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

This week as preparation for a meeting with students enrolled on the Lifewide Development Award I invited them to complete a 10min a day diary during the week and at the end of the week reflect on various dimensions of their experience. I felt obliged to do the same and in doing so the words of Kielsgauard Sorenson came to mind - 'we live our life forwards but we make sense of it backwards'.

It's not been a typical week as last weekend we journeyed to see family in Norfolk - grandma, aunts/uncles/inlaws, and cousins/nephews/nieces. My wife's first husband's family is large but fortunately many of them live in the same place. I have been accepted into the family as if I was one of their own and I'm very grateful for this. So my learning log reflected three days of travelling and being with family - which was fundamentally about renewing our bonds and reaffirming our relationships as members of the same family. It was great listening to grandma talk about her childhood growing up in London in the 1920's-30's and outlining the background to the families fruit and veg business and then tracing the family roots through the west country and the channel islands to Normandy. The older I get the more I appreciate our ancestry and this connects to my research into my own families history. In fact when I got back waiting for me in the post was my own grandfather's marriage certificate which someone helping me at UKinfo helped me locate. It proved his father's name was Tom which until now I had only been able to infer from my searches on Ancestry.com. It gave me confidence in the other inferences I have made about my grandfather's ancestors.

My activity log this week also reflects the time I spent with my own daughter's children. Its half term so I looked after all three grandchildren on my child care day. I don't mind admitting that it is hard work to have sole responsibility for them between 8am to 5pm but it's also a great joy. I also had my older grandson for a sleepover, swimming and generally being together. It's rare that we spend 1:1 time together so for me it's a real treat to do so.

I did other things this week but looking back these acts of being a member of the families to which I belong and acting as father, step-father, grandfather, brother in law and uncle was by far the most important thing I did. It seemed to me that this was another manifestation of commitment drawn from long lasting relationships with people I care about and love who I want to influence and be influenced by. Who are willing to involve me in their lives.

Through commitment we do things for each other. We stay connected and we listen and appreciate each other's stories of how our lives are unfolding and how our past histories contribute to who we are and to the existence of our offspring. The commitment to family means that we can stay connected to our children and help them in the caring and development of their own children. And it is deeply satisfying to see our children learn the value of extended family and continue this process of commitment that binds us all together. Family is an important dimension of our wellbeing and the cause of unhappiness when there is discord or conflict. Family This is one of the important ways we grow into our village and help our children and grandchildren  grow into their village.

Returning to my visit to Southampton, I was pleased with the way the simple aid to recording and reflecting on the way a week of life unfolds provided the basis for a good conversation about what was important and meaningful in the students' lives. Interestingly, they also extracted far more meaning and personal significance in the things they had done, than the learning they had gained from their activities. Perhaps that is a fair reflection of their relative importance in everyday life.

I introduced my talk with a slide that portrayed my own ecological process for making my contribution to the event. I had concluded that my learning process had been purposeful and directional - towards creating the resources and personal knowledge to be able to contribute to the seminar and workshop and that it had also involved lots of other people - the people who had codified their understandings in the articles I had read and whose ideas I had assimilated and reused, the people I had talked to especially members of my family, the people who had written blogs which I had drawn on, accounts of learning written by past students at Surrey and my daughter's evolving account of learning as she helps us pilot the lifewide development award. My learning had been both a  constructive process and an organic social process. 

The workshop involved inviting participants to think of a learning project they had been involved in and to try in about fifteen minutes to record the key elements of their learning process. Each then told their story of learning and as a group we tried to think about the ecological aspects of the story. The process was quite revealing and on the train journey home (in true ecological spirit) I decided to email the people who had participated to invite them to continue working on the ideas that had emerged and to write them up as a co-authored paper to illustrate how such a workshop methodology can work in revealing the ecological process involved in lifewide learning. So far only two people have responded so I'm uncertain as to what will emerge from the process. But I feel sure that something useful will come from it. 

