For the last few weeks I have been working on the most recent issue of Lifewide Magazine with my co-editor Jenny Willis. We took the theme of everyday creativity for this issue and tried crowd sourcing some of the content extending an open invitation to contribute a story of personal creativity. I also searched the internet for stories that we could use and found some great examples of creativity growing out of the circumstances of individual's lives. Altogether we had 20 stories and all of them reveal that someone cared enough about their creative ideas to turn them in to concrete experience or some sort of product or relationship. But creativity does not just happen in a vacuum. Individuals are located in the circumstances and situations that form their lives and the collection of stories gives meaning and substance to Rogers' concept of creativity and the way it happens.
 
Creativity is 'the emergence in action of a novel relational product growing out of the uniqueness of the individual on the one hand, and the materials, events, people, or circumstances of his life'  Rogers (1)
 
Some of the stories show how we use our creativity to change the circumstances of our lives to give it more purpose and meaning. There are many suggestions as to why, when, how and where creativity emerges from and through people's lives and plenty of lists showing how we can improve our creativity (2).  Based on the collection of stories in 'Our Creative Life' we offer these thoughts.

• Importance of imagination, exploration and connection
• Our everyday creativity can be applied to almost anything - we are very good   at using our imagination to find the affordances for our creativity in the different parts of our life - it's a fundamental characteristic of being a person.
• The source of creativity - our imagination that gives rise to new ideas, feelings and actions, can be provoked by almost anything. We are the ones that find interest, meaning and inspiration in our own experience. being open to our feelings enables us to be inspired by almost anything.
• Our imagination encourages and enables us to connect ideas that are not normally connected. Because they are our ideas that we care about, the result of connecting our ideas has personal meaning and significance to us. This is the source of our commitment to bringing our ideas into concrete existence.

​Three mothers of creativity 

• Necessity is the first mother of our creativity: for example when we are faced with a challenge or problem that requires us to be imaginative and resourceful or and we need to experience and experiment with something in order to learn.
• The second mother helps us cope with adversity or physical/emotional  disruption in our life. It helps us cope with dissonance and conflict drawing on the emotional turbulence that emerges from the circumstances of our life. Our creativity can also be an expression of care and love in such circumstances.
• The third mother fulfils our desire to achieve more of our potential as a human being. There is within us an innate drive to develop and improve ourselves and our lives - Maslow's notion of self-actualisation (3). So we seek out new experiences and explore and experiment within these new circumstances to make our lives more interesting and in the process we enrich ourselves and our lives. We search for affordance across and through our life. We use our creativity to replace the predictability of routines with interest, uncertainty and excitement.

Some contexts and situations are better than others at stimulating or requiring our creativity
 

• Within the circumstances of our life, some contexts and situations provide us with more affordance for creative self-expression and deep satisfaction, than others. These contexts connect to our interests which motivate us to engage. We immerse ourselves in these interest-driven contexts and in the process develop our skills, knowledge and talents and discover particular mediums that we enjoy. Effort is rewarded as we get good at whatever we are doing as we involve ourselves in the things that we care about and aspects of our creativity flourish. Our interest and passion driven creativity connects to our need to fulfil ourselves as a the person we are.
• Circumstances change and sometimes a context or situation within which we are creative cannot be sustained. If we are unable to continue one form of creative expression for example because of an injury or illness, our creativity can be expressed in a different way in a different medium and context.
• Perhaps the greatest demand for our creativity is found in contexts that are unfamiliar dealing with problems that we have never encountered before. In such situations we are forced to invent ourselves and our practices and we may have to be exceptionally resourceful using whatever is available in our immediate environment. Making do with whatever is available connects to necessity being the mother of invention.

