We spend all of our lives becoming the person we are but rarely stand back and analyse what it entails at the level of our daily lives - preferring to see our growth as a mysterious phenomenon. I have discovered I get great benefit from producing things, usually with other people, that cause me to think about my own circumstances. The latest issue of Lifewide Magazine which I worked on with the editor Jenny Willis focuses on the question of how we become the person we want, need or ought to be. Our Magazine is our most important vehicle for exploring different dimensions of the phenomenon of lifewide learning and development and the process of 'making' involving searching for, commissioning and writing content, and commissioning illustrations and working with the artist always exposes me to new ideas and reshapes my understandings. This issue was particularly significant in this respect. So many of the articles reveal just how precious the chance we have is to use our life to become the person that we try to be so that at the end of our life we are thankful for being that person and have no regrets that we were not someone else. Of course life throws things at us or takes us in all sorts of directions which we would not ask for and this is the reality of what we have to work with. But we can and should be inspired by the people who, through their own actions, show us how to live a life of purpose and meaning that influences and benefits all around them. I had a fascinating and illuminating conversation with my daughter about how she thought she had become the person she is. She has clearly thought deeply about who she is and how she has become the person she is and what affects her day to day in being the person she wants to be. It was deeply personal and meaningful and I learnt so much from the conversation.
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I know I have the positivity gene which I inherited from my mother. I see it as a strength to think positively about events and situations even when most other people would think that there was nothing positive about them. The down side of that perhaps is that I generally don't acknowledge failure because my reasoning is that not being successful in something is merely one step on the journey to accomplishing something, or abandoning a particular course of action. I don't think that there is anything wrong with this but I need to recognise that it might be a weakness not to see something as a failure and to talk about it as a failure (rather than a step on the journey).. This was brought home to me in a TEDx talk by two college students Tara Suri & Niha Jain - Learning to Fail whose main theme was to admit failure and talk about it was good for you and provided an honest foundation on which to build. Rather, than perhaps a foundation of denial or minimalised interrogation that perhaps positivity encourages. By coincidence I was writing a background paper for my presentation at the International Forum of Innovators in University Teaching (IFIUT) conference in Riyadh next February when I saw the TED talk and I think it was helpful in enabling me to be honest and open about the failure of SCEPTrE and me as leader of the enterprise in securing a future for the Lifewide Learning Award - particularly my failure to persuade my line manager that the award was something that was worth nurturing. It's hard to put myself back two years to remember my actions, my feelings and how my beliefs evolved in response to my manager's actions and words. But the writing process combined with the TED talk that had made an impression on me, made me question myself more deeply as to whether I had been persistent, skilful, forceful and subtle enough in my pursuit of success. I will never know whether a different outcome would have been achieved had I been better at persuading, or whether things had been different had the previous line manager remained in post for the final year of the project. Being honest about failure raises lots of 'what ifs' and these I don't find helpful in moving forward. What I do know is that if I believe in something I will try to find a way to progress or make something of it and this is the way I prefer to live my life. So the failure of me and SCEPTrE to persuade the University that our concepts and practices relating to the idea of lifewide learning, education and personal development, would add value to the existing educational practices, provided me with the opportunity to take these ideas forward through a different mechanism (Lifewide Education Community Interest Company). Something that I would not have been able to do had SCEPTrE been successful. But failure is rarely black and white. If I apply this way of thinking to the current Lifewide Learning Community enterprise in our first year I think we have been very successful - 200 registered members and an established presence, community website, Magazine, e-book and a Lifewide Development Award. We have much to celebrate. The