On Thursday I was thinking ahead to the next issue of Lifewide Magazine and thinking of potential contributors when I googled Jay Lemke - who has written extensively on ecosocial theory and  who I had really enjoyed reading. I came across a beautifully written and inspiring chapter he wrote in 2002.. on becoming a village.. I cite a passage below to illustrate..

An old saying has it that it takes a village to raise a child. As children, we know how much we need to learn about everything and everyone in our communities to live there successfully. As we learn, we gradually become our villages: we internalize the diversity of viewpoints that collectively make sense of all that goes on in the community. At the same time, we develop values and identities: in small tasks and large projects, we discover the ways we like to work, the people we want to be, the accomplishments that make us proud. In all these activities we constantly need to make sense of the ideas and values of others, to integrate differing viewpoints and desires, different ways of talking and doing. As we participate in community life, we inevitably become in part the people that others need us to be, and many of us also find at least some of our efforts unsupported or even strenuously opposed by others... The challenges of living in a village define fundamental issues for both education and development.1

His website had a contact email address and in the spirit of nothing ventured nothing gained  I decided to invite him to write a feature article for the next issue of the Magazine.. Within a few hours I had a very encouraging response which indicated that although in the midst of travelling from Europe to San Diego he had taken the trouble to follow the link I had given him to my website and had made a relational connection.. What a wonderful illustration of our ecologies in action.

Fortified by insights gained at the CRA workshop, the other important decision I made this week was to reframe the conference we are planning for next year to focus attention on the way that universities are supporting lifewidelearning ie I turned it from a criticism of inaction to the opportunity to celebrate achievement and progress. In spite of uncertainties I went ahead and booked the venue thus committing Lifewide Education to the conference in March next year. Making these decisions brought a sense of relief, as so often decision making does, and I was much happier at the end of the week than I had been at the start.

1 Lemke J L (2002) Becoming the Village: Education across lives, in G. Wells and G. Claxton (eds) Learning for Life in the 21st Century: Sociocultural Perspectives on the Future of Education Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Oxford, UK available on-line at http://www.jaylemke.com/storage/becoming-the-village.pdf

Once in a while we have experiences that are so different from our normal day to day routines because we have inhabited a very different sort of cultural space. This was one of those experiences when I visited the Education Faculty of Beijing Normal University - the leading institution of education in China. Thanks to the generosity of Professor Hong and the university my wife and daughter were able to come with me. 

I gave two talks to postgraduate students at the Faculty's International Workshop on Large Scale Assessment and Institutional Evaluation. It gave me the chance to talk to students about lifewide learning and education and to gain their perspectives on what it meant to them in their lives and to its relevance for China. Through my conversations with students and faculty I formed a view that there is a lot of pressure on young people in China to perform well throughout their schooling, college and university and the style of teaching, learning and assessment demands a lot of discipline and compliance. Students have huge respect for their teachers but they are also taught to be dependent rather than independent learners. They seem to have little time for activities outside of the formal curriculum although undergraduate degrees have embraced the US liberal arts education model and include general education as well as their major subject.

I interviewed several students and although they recognised the relevance and importance of lifewide learning in their own lives they doubted whether lifewide education would be possible in Chinese universities. Firstly they thought that parents wanted their children to concentrate on getting good grades and notheing else mattered. Secondly they felt that faculty would resist and not want to put the effort in to change. They felt that pressure would have to come from employers saying that they wanted employees with the sorts of capabilities that require development through lifewide experiences.

Turning to my own lifewide learning this week was very special. We were shown the meaning of hospitality. Our host Professor Hong Chegwen was so friendly, kind and generous with his words and his time. We dined with him almost every night. He is a most entertaining and funny host and we were introduced to the most amazing dishes. I can't remember experiencing so many different dishes in such a short space of time and the Chinese dining culture of continuously toasting each other and the wisdom gained through life. It is a very nice custom and toasting life and the people in our lives seems to fit very well with lifewide learning. 