Some factors and conditions that influence our creativity

• All sorts of factors can influence our creativity. Our parents and our upbringing can influence and inspire us to live a life of creative possibility, while for some people particular conditions like having time, being relaxed, exercising or drinking coffee in a favourite cafe, help them access their unconscious mind to liberate their ideas.
• We do not require an audience for our creativity to be exhibited, but we do derive enjoyment from witnessing the enjoyment, approval or admiration of others in response to our creations. But most of our everyday creations go unnoticed by everyone except ourselves.
• From time to time we might find ourselves in situations that we cannot get out of. Talking about our problems and challenges with sympathetic and engaged listeners can open new ways of thinking and opportunities for creative solutions and actions that are not available to us without their involvement.
• Some creative ideas involve gaining buy in and involving others in order to accomplish something or make something significant happen. In such circumstances creativity may lie in the orchestration and facilitation of the process whereby people can make their contribution.
• Creative moments can be remembered throughout our lives and they may have a lifelong impact upon us and sometimes others. By sharing our creations and our thoughts and feelings around our creations we can inspire others. In the Social Age blogs have become important vehicles for creative self-expression, for sharing our creations and inspiring others.
• Finally, if we are to create a more creative society: a society in which every person's creativity is nurtured, encouraged and valued, then teachers have a crucial role to play in ensuring that the right sort of conditions, relationships, affordances and recognitions are available.

 POST SCRIPT
By coincidence, on the day I wrote this post two weeks before Christmas, my wife decided that we were going to have a creative afternoon making Christmasy things. She set up what in educational terms would be called a 'maker space': she filled our dining room table with 'stuff': materials for making things - coloured card, paper, fabric, sticky tape, glue, paints, pencils and crayons, beads, tinsel and sparkly stuff, boxes, jars, paper bags and labels.. and the tools to make them - like scissors and other cutting and shaping implements. I was made to sit down and make something - opting out was not an option on this occasion but at least I had permission to make anything I wanted, although I was given five paper bags and told to make something for my grandchildren. So I set about decorating the bag with sweets (a sure winner I thought) and as they are all boys a stuck a little car in each one and another sweet. I was pleased with my impromptu invention. And that was the feeling around the table. My wife and two daughters happily immersed themselves for four hours listening to carols and making stuff. Quite spontaneously my daughters said it gave them pleasure and reminded them of when they were children and they talked about primary school and how they sometimes felt inhibited because what their art work was not as good as their friends. But in this environment there were no judgments or criticisms:  each appreciated what the others had done and that encouraged them to persist with what they were doing. Here was a family act of everyday creativity and I could see that sometimes we engage in the creative act of making things simply for the pleasure it gives us and in this family social setting part of the pleasure was in the conversation and the memories of Christmas and childhood it triggered. And what a perfect example of Rogers' (1) concept of creativity in action!
 
Sources:
(1) Rogers, C.R., (1961) On becoming a person. Boston: Houghton Mifflin                                                                                            (2) Tay D., (2015) The big list of 51 hacks to improve your creativity http://piktochart.com/51-creativity-hacks/                             (3) Maslow, A.H. (1943). A theory of human motivation Psychological Review 50 (4) 370–96
​​

I have a really interesting assignment on Wednesday to work with a group of staff and students at Sheffield Hallam University and facilitate a workshop aimed at exploring and re-imagining personal development  planning  (PDP) in the Social Age. 


To say I have a soft spot for PDP would be an understatement. Back in 1998-99 while working at QAA I facilitated the process of developing the policy framework for PDP. What I learnt through practitioners and my subsequent research convinced me of the value of linking a set of interconnected activities and experiences that included:

• thinking ahead and deciding what to do – analysing tasks, identifying  goals, creating strategies to achieve objectives; using reflection –  drawing on past experiences and imagining a different future 

• doing / producing things broadly in line with planned intentions but  being responsive to the effects of actions and changing plans if appropriate; learning through the experience of doing with greater self-awareness

• self-observing and recording - thoughts, ideas, experiences, actions and their effects, experiences, to develop a record of learning and to evidence the process and results of learning and support the enterprise of ‘learning  about learning

• thinking about what was done and what was achieved in order to learn  (reflecting, reviewing and evaluating; making sense of experience;  making judgements about self and the effects of personal action and  determining what needs to be done to develop/improve/move on; the enterprise also supports the process of learning about learning).

