicated to a theme that enabled us to add new knowledge and understanding to our lifewide concept. Brian Cooper's diligent editing enabled us to publish  eleven chapters in our Lifewide Education E-Book - including conceptual reviews and syntheses on wellbeing and learning ecologies, moving biographical accounts of lifewide learning, research into wellbeing and learning ecologies and overviews of lifewide learning in universities and colleges. Our research and scholarship has focused primarily on examining the idea and perceptions of wellbeing and developing and applying the concept of learning ecologies to individuals' learning and development processes, work that will continue through the coming year.

We also developed further our tools for supporting lifewide learning and my daughter (one of our student volunteers) helped us pilot our approach and successfully completed the Lifewide Development Award (LDA) providing future learners with an example of an on-line portfolio of recorded learning and development. We also explored the idea of Open Badges and we are now introducing them in the current stage of piloting. We are working with Christine Fountain at Southampton Solent University's Business School with students on the HR Management masters course to examine the ways in which the LDA might be incorporated into the learning experiences of students.

Members of the team contributed to, and or participated in a total of ten conferences in the UK and overseas. In June, after submitting a paper outlining the idea of an EU-wide Lifewide Development Award I was invited to participate in an EU Foresight workshop by the research group who support development of EU educational policy. This was the first time that LWE has been invited to share our views in a close to policy forum. Through our involvement in conferences we have formed new relationships have with people who are sympathetic to lifewide learning in Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, China and Argentina.  Ultimately, our future lies in the relationships we form with the people who want to promote and implement lifewide learning in their own educational and learning contexts.

Periodically taking stock of where you have got to in any project is a necessary and important aspect of the development process. It helps you maintain that sense of wellbeing knowing that you have tried to fulfil your purposes. Looking back enables you to take pride in achievements and develop a better and more realistic perspective on what has been accomplished so that questions of what to do next become clearer. 

Documenting achievements makes public the ways in which you have lived your life according to the purposes and goals you have established. Publishing our annual review so that the community can appreciate the hard work and contributions that many individuals have made enables the members of the team to gain the credit they deserve. None of the things we have achieved in 2013 would have been possible without the help, support and encouragement of a wonderful group of volunteers and the generous financial support of our corporate sponsor Chalk Mountain Education and Media Services. 

Kiboko's latest illustration sums conveys well the way in which the achievements and experiences of the past year provides the launchpad for the future.The coming year will inevitably bring with it new challenges and opportunities which we can face with confidence.  In March we will achieve another of our ambitions - to host our first national conference on lifewide learning and education in universities and colleges and publish a new E-book on lifewide learning and education in universities and colleges.