Throughout the week our wellbeing was cared for by two students - Li Xianoyan and Zheng Lingyu. We will never forget their friendliness and kindness and their generous gifts of their time and help in enabling us to see some of the many attractions of Beijing including the Forbidden City, Great Wall, Tian an Men Square and some of the  Ho Hoi hutongs and markets. They guided and advised us with great care and attention always smiling and never tiring of answering our questions so that we could grow better meanings from our experiences. They acted as cultural interpreters and I could see how such people are essential to lifewide learning when you move into such unfamiliar cultural contexts. We are indebted to them for their help and we hope to be able to repay them in the future when they come to England.

Sometimes you know when you have a made a relationship from which new things will grow and I sense that my relationship with BNU, thanks to Professor Hong and the students I met, will continue to grow.

The next issue of our Lifewide Magazine is being formed around this
African proverb... a cultural story with deep meanings, and I thought it was
worth spending the time to reflect on my own early life. My first thought was
that this is a story about lots of people being actively involved in helping and
enabling a child to grow up. That seems obvious I suppose most of us have
parents, siblings, aunts/uncles, cousins and grandparents and I guess in an
African village all would have played a part.. But I interpreted the story to mean that other members of the village would also be involved..perhaps to teach essential skills and pass on cultural wisdom that was essential for the health and survival of the village..

There was nothing exceptional about my childhood. I was born in 1950 in the middle of Manchester.. and my earliest memories (less than 5) are of a street of terraced houses (Camelford St) with front doors that opened onto the street. I have quite a lot of fragments of early memories and impressions of my surroundings. I know we had good neighbours who sometimes looked after me but I'm sure my early upbringing was dominated by mum and dad and home. When I was 5 I moved to the northwest side of Manchester a place called Monton.. to a home with a front and back garden..I remember that moving was a traumatic experience fore me. It was still a town, with a cotton mill and canal at the end of the road, but at least there were fields to play in..and without too many cars it was safe to play in the street..which I did with the kids nearby... the neighbours were friendly but I don't remember much of a community in the way I imagined the African proverb describes. As I became increasingly aware of who I was. I learnt what was right and wrong and suffered the consequences (usually a smack and being sent to bed) if I did not follow the rules or crossed a boundary...like playing on the railway.. or falling in the  canal..or answering back..

We considered ourselves as a good working class family you achieved through hard work and a good job was you aim in life. My parents ambition for me was not very great at that stage.. you left school at 16 and got a job... my dad left school at 14 and what was good enough for him was good enough for me.. (at that stage).. so I don't think I was encouraged in the
 sense of ever thinking that education was a way of making something of yourself. My mum had to look after all of us.. by the time I was 10 there were 5 of us! so she had her work cut out. Being the eldest I felt I was the one that was treated the harshest and I was the one that was always pushing at the boundaries .. like bed time.. So perhaps that became part of my
chararcter..

My mum was the one we spent most time with and she was the one who had to keep us under control and look after us..she worked very hard and for years she never had a pair of knitting needles out of her hands. She had a tremendous positive spirit and always saw the good in everyone and everything (still does) and although her ambitions for us were also limited she never
stopped encouraging us.. I owe my own positivity to her I'm sure. I know I was loved and cared for and their role model as parents has stood me in good stead for being one myself.

My father's gift to me was his work ethic (his own a reaction to his father who had been unemployed for most of his childhood when the family had suffered real poverty and led to his mothers early death). Whatever the weather he cycled the five miles to work and never missed a dayunless he literally couldn't climb on his bike.  He suffered from bronchitis and his presence was often announced by coughing.. I had to do my share of jobs like run errands and I was also volunteered! to cut
the hedges and grass of neighbours. I remember resenting it but if I'm honest all these things fed into me.