current 'Failure' might be in not attracting enough people to the award - we know this and the focus in the New Year has to be on addressing this failure while maintaining and growing the other aspects of our enterprise. In other words failure is only failure when you give up and admit defeat. In the case of SCEPTrE we didn't give up- the university gave us up. This week will be interesting because I'm contributing to a survey LWE survey aimed at revealing how, what and why we learn through our everyday experiences. It should reveal the ecology of my lifwide learning. Three times a day I will spend about 10mins recording these things and at the end of the week pool them with other contributors to see what emerges. I will also reflect on what my log tells me. Anyone is welcome to join the survey even if its only for a few days. DOWNLOAD SURVEY TEMPLATE Here is my completed log for the week
A Week in My Life - making sense of my activities and the learning/meaning I derive from them
My week was atypical in the sense that it is not every week that I get the chance to participate in a conference and interact with people who shared the same sorts of interests and values as I have. But the rest of the week was typical of my current life. So what have I learnt from the process of recording and thinking about my experiences? ACTIVITIES Out of a possible 168 hours (7x24h) I was active for about 112h (averaging about 16h per day). These were broken down into the following categories of activity WORK About 50 hours includes work for my company Chalk Mountain and Lifewide Education. This week it including attending a conference. This week I spent considerably more time on LWE work. Also includes 6h for this recording and reflecting exercise. Quite a lot of my time was spent either preparing for the conference or trying to fix a problem with a website. FAMILY About 24h this includes family at home (my wife and daughter), family elsewhere (children at university and children/grandchildren living locally), and family overseas (mother and father in Australia and sisters in Australia). DOWNTIME about 18h includes reading, listening to music, watching TV/ youtube for pleasure and education like Time Team and playing my drums TRAVELLING about 14h mainly time in the car being a taxi service or travelling to friends and family. This week included travelling to and from Leeds to participate in a conference CHORES about 6h includes - cleaning, shopping, preparing meals, ironing, doing odd jobs in house/garden HABBITS I am clearly a creature of habit and my life is quite routinised. I get up and go to bed at more or less the same time. I have breakfast, lunch and dinner at more or less the same time, and the pattern of what I do each day when I am at home is more or less the same. I start working at around 8am and work until 12ish.. I eat lunch and watch time team, I work pm until late afternoon or evening. I have dinner at more or less the same time with my family and we use this opportunity of being together to learn about each other's lives, discuss family and make plans. Evenings after dinner are generally devoted to relaxing and I seem to do the same sort of things most evenings.. This routine might be seen in a negative way but they do not feel boring or constraining because I generally value what I am doing and derive meaning and enjoyment from the things I am doing most of the time. Indeed, negative emotions generally emerge when things get in the way of the things I am trying to do - like having to complete my tax returns. SOCIAL INTERACTIONS My main social interaction day to day is with my family wife and children, and thanks to my sister's call - my family in Australia. Some of these interactions are face to face and some via email/skype/telephone. Conversations and activities encourage the sharing of daily events or news in each others lives the disclosure of feelings and practical and emotional support. Another sort of social interaction is related to work and this is mainly focused on trying to make progress. Communication is mainly through email and I am grateful for the help and support given to me by other people involved in LWE. Life is punctuated by less regular events like participating in conferences and this provides opportunity for face to face social interaction. PLANNED & UNPLANNED ACTIVITY While there is a consistency regarding the pattern of my activity the detail is only roughly planned from day to day. At the start of the week I know roughly what I want to try and achieve. But the details of each day only unfold within the day. There are also unanticipated events that emerge and create problems and new opportunities. This week I had two emergent situations. The first involved having to resolve a problem with the LWE website created by the person who hosts it making changes to the front page that I didn't like. The second event involved me responding to an email from Rob Ward offering me the chance to design and facilitate a workshop at