In my research, after the policy framework had been created, I discovered that this set of activities underlies the theory of self-regulation and this theory and PDP have influenced my thinking about learning and developing ever since. Lifewide education and lifewide learning are founded on the principles of self-regulation and the way of revealing learning and development is through PDP-type processes.

So it's with great pleasure that I am returning to thinking about PDP. What has changed in the last 15 years since PDP was introduced into UK HE is that we have now moved into the Social Age of collaborative learning and sharing. The Social Age is defined by the massive use of social media platforms that are changing behaviours and habits in respect of how we find, use, develop and distribute information and knowledge and create new meaning and understanding for ourselves and with others. It is being brought into existence as a result of the web 2.0 and web-enabling communication technologies and ever faster broadband, wifi, 3G + 4G technology that  enable connectivity almost anywhere at anytime with infinite information resources, and personal knowledge residing within the personal learning networks we create for ourselves. Enhanced connectivity is at the heart of the Social Age might be defined in terms of  'the creation of value (knowledge, understanding [or learning] and relationships) by connecting individuals who want to share their interests, knowledge, passions who form a relationship  to co-create new understandings. 

I've not been a particularly fast adopter of these technologies but slowly and surely over the last few years I have tried out website building tools and various social media and gradually adopted, in a selective manner, the technologies that help me do what I need to do. In the process I have also decided against using some technologies, or using them in a selective way.

So how has my PDP practice changed?
I like to think I have always been reflective and this has helped me learn from my experiences. I also think I've been reasonably good at imagining what I need to do in different contexts and developing strategies for achieving stuff. And I have worked out through experience that plans need to be fairly fluid to accommodate all the unexpected stuff that emerges through life. All this is internalised and for most things I don't need to sit down and make a plan on paper or formally write up a reflective report.

Throughout my career in many different professional my roles I have had to keep good records of what I have doing and plans of what I intended to do, and in the last 20 years of my career I went through annual appraisals of various sorts - many of which involved creating a narrative and filling out forms which asked the questions that managers wanted answered and did not necessarily tell the story in the way I wanted to.

I don't have to worry about this anymore, the only appraisal I go through is my own, and my wife's from time to time! Neither do I have to worry about building my cv anymore. But I am interested in developing my ideas and sharing them with others to see if they have value.  As an educationalist I am trying to model my ideas and practices for lifewide learning and creativity so I do devote quite a lot of time exploring how my ideas relate to my own life believing that if I can't apply them in my own circumstances they can't be much good.

One thing that hasn't changed is that I prefer to write in word and upload to other technologies. I find the familiarity of word gives me the freedom and flexibility to express myself in ways that writing on-line does not.

The characteristics of my PDP are documented below

1 My PDP is all informal. It's what I choose to do, when I want to do it and how I want to do it. I have to make up the rules and frameworks I use they are not given to me. The fact that I don't have to jump through any hoops and the products are not being used to appraise or assess me, is quite liberating.

2  Its contextual. My PDP reflects the circumstances of my life and it being created in the context of my interest in lifewide learning and creativity - which is my work.

3 I have to motivate myself to do it because no-one else will make me. So my motivation is intrinsic, driven by my purposes which is to model the practices I would expect of a lifewide learner and my interest in developing and sharing ideas that emerge through this process. For PDP to be successful it has to serve a useful purpose and fulfil a need which might be defined in terms of interest in myself and how I relate to others, and an interest in the educational ideas that emerge through the process.

4 It requires discipline. There are times when I'm so busy that time for writing about my experiences and learning is squeezed out, but somehow you have to squeeze it back in again. This means I have to value the process and what emerges from it.

5 it's about building a narrative of the events in my life and how I respond to them. The overall value to me is in the development of my narrative over time and it matters to me and probably no-one else. It is I suppose a vehicle for creative self-expression in a medium (writing) that I enjoy. I also see that my writings can serve a number of purposes which is another source of motivation.