I'm sure I leant at primary school. I certainly learnt to be a member of a community, make friends, treat people with respect and
follow rules pushing at them from time to time and suffering the consequences.. I remember being caned on several occasions.  My school had not learnt how to get pupils through the 11+ with only one or two passing each year so no one was
surprised that I didn't pass it. 

From the age of 8 church choir and cubs expanded my horizons enormously -
and gave me my first taste of freedom away from parental control! Day trips by
train to Derbyshire and the Lake District or the N Wales coast... In all of
these activities I think I learned much from just being out in the world and
interacting with people and adults.  When I think more deeply about this I think
that both choir and cubs taught me the value of being part of a community, of
learning their cultures and being part of it, of doing things together and in
the case of the choir practicing an anthem over and over again and then performing it. I can with the benefit of hindsight see that this was important learning. Both cubs and choir required discipline and commitment.. once a week for cubs .. Sunday morning and evening for choir and Friday for practice..they both taught me a sense of belonging and they both taught me that if you stick at something long enough, with time you will become a leader one day.... head chorister in the choir or a sixer (responsible for at least people) in the cubs.. When I look back these were important things to learn at that age and I'm sure they shaped me psychology and spiritually (though not religeous).

What I do know is that by the age of 10 I had a good sense of who I was but
not who I wanted to be. Going to secondary school was my first defining moment - a gym, playing fields and organised sport was all I needed to become who I wanted to be. Sport (any) and teams became my life..and I was good at these things..my confidence and belief in myself grew. I loved my school and just being in the environment helped me grow up.. I was in the top class and I don't know how but I came top in my first term which entitled me to a crack at the 12+ exam. The first of three important second chances in my formal education. I was reluctant to try for the Grammar school as I liked my Secondary Modern school so much. My mum and dad thought I should try and sent me to see the vicar who they thought could influence me and he did.. I decided I would go and do the exam and then decide what to do.. I passed and then had to make the decision which was a no brainer for my parents but more difficult for me.. Needless to say I went and that was my second defining moment as a child.

Looking back I did not have any sense that I was raised by a community.. perhaps a village would have been different....my values were learnt through family, school and church, there were adults who undoubtedly influenced me and particularly controlled what I did but I think I learnt more from my friends and just being out and about in the world : a pattern that continued through my teens. Growing up and becoming me was a social process but it was more to do with participating in life than being shaped and influenced by significant others.

I am not sure that my early childhood story plays well into my interpretation of it 'takes a village idea'.. My story I think reflects more the idea that as we grow up we have to find and put ourselves into different communities in order to learn from
others and gain the experiences that will help us develop as people. Nor does my story play very well into the saying “Give
me the child until he is seven and I’ll give you the man”.  While early life influences are very important, and we
they most certainly shape our  beliefs and values, once we become aware of who we are and of our own agency, there are
opportunities that if we take them will enable us to become the person we want to be indeed perhaps its the way we start to learn who we want to be, We are not rigidly held in the mould of ourselves as a seven year old.

Putting the first mark on the paper is a scary thing but I know once I get going it's not so bad. The psychological barrier we have to confront when we make a start can be very hard to overcome. I recently spent 6 or 7 weeks prevaricating over a
chapter I had to write that I knew was going to be hard. Sadly, when I eventually started it was hard and I find it very easy to put it to one side  and start (and finish)something else. Not a good habit I know but I have managed to convince myself its part of my creative process and that because it's at the back of my mind (actually playing on my mind!) I'm still working on the ideas. So my question is do other people suffer from this problem and if they do have they learnt any strategies for
dealing with it. Generally once I get going my attitude changes and I become more positive so something obviously happens in the mind once a start has been made. 