the CRA conference on Friday. This is how it happened.. ******************************** From: Rob Ward Sent: 19 November 2012 10:10 To: Norman Jasckson Subject: Forthcoming Residential Importance: High Hi Norman I'm needing to do some last minute tweaking of the Residential programme as the final short session on 'Creativity and PDP' (plenary workshop, 14.20-15.00 on Friday) can't now go ahead as planned. Would you bewilling/able to offer a short contribution on this theme here? Apologies for the short notice! BW Rob ******************************** Once I had thought about it I did see it as a real opportunity to try something new and develop myself in the process. ********************************************** From: Norman Jasckson Sent: Mon 11/19/2012 2:14 PM To: Rob Ward Subject: RE: Forthcoming Residential Okay how about trying to model creative use of technology? This process would need the room to be connected to internet and two CRA staff to support - 1 connected to twitter, 1 connected to weebly.com a website building tool THEME 'Using technology to stimulate students' creativity in recording ideas, experiences, learning and achievement' Participants to assume that there are no constraints on the way technology might be used in their own PDP environments ie a blank sheet of paper. DESIGN - process 1) Self-organise into groups of about 4 people. Groups must include someone with a smart phone. 2) 10mins - pool ideas in the group drawn from personal or imagined experiences 3) 10mins - choose 1 idea and create a poster on a sheet of flip chart paper to explain the idea also prepare a 1 min pitch 4) 5mins - find a quiet corner and person with smart phone a) takes a photo of poster b) records 1 min explanatory pitch on phone 5) 5 mins group composes 140 character tweet to capture the essence of theiridea for twitter and tweet, photo of poster and 1 min video clip emailed to CRA address 6) 10 mins CRA colleagues a) post tweets & images on twitter & B) upload video clips to weebly website.. outcome The tweets would be displayed on the projector screen and if we had two screens we could also display the video clips.. People can go away and look at the results. ********************************************************* Between this email and the workshop I did the preparatory work necessary to make it work, I got support from JW who provided illustrative poster and recording and I liaised with DB from CRA to make sure we could do it. The workshop worked very well and I know I can add this sort of technologically enabled workshop to my repertoire of facilitation techniques. I had no idea that this would happen at the start of the week. LEARNING & DEVELOPMENT Unusually for me this week some of my learning was formal in the sense that I put myself into situations (presentations and workshops) with the intention of learning something. But, more typically, most of my learning was informal usually goal/achievement driven... a) completing my book project or b) trying to advance LWE. I did try several things I hadn't done before including a workshop design that seemed to engage participants and get some great results. Much of my learning was simply about gaining some new knowledge and much of it was through conversation mainly with people I already knew but who I had lost touch with. Most of my follow-up actions will be linked to this relational knowledge. I would say that quite a lot of activity I engaged in did not lead to any significant or recognisable learning. In terms of personal development - what I can do now that I couldn't do before the week started I would identify the workshop I facilitated and the techniques I developed to engage people and record their creations. That experiential knowledge, the capability I developed and used and the confidence I gained can be used again. Most of my learning was driven by my needs. I needed to modify a logo so I learnt how to use photoshop top do it. I uploaded a slide show to weebly for the first time. I learned how to design and facilitate a workshop I took on. Some of my learning was simply a biproduct of enjoying myself.. like searching for music on Youtube, spotting a new band I liked on Later with Jools Holland. There is also learning of a more strategic in nature which is linked to my work namely reading articles and books that enable me to add to my understanding. This week I read a transcript and watched a video clip of John Seeley Brown's talk on the entrepreneurial learner which I think LWE can use. I had picked this up from a link in a blog by Jane Hart that I was examining with a view to commissioning a chapter for LWE e-book. Much of my learning comes from this sort of intelligent and sometimes haphazard searching. I also continued to develop my understandings of the ways of thinking promoted by Clayton Christiensen by reading his book and trying to apply his ideas to what I was doing which I know will have significance for LWE. Some of my learning has come from using tools like stat