6 It is about learning about myself. To develop my ideas I have to keep thinking about things I have not previously given much thought to. What often causes these triggered reflections is the stuff I read in other people's blogs which provide a prompt that I can't resist. How do I find these? Well I spend a lot of time on google searching for things that interest me but also I discover much through the Personal Learning Network I have constructed using Twitter. I usually check my feeds daily, although I can go days sometimes without doing this, and if a tweet looks interesting I follow the link to see where it takes me. I have learnt so much through this process.

7 I have to admit that I have the time or rather I can make the time because by doing it I'm not able to do something else. But not having to go to work every day

8 I am using quite a lot of technology to help me record my experiences and musings. Thanks to the Web 2.0 Weebly website building tool I have my own website which hosts my blog and a suite of other websites to support my educational work. My basic approach is to write a blog usually about something that has happened or something I have come across that has caused me to evaluate myself. I try to write something every week. If I think the ideas and perspectives in my blog might be of interest to others I share them either through my two educational websites (lifewide education and creative academic) or Linked in or for work that actually becomes publishable - academia.ed. When my ideas have been developed sufficiently I might publish them in our on-line Lifewide Magazine. I share my blogs through my three twitter accounts which serve different purposes and audiences.

Making sense of it 
Two friends who are in my PLN - Chrissi Nerantzi and Sue Beckingham, have developed a framework to help us understand how social media can be used. Its called the 5C framework - communicating, connecting, collaborating, creating and curating. Descriptions of how I'm using social media to support my PDP  I can see that I am engaged with all 5 of the C's. Firstly, my blog is all about communicating in words and images, my personal knowledge and insights to myself and to others who are interested. Connecting - I use my blog to connect ideas, link to resources and to connect to interested others. By posting on multiple sites and with forums like the special interest groups on LinkedIn, I expand the potential for people to connect to my ideas. Similarly I benefit from the connections I make in my PLN's and quite a few of my reflections have been triggered by the posts of others. Collaborating - this is probably the weakest aspect of my PDP practices although the topics of my reflections often make reference to the collaborations I'm involved in (such as my involvement with Hallam in this post). PDP for me is mainly a solitary practice although I could present a case that every idea I assimilate that triggers a reflection is a sort of collaboration and therefore many of my blogs are in fact co-created with the resources and ideas of others. Creating - my blog brings ideas and thoughts into existence that are new and original to me and I change my understanding through the writing process. The digital medium allows me to play with ideas and images in ways that I could never do before this technology was available.  Curating - I am curating my narrative and my ideas for myself and because I am always trying to be resourceful I make use of my writing for multiple purposes. For example I intend to use an edited version of this article in the next issue of Lifewide Magazine. By posting in my thematic websites I am adding content to other curated collections. The one thing I would add is another C - commitment. All this does require sustained  commitment and effort.

Why do I do it?
I left the big question until the end. I commit to engaging in PDP because I believe in its intrinsic worth. I also engage in PDP because of my professional interest in exploring and growing ideas from my everyday life and because it helps me to understand myself. I also do it because to be an active participant in the Social Age, sharing my personal knowledge and insights with anyone who is interested.

My PDP is an integral part of my learning ecology. For example this post is a personal inquiry, prompted by the forthcoming Hallam workshop, in order to gain a better understanding of what PDP practice means to me. My intention is to share this post with participants as part of the knowledge development process around the workshop. 

Last but not least, the PDP practices I describe above is one of my outlets for creative self-expression.  Furthermore, the new insight I have gained from this examination of my own PDP practices is to conclude that I use my PDP process not only to reflect on what I have done and make sense of my experiences, I use it to actively explore new ideas and things I haven't thought about before. That is why it is such an important part of my ecology for learning and developing.

If you would like to share your ideas and practices relating to PDP please leave a comment.