Saturday 15/09 - my mums birthday- 86 today

Today I have a good example of making a start. One of my goals in my current development plan is to create a memorial garden for my first wife Jill. Immediately after she died in 1999 I spent 3 or 4 months building a water garden. It gave me a lot of comfort and the physical toiling under a hot sun helped me work through my grief.. Since I moved house I have felt guilty that I have not created a physical space for her. But it's one thing saying you are going to do something and another to do it. Anyway its a lovely sunny day and I have been in the garden chopping down trees. I decided to move one of our
benches into the woods.. We have 3 acres of woodland and apart from the paths it just runs wild.. As I was carrying it down to the woods I decided I'd like to put it in the middle somewhere and as I started looking the idea of the memorial garden came into my head again.. There is a sort of drainage channel through the middle with lots of reeds and in spring there is a swathe of forgetmenots.. which flowers in early May - the time Jill died... I know my daughters also share my delight in the forgetmenots so I decided that the naturalistic 'garden' just had to be there.. so rather than prevaricate any more I worked out a route
from the existing path, cleared the bigger logs and drove the tractor in to make a start on the pathway.. Standing back from the particularities of the situation I think my goal is to create something that I, and my children will value. I had a vision of what it will be like- pretty and natural like she was and surrounded by wild woodland but in the more open spaces where the light comes shining through and the wild flowers grow in spring. While my vision and enthusiasm was still in my head (and ignoring the other jobs I was in the middle of) I began creating a pathway towards achieving the vision.. I know its just a start, and
there will be a lot of hard work ahead, but it feels already as if I am a significant way towards my goal. I took some photos before I started so I can see the changes I make. I feel quite positive about it having made a start.
Sunday 16/09

Knowing I had a busy day ahead of me I got up at 7am and went down to the woods and spent several hours laying out the pathway. It was laborious work cutting through fallen logs, lugging fallen trees to line the pathway and trying to dig through the chalky rubble to fill in some of the hollows. I fell over several times as my foot caught in the brambles and got stung by nettles. Altogether it was a sweaty exhausting process but I could see the progress I was making so that spurred me on. I could see that although I had a rough idea for the direction of the pathway and the detail was designed as I went in order to miss trees and stumps that I hadn't at first appreciated were there because they were overgrown. It made me feel bad when I realised that the 4' wide pathway was going to destroy a lot of plants in the middle part of the new pathway. After thinking about if for a while I decided that I would only use the lawn mower in the middle part and have a narrow pathway through the reeds and bracken. I recognised that this was a better solution.

Monday 17/09

I should have been doing other things but I spent a couple of hours in the woods. It was hard work filling in valleys and fissures in the path and there is a lot of this to do before I have anything like a proper footpath. When I'm walking in some out of the way place I often think of the people who must have made the path originally. Making paths for future generations of people to follow seems to me to be a special task in life and it can be used as a metaphor for leading others. Today my woodland work was inspected by my mother and father in law who are visiting us. They love walking and they could see what I was trying to do and they recognised it as a good thing. We talked about how gardeners don't just make things for themselves they are creating something that other people can enjoy in the future. My insight today was to do with design - now that I have done what I have done I can see much more the potential in what I'm doing. Its only after you have got someway into a project that this potential can be appreciated.
Tuesday 18/09

Well I think I have found a solution to my bumpy path problem. I went for a walk around the garden and behind some fir trees I found a pile of builders rubble which I had put there 4 years ago when we had a garage conversion done. The only snag is it's a long way to hump it down to the woods. So I have to convince myself the exercise will do me good. I spent a couple of hours humping the rubble down - altogether I made 4 trips with a full barrow.. fortunately its downhill and the last one I got a puncture and ended up having to pull the barrow. This is the slogging part of the process with little joy. It took me two hours to grade 2 meters so I can estimate that there is a couple of weeks work if I try to stick to my two hours a day. It was sunny though and paused to imagine several times what I could do when I start to create the woodland garden.. The results are good and I covered up the rubble with woodland soil so it looks fairly natural. Today's reflection is on the role of 'sustained slog' in trying to accomplish anything of significance. Once the initial enthusiasm of starting is over there is usually a lot of labour which is not very rewarding emotionally. I'm going to use John Cowan's idea of finding two hours a day to keep chipping away at the 'problem'. I probably won't make any more entries until I get to the next stage.