counter to monitor how my websites are being used. This is a new form of learning over the time the knowledge will be valuable to know what interventions draw people to our resources. In a more typical week I would do a lot more writing. For me writing is a very important way of developing and organising my thinking, creating meaning and recording my understandings. This log and the reflective piece served as my main writing task this week. MEANINGIn my family context meaning is created through the day to interactions and conversations we have and the things we do to help and encourage each other and give each other emotional and practical support. In the work context meaning is created through my book and in developing and promoting LWE. I feel I made quite a lot of progress with the later this week both in the redesign of the website and in my involvement with the conference. Meaning is also created through interaction with my family and feeling that I am in some way helping them. Reflecting on my experience of participating at the CRA conference I felt that I had, at least momentarily, regained a lost identity and renewed a set of friendships/relationships with people and higher education that had been eroded because it was no longer part of my everyday experience. This meant a lot to me and it has taught me the value of trying to find or create these opportunities for my own wellbeing. I devoted a lot of time this week to intentionally learn about my own learning and meaning making. I probably spent 4 or 5 hours this week recording and analysing my activities and what I have learnt from them. The value in the process is that it has enabled me to examine more systematically what I'm doing and how I draw meaning and learning from my activities. VALUES & IDENTITIES One of the purposes of this exercise was to examine the ways in which activities and behaviours, and what motivates them, reflect values and identities. Through the week I was mainly working with two sorts of identity. The first identity I embodied was my working identity - my work is essentially academic (eg being a writer/scholar - the book commission I worked on), educational (applying my knowledge of how people learn to the concept of lifewide learning) and educational developer (trying to influence other educators). The central values here are those of being professional in these fields and trying, through hard work, thinking and creativity to progress each of my work enterprises. An important part of my identity as a teacher is my ability to communicate ideas and engage people in using them. Because of the conference I was able to do both of these in presenting my ideas on lifewide development and facilitating a couple of workshops which enabled people to try out some tools I had developed, or enabled small groups to share ideas and create some original educational designs. It is very important for me to maintain this part of my identity but which is quite hard to do now that I am no longer working in an institution. As a result of reflecting on this I strengthened the way I market this aspect of my professional work on my website. The second identity I embodied relates to me as a member of a large family and a complex set of relationships that make up my family ... as a father/step father, husband, grandfather, brother and son.... the central value here is the love for my family and my desire to care for and help family members and the value of staying in touch with each other. This week, thanks to technology I was able to have interactions and good conversations with my wife and daughter at home.. with my daughter and son at university - telephone/skype, with my wife when I was a away and she was away by telephone and skype, with my mum and dad in Australia (telephone), my two sisters in Australia (skype) and my daughter and my three grandsons. This record shows the value of the technologies we have for enabling us to communicate across the world. I also experienced two other sorts of identity during the week.. The first was a sense of regaining, at least for a short time, an identity I held a few years ago as a respected thought leader in higher education. By being with a group or people I had worked with, including people from two agencies I had worked for, and being reminded of the roles I played in enabling change to happen in the HE system, I felt part of that society or community again. Here the values were around championing an educational cause (PDP, and providing concrete practical support to enabling it to be implemented. The fact that my commitment has carried on beyond employment gives me credibility in this respect. Another identity I nurtured was my identity as a drummer in a band. We normally practice every week so this identity gets validated when we come together. When I'm listening to music in the car I sometimes play our own music or I imagine playing the drums to whatever is being played. This week we didn't have a practice but I had an hours work out on