Sources
Nerrantzi, C. and Beckingham, S. (2014)  Our Magical Open Box to Enhance Individuals' Learning Ecologies. Chapter 2 In N.J.Jackson and J. Willis (eds) Lifewide Education in Universities and Colleges
http://www.learninglives.co.uk/uploads/1/0/8/4/10842717/chapter_c2_revised.pdf
QAA (2009) Personal development planning: guidance for institutional policy and practice in higher education Available on-line at: http://www.qaa.ac.uk/en/Publications/Documents/Personal-development-planning-guidance-for-institutional-policy-and-practice-in-higher-education.pdf
Stodd,J. (ed) (2014) Exploring the Social Age and the New Culture of Learning. Lifewide Magazine Issue 11 Available on line at http://www.lifewidemagazine.co.uk/

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.

This week has been another busy week.. immediately following our conference I discovered that a possible invitation to teach a module in the professional development programme at the University of Limerick had become a concrete possibility with an email from the programme director..

I am following up on an email my colleague sent you regarding your willingness to teach a module on our Specialist Diploma in Teaching, Learning and Scholarship.  The course is a level 9 course consisting of ten modules each with three credits and it is designed to equip  participants with high level competence in Teaching , Learning, Scholarship and Innovation in Higher Education settings (I have attached a copy of the Diploma handbook for your information). The module we would like you to teach covers Scholarly innovation and creativity. I have attached the module outline used previously and the type of assessment students have been given in the past, to give you an idea of what is involved. Of course given the module is about innovation and creativity in scholarship, you have freedom to teach this module in the manner you feel is better for you
 
The email went on to inform me that the module was to be run in six days seven April 3/4 if I was willing to do it so I had to decide on whether I could take it on. Effectively I had 6 days to prepare but I also had a lot of other commitments in that time. Two things grabbed my attention - the fact that I could teach it how I wanted to and the focus on personal everyday creativity.. So I said yes and spent every spare hour I could over the next six days 'preparing'.

The experience was a good one  in all sorts of ways and I am writing a reflective essay to consolidate my thoughts and feelings. Here I focus on its value to me as a reminder of what it is like to teach. I had a group of 18 professional learners ranging in age from early 20's to 50 at various stages of their careers. All were leading busy lives and had to fit in the 10hours over two days during which the course ran. As a teacher I designed a process which included content - mainly my writings on the topics we covered, activities - the tasks I designed before, during and after the event and a few more spontaneous situations. But you cannot predict how learners will respond. It was my good fortune that they engaged in the way I had hoped and the whole experience for me became reaffirming. It made me feel like I used to feel as a teacher when the situations I had crafted produced the desired results in terms of learner interest, engagement, discussion and the application of the learning. I still have to mark the two assignments I set which will give me more feedback on whether the ideas and knowledge I worked with has been assimilated and applied and I want to gather the learners' feedback on the course - but the experience has shown me something that I miss so I am going to try to market the short course to other  institutions.

Thank you Limerick Creatives!

I had another experience of  'slogging' this week. One of my development projects on behalf of my family and my ancestors! is to try and construct our family history. I began by recording some conversations with my mum and dad. They are now approaching 90 and they are able to recollect their childhoods and the stories they were told about their families. I turned this into what I hope will be the first chapter of a family history that my siblings and my children can carry on developing. I then turned to Ancestry.com thanks to the generosity of my sister who bought a subscription. Over the last couple of months I have spent a lot of time (probably far too much)  slogging away at the various records that can be accessed. Sadly many of my ancestors were called Thomas Jackson and they lived in Manchester and that generates an awful lot of possibilities. So far I haven't even got my grandfathers birth certificate. But using my imagination and I hope reasoning power I have fabricated a lineage going back to the 1790's. It might of course all be wrong but the point of my story is that in slogging through the records this week for probably the best part of  6 hours and feeling very frustrated because I wasn't making any progress, I suddenly found a record that seemed to fit and push me back another generation. The joy that came from this moment of seeming to make progress out of this tedious search was enormous and it was a real boost to my morale causing me to stay with it for much longer than I intended. So out of slogging can come reward and satisfaction as a bit more of a problem seems to be resolved and out of these moments progress is made and potential solutions emerge that would not have happened without the slogging because the information or idea is deeply buried within the quest. So slogging away at something may be deeply dissatisfying but it is the pathway to discovery and achievement.