World events come in all shapes and sizes but the Olympics - especially when they are hosted by your own country are pretty big and sustained. Of course I love sport and having been sporty as a youth I can relate to what these elite athletes are going through and appreciate something of the dedication, commitment, sacrifice and pain they have gone through to prepare themselves for their moment.

I can honestly say I have been blown away by the spectacle from the opening ceremony which filled me with pride through all the drama as it unfolds. Not retrospective analysis but raw gut feelings to what is happening or has just happened involving the people who it is happening to. Having the time to follow multiple events on the BBC internet service I have been totally enthralled by the drama and the spectacle. I also managed to experience two events - football and volley ball. 

There is no doubt that the media have a huge role to play in engaging people in the Olympic experience especially for people who are unable to directly experience an event. The BBC coverage has been exceptional - through the profiles of the athletes I have learnt about them as individuals - their families, their sporting history and what it means to them and the coaches who encourage and help them perform. Through the events we learn about the different sports and what individuals have to do and of course we witness people performing at the highest level.

I expect I'm no different to anyone else when I witness - albeit through the BBC - someone winning an event in the Olympics. On every occasion I experience a rollercoaster of emotions that begins with willing people on and then there is an overwhelming feeling in which tears well up and I connect with the moment being shared by athlete and audiences all over the world .. It is an amazing feeling of happiness, pride and gratitude for someone who has achieved their dream after devoting their life for this moment. And they share their overwhelming joy and thank all the people who have helped them and made sacrifices too.. And I can't help but be moved and feel uplifted as I experience this wonderfully human feeling over and over again.

                                                 Laura Trott just after she won gold in the cycling rejoicing with her family. 

But what about the downside of the emotional rollercoaster? The side that is not joyful but broken-hearted. Thanks to TV we also witness the total dejection of people who judge themselves to have fallen short of their goal, who perform well below what they are capable of doing or who injure themselves in competition. We see interviews of people who have given everything and were piped at the post like Mark Hunter and Zac Purchase in their dramatic lightweight double sculls final when they led all the way until the last few metres and were beaten by inches into the silver medal position. They were barely able to talk because they were physically shattered and choked with emotion. And our empathetic brains kick in again as we share their utter devastation and empathise with their situation. 

And I'm sure the memories will live on until I can remember no more and just as I was inspired by Sebastian Coe and Steve Ovet in the 1980's many young people will have been inspired by the performances of participants in these games and their influences and effects will be immeasurable. 

Sunday June 24
Every parent knows that the thing that they most want for their unborn child is to be healthy and when you are told that your newly born child may not be - it is an unbearable burden. Over the weekend my daughter learnt that when one of her new born twins stopped breathing a week or so after he was born, he might have suffered some damage to his brain. I cannot pretend to comprehend how she must have felt all I know is how I felt and she and my grandson have not been far from my mind ever since. At such times we realise that life is not just about development in a positivistic sense. It's about coping with things that fundamentally turn your world upside down, that require love and empathy in a profound way and I ultimately providing practical help and support wherever and whenever it is needed in ways that you never imagined before. This is profound mental and emotional adjustment within a set of relationships that lie at the centre of your life. As a parent it has hard to discover anything that is good in such a situation until you see the way your daughter starts to cope with the worst situation she can imagine and becomes positive and hopeful again. It is a lesson in the resilience of the human spirit and the profound love a mother has for her child or as she calls him - her little angel.