Sunday. Here my values relate to my love of music and of making music particularly with others and trying to improve myself as a drummer. COMPARISON OF HOW I USED MY RESOURCES WITH MY PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT PLAN This is the first time I have ever taken a week of my life and tried to record how I have used it. In his book on Measuring Your Life Clayton Christensen (p62) talks about strategy - Real strategy .. in our daily lives is created through hundreds of everyday decisions about how we spend our resources (our time). As you're living your life from day to day, how do you make sure you are holding in the right direction? Watch where your resources flow. If they are not supporting the strategy you have decided upon, then you're not implementing that strategy at all. The personal development plan I made in September identified my most important goals as: 1 To lead and contribute to the further development and promotion of the Lifewide Education enterprise 2 To grow the Chalk Mountain business and deliver a good service to clients 3 To support my (large) family - do whatever is necessary to help them 4 To build a recording studio and develop the technical skills to record my band 5 To create a woodland garden 6 To be open and responsive to new possibilities and adapt to or take advantage of the unplanned and unexpected I think my life this week has supported achievement of the first three goals and I had a good example of responding to goal six in accepting at short notice, the challenge to facilitate a workshop at the CRA conference. Goals 4&5 are much lower in my list of priorities than the first three goals. So it would appear that, this week at least, is quite closely aligned to my personal strategy. CONTEXTS & PROBLEM SOLVING I often use John Stephenson's contexts and challenges tool to help me reflect on the things I am doing. I would say that this week. Most of my activities have been in the familiar context and familiar problems domain but the conference and the activities I undertook did put me outside my comfort zone (unfamiliar context) and tackle an unfamiliar challenge ( the workshop on creative use of technology). VALUE OF THE EXERCISE I estimate that the whole exercise of recording and analysing my log took me about 7 hours which I have allocated to LWE work. So was it worth it? I think it's helped me appreciate the value of this sort of tool and reflective process to helping people appreciate their learning and development in their everyday lives. I now think that the process and outcomes could be usefully integrated into the Lifewide Development Award. The exercise has: 1) enabled me to see my life as an integrated whole (during this period of time) and see how different parts of my life interact 2) revealed the patterns of daily activity in my life highlighting routines and more unusual activity and the motives for engaging in such activity 3) forced me to think about the learning that is associated with different sorts of activity and the potential ways in which I have developed/changed through only a week of living - indeed this reflective exercise has made a significant contribution to my learning this week added to my understanding of how to promote reflection on our own LWE 4) encouraged me to see the meaning I attribute to different activity in my life 5) enabled me to check how I am allocating my resources to the things I value and confirmed that I am spending my time in ways that are consistent with the goals I set out in my personal development plan 6) enabled me to recognise that the identities I embody and enact which are closely related to the things I value 7) enabled me to apply some of the wisdom I have recently discovered in Clayton Christensen's book to reflect on my own activity and behaviour. This has helped me see how some of the ideas in this book might be incorporated into the guidance and support we give to lifewide learners. A beautiful day is all you need to motivate you to get out into the garden and today was a bright sunny day - the light just filled my head and it felt great. I resolved to have another go at the pathway I am making in the woods (its been a couple of weeks since I made a start on it) and spent several hours chopping at brambles and cutting branches off trees. But manual labour creates great space for thinking and amongst the scratches I thought what a powerful metaphor for living making pathways is. I am designing it as I build it. I know roughly the direction I want to go 'working with the grain' of the woods but the detail emerges as obstacles are encountered like half buried tree trunks that make me alter my route. I can't do it without the tools I have - spade, saw, pick axe. It involves a bit of pain and discomfort but opening up the lovely new spaces make it all worthwhile. My activities this week have been mainly focused on three areas of my life - my family, my work (ChalkMountain book project) and LifewideEducation (launching our Award).