And yet one more example of emergence today. I had an email from a talented illustrator I had worked with in the past. It was a speculative email enquiring about possible work opportunities. I emailed back to open up a conversation about a possible role as an artist in residence at our forthcoming conference. Over 3 or 4 emails I tried to draw him in. I could see he was interested and he eventually agreed. I was delighted and immediately created a new web page to host information about our two artists. I then spent the best part of two hours creating a new explee animation to show off his work. It was both enjoyable and I felt creative and I was pleased with the result. There was no way that I could have anticipated this activity in advance of it happening. It emerged through interactions in my work ecology and being able to create opportunity for someone else to apply their talents to a new situation that they found appealing.

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.

I love working with the talented illustrator Kiboko Hachiyon to try and turn abstract ideas into images that convey meanings in different and often more powerful ways than the written word alone. I wanted to create an image for my talk  that embodied the ideas of creative thought, development and production which results in innovation. I had a some scenes that Kiboko had produced that I wanted to re-use so I made a mock up (prototype?) of the narrative on a powerpoint slide with suggestions for additional pictures to complete the narrative. 

The result is shown above and it tells the story of a young man listening to his ipod and looking at some cakes and having the idea of creating a cake that when you eat it plays the tunes you like to hear. He knew that this was the first time he had ever had the idea so it was new to him and when he mentioned it to other people he could see it was also novel for them. The more he thought about it the more he could see the potential and the more he became motivated to make such a cake. His passion drove him to sit at his computer for hours working out what he had to do and finding out waht he needed to know in order to achieve his ambition. He began experimenting making cakes and also building the electronics mindful of costs and health and safety issues. 

Notwithstanding the complexity and difficulty of the challenge he is successful and one day he produces a musical cake at a price that people are willing buy. He also manages to persuade a local bakery to produce the cakes for him. He has
created a new product that is valued and judged to be new and different to any other cake by the people who want to buy it and a business would like to sell it.

We can apply this narrative to any process in which creativity is involved - including this narrative picture, in which a someone imagines something for the first time and is inspired to try to turn their idea into something tangible. They spend time and effort researching and developing their idea, perhaps drawing in other people to help them and if necessary raising money to fund their experiments. Eventually they are able to realise their idea in a form that can be enjoyed or utilised by other people.

This week I spoke at the SEDA conference in Bristol on the theme of Creativity in Educational Development. I was very grateful for the opportunity as it gave me a reason to discover how educational developers perceived creativity and how they used their creativity in their work. The idea of development is also close to me as I consider my life is a process of continuous development some of which I intentionally orchestrate and some of which is more accidental or opportunistic.
Furthermore, all the roles I have performed in my career have a strong developmental basis and many have involved me in explicitly developmental roles for the organisations I have worked for.

As I see it, the wicked problem  facing all universities, is fundamentally a developmental challenge focused on the question of 'how we prepare learners for the challenges they will face in their future lives'. Nested in this challenge is the developmental problem of how teachers and other professionals directly involved in student development develop themselves so that they can support and enable students to develop themselves so that they can act effectively in the future worlds they will inhabit.  For institutional leaders the developmental challenge is concerned with the continual process of change so that the people who work in the organisation are able to engage effectively with this challenge. People who work in a developmental role fulfil a unique role in enabling the institution to meet this challenge. Fundamentally this is a story of development - at personal, professional, curriculum, infrastructure and whole institution levels and what I want to discover is how personal creativity contributes to this process.

To prepare for my talk I created, over about four months, an ecology that is represented in the illustration. It involved conducting two surveys to try and discover the beliefs of educational developers. I am very grateful for everyone who took the time and effort to get involved and I have identified people who gave me particular support and encouragement and te sort of feedback we need to progress our thinking. It is lonely life being a developer and we need the emotional and intellectual support of others to sustain and expand our learning projects.

I have documented the results of  the surveys which are consistent with other studies I have made relating to perceptions of creativity in higher education. My hope is that my presentation will lead to the involvement of more developers in the process and to new as yet unimagined possibilities and opportunities.