norman's website
  • Home
  • Scraps of life blog
    • #creativeHE
    • Garden Notes
    • BYOD4L BLOG
  • Books
  • Change
  • Creativity
  • Professional services
  • BNU STUDY VISIT
  • Contact me
  • GMIT
  • AIT
  • portsmouth
  • DIT
  • TLC
  • BERA
  • ICOLACE4
  • PDP
  • OUC
  • MMU
  • Derby
  • dmucreatives
  • Chester
  • Brighton
  • Buckinghamshire
  • Hallam
  • St Marys
  • LIMERICK
  • kingston
  • UWL
  • SEDA
  • MACAO
  • Beijing
  • IFIUT
  • CRA seminar
  • FBSEworkshop
  • birmingham
  • Creativity in Higher Education
  • graduatestandardsprogramme
  • MAKING MEANING
  • Our Garden
  • Untitled
  • Blogs
  • LEARNING ECOLOGY BOOK

Co-creating a Magazine

5/23/2014

0 Comments

 
Picture
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.


0 Comments

Responding to an emergent opportunity

4/12/2013

0 Comments

 
Opportunities to help shape thinking about the future of learning and education don't come very often so I jumped at the chance to submit a paper to the European Commission Call for Visionary Papers on the Future of Open Education. It was one of those opportunities that came out of the blue.. It was the Monday four days before I was going to China and I had a lot of things to do when I suddenly came across an email from the Future of Learning Linked in group saying that there was a call for vision papers. I knew I had to go for it so I immediately put together a one page summary of an idea for an EU-wide Lifewide Development Award and sent it off to some of the members of the team I thought might be interested. All replied quickly in an encouraging way and I gained some very useful feedback. I set about crafting a short six page paper and by Wednesday, in spite of everything else I had to do, I had the basic content, again I circulated for comment and again I got back some useful feedback with a couple of pointers that helped me refine what I had written. I banged it off to the organisers and went off to China. While I was there I got an email saying thanks for your paper which was quickly followed by another saying that the paper was considered to be one of the winning entries and I have been invited to a workshop in Seville at the end of April. So what do I learn from this? It reinforces my view that opportunities emerge and you have to a) in some way be connected to them b) be able to recognise them c) be able to respond to them. The latter may not be easy given that generally we are always busy with other things but if you miss the chance you might not get another.  So hopefully good things will come from this opportunity.All the papers can be viewed at http://blogs.ec.europa.eu/openeducation2030/vision-papers-on-open-education-2030-part-1-lifelong-learning/

Picture
open_education_2030__paper.pdf
File Size: 109 kb
File Type: pdf
Download File

0 Comments

    Purpose

    To 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.
    @lifewider1
    @lifewider
    @academiccreator

    I have a rough plan but most of what I do emerges from the circumstances of my life 
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    View my profile on LinkedIn

    Archive

    January 2019
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    November 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    March 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    March 2013
    February 2013
    January 2013
    December 2012
    November 2012
    October 2012
    September 2012
    August 2012
    July 2012
    June 2012
    May 2012
    April 2012
    March 2012
    February 2012

    Categories
    these are the tags I've used 

    All
    5C's Of Social Media
    Achieving
    Applying Learning
    Appreciation
    Attention To Detail
    Awareness
    Band
    Beautiful Day
    Being Influenced
    Being Influenced
    Beliefs
    Bonding
    Book
    Bucket List
    Caring
    Climate For Change
    Cocreation
    Co Creativity
    Co-creativity
    Collaboration
    Collective
    Commitment
    Communication
    Compassion
    Conceptualising
    Conference
    Conflict
    Connected
    Connected Learning
    Connections
    Constructionism
    Creativity
    Creativity In Development
    Creativity Nurturing
    Crowdsourcing
    Cultural Exchange
    Culture
    Curriculum
    Dealing With Emotion
    Dealing With Emotions
    Dealing With Setbacks
    Dealing With Situations
    Designing
    Development
    Disruption
    Disruption In Life
    Ecology
    Emergence
    Emergent Need
    Emergent Opportunity
    Emotion
    Emotion (negative)
    Emotion (positive)
    Empathy
    Engagement
    Enthusing Others
    Environment
    Experience
    Experimenting
    Facilitation
    Failure
    Families
    Family
    Feedback
    Fulfilling Our Purposes
    Goals
    Good Ideas
    Great Idea
    Growing Up
    Guilt
    Health And Fitness
    Histrory
    Ideas
    Identity
    Illness
    Inflections In Life
    Influences
    Influencing
    Information Flow
    Insights
    Inspiration
    Interest
    Intergenerational Learning
    Joy
    Juggling
    Knoweldge And Understanding
    Knowledge
    Knowledge And Understanding
    Knowledge Development
    Knowledge Working
    Leadership
    Learning
    Learning Ecologies
    Learning Ecologies
    Learning Ecology
    Learning For Teaching
    Learning Through Experience
    Learning To Cope
    Learningtoday
    Liberation
    Lifedeep
    Lifewide
    Lifewide Learning
    Lifwide Education
    Liminal Space
    Looking Back
    Love
    Making A Difference
    Making Progress
    Making Progress
    Making Something
    Managing Self
    Men's Sheds
    Models
    Motivating Others
    Motivating Self
    Motivation
    Motivational Strategies
    Motivation By The Spirit
    Motivations
    My Fitness
    My Purposes
    Narrative
    Narrative Inquiry
    Narrative Inquiry
    Natural Beauty
    Nature
    Neurological Process
    Opportunities
    Partnership
    Paying Attention
    Performance
    Personal Creativity
    Personal Development
    Personal Development Planning
    Perspective Change
    Planning
    Play
    Procrastination
    Purposes
    Reflection
    Relationships
    Remembering
    Retirement
    Role Model
    Sadness
    Sarendipity
    Seeing Potential
    Seeing Potential
    SEEK SENSE SHARE
    Self Motivation
    Self-Motivation
    Self Regulation
    Self-regulation
    Significant Personal Events
    Slogging
    Social Age
    Social Leadership
    Social Media
    Sorrow
    Spiritual
    Stories
    Survey Monkey
    Symbolism
    Teaching
    Teamwork
    Technology
    Tools
    Tradition
    Trajectories
    Twitter
    Using Technology
    Values
    Vision
    Visualisation
    Wellbeing
    Why?
    Willpower
    Work
    Working Out What You Have To Do
    Workshop
    Writing

    RSS Feed