1 Chalk Mountain - Last week I talked about how difficult it is sometimes to make a start. The chapter I have been writing has been a struggle over a long period of time. I put it off and put it off. I did bits here and there and generally hated doing it which is very unusual for me when the task involves writing. But eventually, when I couldn't put it off any longer, and having missed my own deadline twice, I did knuckle down and did it and the result was okay. At least it got us to the stage where we can see where to go next with it. This was in complete contrast to the experience I had writing another chapter the week before which was a joy and just flowed from my mind... I am not sure I learnt much from this struggle but I did get valuable feedback on both chapters which means I can now shape them to make a better fit with what the institution wants.. So the learning is reinforcing what I already know about the need for feedback in order to produce work that is useful. 2 Lifewide Education - My biggest achievement this week was to launch the Lifewide Development Award on the 28/09. I spent time preparing a slide show for the introductory talk and gave the talk to students on the MA Human Resources Management course at Southampton Solent University. I have worked for a long time to reach this moment and done much work to create the guidance and the website infrastructure. It gave me a real sense of satisfaction in talking about what we are doing and explaining the strong positive ideas that underpin the practice. 'Making' the slide show was enjoyable and I felt creative. It resulted in some useful materials to help me explain the background, purposes, structure, process and tools underlying the scheme. I realise that this slideshow is an important tool and I can see how I might produce a podcast for the website from the materials. I think this was an example of 'learning by making a tool'. It's always hard to judge what participants are thinking but my sense is that they found it interesting and I am hoping they will want to participate. In putting the materials together I came across the old African proverb - it takes a village to raise a child and recognised the wisdom in this and its value to LWE as a concept. It is a great metaphor for thecommunity-based enterprise that will have to underlie the Award if it is to be successful. I'm delighted that the on-line Community Forum I established two weeks ago is working really well and I hope that we can draw in the learners to share their experiences. 3 My third area of activity relates to my family.. At the weekend my wife and I took our daughter to university. Not surprisingly she was apprehensive and anxious moving away from home for the first time. We had prepared her as best we could and she had prepared herself by spending three weeks in France - her first independent holiday. After an emotional farewell we left her to get on with it. A week later she tells us how hard it's been - surprisingly she is 'having to juggle loads of things' and 'it's been so frustrating spending three days trying to get logged on to the university system' and 'everywhere is so big and it's easy to get lost' and 'the buses don't come and I spent an hour waiting for one in the rain'. This is why going to university is good for you - it's a nice (protected) wake up call to the real world after years of timetabled familiarity.. My oldest daughter is very much in the real world with one child of 5 and two month old twins and a husband in America.. So I spent some time trying to help.. I was even left for 2 hours by myself with them - that was quite an experience and only filled me even more with admiration. But at least I can feed them both at the same time now and I am growing in confidence and experience of how to look after them.. Incidentally, she is also two thirds through on OU degree trying to fit in the assignments around babies and no sleep.. Its quite humbling... So an interesting week in which I think I have achieved in three areas of my development plan.. Learning in passing -I clicked a Linked-In Learning without Frontiers link to a blog by Gaurav Gupta http://agoodschool.blogspot.co.uk and discovered a lovely little blog site called the Good School site..In it I found the it takes a village to raise a child proverb and I contacted the writer (an Indian) with an invitation to write a short piece for Lifewide Magazine which he is doing.. I feel its a good example of useful knowledge and relationships emerging by just following links. I didn't intend to do this today - it just happened. So this is my reflections on how and why it happened. Working
backwards from the provisional outcome - the outcome was an email invitation to John Cowan to share his expertise and wisdom in mentoring through a Guide on how we might mentor learners on the lifewide learning award which we are planning to start with a group of students in 3 weeks time. In framing this invitation in an email I had to think through the dimensions of the problem - they won't be complete but they do represent a significant chunk of the problem. The story began 2 hours earlier when I sat down to update the front page of my website. From this action I went to my blog and felt it needed updating but wondered what I would write about. I decided I needed to amend my Personal Development Activity Plan to include the URL of my blog and this took me back to the Lifewide Award Guidance Document. I re-read the Guidance and made a number of amendments including a summary statement on the front page explaining what someone had to do to participate in and achieve the award (a recommendation that had been made by my daughter who is trying out the tools). Having updated my own PDAD and lifewide activity map and the Guidance I decided it was time to get final feedback from the team on these documents before we start using them. Also we are going to expose them in an online seminar in two weeks time. So I emailed John who emailed back saying 'Good to hear from you and be given something to do'. I always get a nice feeling when I sense that someone enjoys doing the things I like doing, so seeing an opportunity to involve John further I put my invitation email together. Through this unfolding process I feel I've made a bit of progress towards achieving one of my goals and more importantly I have tuned in again to the continuous development needs of the LWE project, drawing it from the back to the front of my awareness again. So not only do I feel good because I have made a bit of progress, I am re-engaging with the challenge and as a biproduct I have an example of emergent learning for my blog!!!! Looking back over the last eight months I can see that I have learnt quite a lot about the use of technology to desig and build websites. I have also learnt quite a lot about the use of some well known social media tools. My learning and development has been partly planned in the sense that decisions were made and a strategy was developed - like the design of my website and the planning for five twitter exchanges. But it has also been partly reactive to the situations as they arose - like NB's invitation to get involved in Twitter and seeing an example of an organisational facebook page and thinking that this would be a good thing to do.