As a committed lifewider I'm a firm believer in the principle that what you gain from an experience is proportional to what you put into it. One of my failings perhaps is, if I'm busy, I don't try things for long enough or put enough effort in to appreciate the value in something. I had made my mind up to put effort into our twitter week long conversation even though I was quite busy. And looking back over the week I can see that I did learn lots of new things. I knew next to nothing about how to use twitter before I started and the practice I had had only confirmed my prejudices so I suppose I was quite sceptical about its value to me. But I can now appreciate some of the value in twitter (thanks to the people who helped me - Nick, David and Jane in particular) and how I can incorporate twitter into my personal learning strategies

1) Knowing next to nothing at the start it is easy to see that I now know something.I am now confident in composing and posting messages and being able to search for people and topics.

2) I gained some new experience in trying to engage people in the twitter conversation and in setting up the invitations on the website.

3) I have to say that I found the form of conversation frustrating and I didn't think I progressed my understanding of LWL beyond what I already knew. In fact I found some of the ideas confusing I think because I was not appreciating the contexts in the minds of those offering the ideas. But I acknowledge that others did seem to get excited by things that I wasn't able to appreciate so there is value in witnessing how others are inspired. 

4) Which takes us into the affective domain. We all look for inspiration and I posted a question on a Linked in forum this week relating to what inspires us. I could clearly see that some of the posts that were made on twitter seemed to inspire people and I did towards the end of the week (see below) experience some inspiring moments. So I can now appreciate that posts made in twitter can be a source of inspiration. * I'm also trying to engage with linked-in so I have been able to make comparisons between twitter and linked in and see how twitter posts are used in linked in.

5) The event introduced me to new people and their work which was important new relational knowledge and off-line I approached one person with a view to trying to engage them as a supporter of and contributor to our work.

6) I took the trouble to search out blogs that provided concise and useful knowledge about twitter so began to use codified knowledge and personal wisdom gained from experienced users. Twitter now began to make more sense to me because I have had the practical experience of trying to use it (see attachment)

7) By Day 5 (thursday) I was beginning to adopt an exploratory approach - forcing myself to go beyond the conversation. I was not so interested in what people were saying in the conversation as the links to video's and blogs that people provided. I started to follow up links e.g #learning that one of the participants was providing. And then did my own searching for messages that looked interesting following up the links in them. I came across David Gerteen who I was aware was a well known thought leader. L clicked on one of his links and it took me to a great website with some excellent video speaker content - now I realised that by following links that looked meaningful I could find resources that were useful to me - my work and expanded my understanding. I began to see for the first time the value of twitter from the perspective of incorporating it into a personal learning strategy. But I had to invest quite a lot of time to get to this stage of enlightenment.

8) Then moving from links to people I identified one or two people who seem to be productive thought leaders in fields that I am interested in and began to follow them so on Friday morning I spent 20mins checking up on links provided and found some interesting resources. So I can see the value of following and hopefully if you post things of interest to others - of being followed.

So all in all I have developed through this experience some useful experience-based insights (some knowing how to), acquired and made use of existing codified knowledge, gained some very valuable relational knowledge, identified and connected to some thought leaders that I'm sure will inspire me, improved my media literacy ( a little), and I can now see how I can incorporate twitter into a personal learning strategy. In other words, through taking the time to engage in activity through which I might learn something new,  I have shifted from being ignorant, sceptical and having no competency in using this technology to a position of relative enlightenment and having some new capability, confidence, interest and belief. And I have overcome my prejudice and scepticism.

Not bad in 5 days!! 


APPLYING MY LEARNING 19/05/12
Learning about something and then enacting what you have learnt are two different things. On Saturday morning I added a twitter button to my blog and made myself spend 20mins checking out #Learning and found a really interesting link to Charles Jennings blogs. Its an area of learning and development I was not aware of and I have read his articles and re-posted one of them on the Lifewide Education website. The proof of the pudding is in the eating then I have eaten twitter and it tastes good. I was also pleased to see this post by David Roberts which showed that someone had taken an interest in my learning.

David C Roberts ‏@DavidCRobertsVery telling blog post by @lifewider1 about a learning exploration on#Twitter http://www.normanjackson.co.uk/scraps-of-life-blog.html#learning #heutagogy #LW1 #PhDchat

Where does joy feature in lifewide, lifedeep and lifelong learning?

