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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's Saturday morning and I was doing my housework when I started a conversation with my son. I'd had an idea for one of the sessions in our forthcoming conference and I wanted to sound him out -  it was around the question why? Why would anyone invest time and effort in engaging in their own lifewide learning, and put intellectual effort into trying to understand it by planning it, paying attention to it, recording it and analysing it?  I sat down in my rubber gloves and we considered the idea through his own experience at university and then moved to more general perspectives. His reasons for doing the things he did while at university were driven by his intrinsic motivations particular his interests to make the most of the opportunities he had to develop himself. He didn't do things outside his course to gain any sort of recognition but because the opportunity was there for recognition he took it.

It made me think of my reasons for why I consciously engage in my own lifewide learning are motivated by interest but also a belief that by acting as an advocate I am doing something worthwhile and of potential value to others. By coincidence that afternoon I got involved in an email conversation with John Cowan and I asked him the why? question. His  reply "the reason I engage in LWL is neatly summed up by Emerson:  "Do not go where the path may lead.  Go instead where there is no path, and leave a trail."  My motive is not and has not been to leave a trail.  It is to find, explore and enjoy things which are new to me at least. for without that, life would have been totally stale." This seems a nice way to frame the why but it seems to emphasise only the intrinsic value to self rather than the value to others of what you are doing.

I was  intrigued to explore 'why we do what we do' a bit more so I spent a bit of time googling and found a nice summary by Anthony Robbins. He claims that there six fundamental human needs that everyone shares namely:
1. Certainty: assurance you can avoid pain and gain pleasure
2. Uncertainty/Variety: the need for the unknown, change, new stimuli
3. Significance: feeling unique, important, special or needed - drawing meaning from life
4. Connection/Love: a strong feeling of closeness or union with someone or something
5. Growth: an expansion of capacity, capability or understanding
6. Contribution: a sense of service and focus on helping, giving to and supporting others

Looking at the important things I do in my life I can see that these reasons provide many of the answers to the why question although the blend and balance of reasons is different in different aspects and at different times. These answers to why are the reasons that drive our learning ecologies and ultimately they lead to our deep sense of fulfilment when we believe that we are achieving in some way our purposes.

Returning to the question 'why would anyone invest time and effort in engaging in their own lifewide learning, and put intellectual effort into trying to understand it by planning it, paying attention to it, recording it and analysing it?  My son felt that the answer to this would be different for everyone but that the answer would be the driver for their involvement. Perhaps the most valuable aspect of engaging in a learning conscious way with your own lifewide learning is to explore the why question in each significant aspect of your life

As if to reinforce this message I received a linked-in notification yesterday to the well known TED talk by Simon Sinek  on the theme of 'people don't buy what you do they buy why you do it'. Why is as important in business as it is in the rest of life.

Tony Robbins blog
http://training.tonyrobbins.com/the-6-human-needs-why-we-do-what-we-do/

I'm sure that this is a multi-faceted and complex idea but I think it should be connected in a profound way to those aspects in our life where we feel we have a purpose - areas where we want to achieve and develop, and areas that contain people that we love and care for and want to nurture and or support. I'm currently examining those aspects of my life where I feel commitment is involved and trying to understand where that commitment comes from and how it manifests itself.

For people like me who have spent much of their lives working with ideas one source of commitment is to ideas that we value which we feel can make a difference either by contributing useful new knowledge or inspiring and supporting new practice. But interesting ideas alone are not enough to be committed to an idea requires investment of time and energy to give them meanings that engage with your purposes, values and beliefs.

In 2006, at the start of our SCEPTrE1 project at the University of Surrey, I commissioned an artist (Julian Burton) to draw a picture on our wall to help us visualise the educational world we were trying to prepare students for. The picture which I included in my last blog turned abstract ideas into something that was more of a vision that inspired commitment and action through which more defined ideas about lifewide learning flowed. Over the years since 2006 I have devoted much time and energy to thinking about the idea of lifewide learning, writing and talking about it, developing practice to support it and doing many things to promote the idea and action and reflect on it through the events and happenings in my own life. 

Commitment to an idea is clearly connected to our will to do something with the idea. In doing something with it you continue to develop and apply it and learn through the experience and the process. So commitment to an idea makes you own, value and believe in it  which in turn sustains your motivation and commitment to it. Commitment inspires a virtuous circle (a recurring cycle of events, the result of each one being to increase the beneficial effect of the next). At this point in my life I cannot imagine abandoning commitment to the idea as it has become part of my core beliefs.