This journey has involved: 1) creating my own website using weebly tools - then applying my learning to develop five other websites for different purposes using the same tools. 2) creating and maintaining a blog on my weebly website 3) opening a twitter account and participating in four twitter exchanges as well as behaving as an individual 4) setting up a 'scrapbook' to enable me to provide supplementary materials for twitter 5) opening a facebook account and with the help of my daughter setting up a lifewide education facebook page and making postings to the pagehttp://www.facebook.com/LifewideEducation 6) setting up a Lifewide Education Twitter account and linking it to the Facebook pagehttps://twitter.com/#!/ 6) setting up a lifewide education organisational page and promoting discussions on linked in. What I have learnt through this process of participation? I realise I can make effective use of these technologies - I am not scared of making postings and I can see how they work in terms of attracting an audience or following. I'm also beginning to understand how I have to behave in order to attract a social network. These things have been learnt through 1) trial and error - just trying them out 2) being guided by people who were already experienced in using them 3) observing how other users use them and copying them 4) trying to involve other people. I have been experimenting with twitter and discovered that the 140 characters were very restrictive. In the past I linked any substantial and personal thoughts to my blog but I decided that this was inappropriate. So I set up a scrapbook which allows me to record my thoughts on specific topics. It is effectively an extension of this blog. The first topic I used it for was the Olympics. http://lifewidescrapbook.weebly.com/ The concept of everyday creativity Ruth Richards suggests(1) that we are forever creative but sometimes its very hard to recognise any sort of creative thinking or activity in a single day. Yesterday was like that. I spent most of it in the garden trying to get it back to some sort of order after being away for a few weeks. The combination of rain and sunshine had made the grass grow to the point where it looked more like a cultivated crop than a garden. It was very physical and I was very tiered at the end. But I suppose that churning in my head were all sorts of thoughts and feelings about my recent visit to China and the people I had met and how I might continue to develop my relationships with some of them. If there was any creativity in my life that day it was in thinking how to build on my existing relationships. I had planned to set up and launch a Tweet Exchange on the theme of personal creativity and I had done this on Saturday so my focus today was in trying to engage people. So I invited all the speakers who had participated in the Chengdu conference and by the end of the day several had replied. It doesn't seem much but it meant a lot to me that people I had met only a few days before where making contributions to our topic and drawing other people in from their own network. At the end of the day I felt we had made some progress and as Teresa Amabile says - the sense of making progress provides the best conditions for nurturing our creativity (see video below ). So perhaps I will be creative today? 1) Far from being a minor or specialised part of our lives, our everyday creativity - our originality of everyday life- is first of all, a survival capability. It is also a universal capability. But,........our everyday creativity offers us more: It offers a dynamic process and a powerful way of living. When developed, it can open all of us to new depths, richness and presence (Richards 2007:3). Richards, R., (2007) Introduction, in R. Richards (ed) Everyday Creativity and New Views of Human Nature. Washington: American Psychological Association. 1-22. Teresa Amabile - Progress Principle 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 |
PurposeTo develop my understandings of how I learn and develop through all parts of my life by recording and reflecting on my own life as it happens. I have a rough plan but most of what I do emerges from the circumstances of my life
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