It's a glorious Sunday morning one of those amazing, bright sunny spring mornings with a heavy dew on the grass that is so uplifting. I was reading the latest draft of the summer issue of Lifewide Magazine. Each of the articles seemed to be expressing in some way the  joy of what I was feeling and when I started to look more deeply it seemed to me that all the pieces were connected by this theme of joy but in what way is it related to lifewide learning? So where do our community members find joy?

For Anna Vartapetiance, joy was found in tackling the challenge of coming to live in the UK from another country and the joy of learning and adapting to enjoy another culture and the opportunities that living on a multicultural campus brings.

For Nick Jackson  -who 'always tries to look on the bright side of life', joy is to be found in discovering that his commitment to developing and continually trying to improve a broad range of skills and interests, is his secret of success and personal fulfilment.

For school teacher Peter Rhodes joy was in discovering a new way of engaging his pupils so that they discovered the joy in their own learning and personal achievement. Joy was also found  in the accomplishment of pupils in a primary school who created and performed a magical mystery tour assembly for their fellow pupils and teachers.

For Joevas Asare, an ambassador for lifewide education, joy comes from pursuing his passion to be a successful rap singer (called J Peace) and working with talented people in the music business to learn from them and become a better musician.

And for Harvard Professors Joe Blatt and Chris Dede joy is realised by helping to change the way education utilises the diverse range of communication  technologies  so that more students experience the rich pleasure of learning and what they call the 'joygap' is closed.

While for our featured artist, Kiboko HachiYon, his joy is realised in turning abstract ideas into images that help people recognise and celebrate the deeper meanings in life.

I began to appreciate that joy was an important part of the lives of all the people in our community who were contributing stories from their life. By contributing to the Magazine they were really sharing some of the joy in their lives and in doing so they are encouraging other people to recognise the joy in their own lives

It seems to me that joy is within us as we experience the everyday incidents of life but that it originates in achieving or trying to accomplish the things we value ....It involves feelings of happiness but happiness can be related to a transient pleasurable experience. Joy is deeper, more profound and sustained than happiness because it affects the spirit of who we are. And because it's a state of mind rather than a state of body it has the potential to continue to affect what we do because it is part of who we are and who we want to become. The sense of exuberance and empowerment that fills us seems to infect everything - as the young people in the photo are doing (a photo I love so much that I used it on the cover of my book) we literally jump for joy because the emotion affects us physically 
So perhaps joy is an achievement, an achieved state of mind that helps us see and interpret and enact our everyday experiences as we interact with the world around us. This is the lifedeep side of learning- the deeper spiritual meanings of living and being aware. I was curious to know what other people felt joy was and both my children saw it as being something deeper than mere happiness.

I googled and I was struck by how many of the websites I found that discussed joy had a religious or spiritual context. Here is one the explanations I liked.
Trying to define joy is like drinking water from one hand.  You can only capture a bit at a time.  It is more than happiness, more than contentment, more than gratitude, though they all are certainly components of joy.  Joy is a feeling, but it is also an attitude toward life. Abraham Lincoln said “most people are just as happy as they make up their minds to be.”  The same could be said of joy.  Most of us are just as joyful as we decide we are going to be.

It is hard to always, and in every circumstance,  find things to appreciate, to enjoy and, even sometimes,  to find hope for the future.  There can be crushing experiences in health, employment or relationships.  What brings us through them?  It is the splashes of joy that cross our lives....In joy we find gratitude, happiness and hope for the future.  Sometimes those splashes seem random, sometimes they come from others but they lift us up.  And then we can lift others.

So I'm convinced that joy is something that relates to the lifedeep dimension of lifewide and lifelong learning

A Pinch of Joy website
http://www.apinchofjoy.com/2011/08/what-is-joy/