My daughter and her children are a very significant part of my life. This week I did my Tuesday child care looking after the twins and also Wednesday afternoon while my daughter went to the dentist.  I love my twin grandsons as if they were my own children.. My wife said this and I realised it when she said it. There is no doubt about it I have bonded to them and them to me in a big way.

They are approaching their first birthday at the end of May. It's been a long, difficult, at times gruelling and emotionally challenging year for my daughter who has had to cope with her three children by herself much of the time. They were born 10 weeks early so developmentally they are really only nine months old. In the last few weeks Archie has learnt to sit and this has liberated him so that he can do occupy himself so much more.  His development is in stark contrast to Alfie's who actively resists sitting... In the last few weeks we have become acutely aware and concerned of differences in his development compared to Archie's. We have always been conscious of the consultant's diagnosis before they left hospital that Alfie's brain scans showed signs of damage - probably because his brain was starved of oxygen at some point. Something that I think is not unusual in babies with such low birth weights. We have lived in hope that everything will be okay but we think we are now seeing the effects of this damage in his development. For  the first time this week I googled to find out something about cerebral palsy. The information was both reassuring (that there is help and the condition doesn't get worse) and distressing (depending on the degree it can be quite disabling).  There are a number of signs that are pointing to this condition for example one of Alfie's arms seems less active than the other,  he throws himself backwards when sitting or standing and he often  goes into a trance. I know my daughter and her husband  are very worried as I am for them and Alfie. The physiotherapist came today and she is going to arrange for some tests for Alfie to check on epilepsy and his cognitive functioning.. I tried to reassure my daughter that the testing is for the best as the earlier any discoveries are made the quicker treatments can be put in place.. But my heart bleeds for them as parents. But she is a remarkable woman and Alfie is fortunate to have her for his mum.. She will I know do everything she can for him and I/we will try and support her and them as family as much as we can. We will not give up hope that his life will not be so limited and I will not dwell on all the potential scenarios and imaginings of of what lies ahead. Instead I will remember the wonderful smile he gives me when he hears 'Hello Alfie its granddad!' and the way he rests on my tummy when I cuddle him. What a funny mix of joy and sadness life can be.

I recognise that I am a knowledge worker someone 'who thinks for a living'. I used to be paid by an employer, now the company who managed my pension pays me to be retired - but I still think for a living spending a significant amount of my time developing and using my knowledge to try and achieve what I value, namely the promotion of lifewide learning and education as both an ideal and a practice.

I am, what Daniel Pink refers to in his book 'To sell is human', involved in non-selling sales. That is much of my work-related daily activity involves trying to persuade, influence and convince others that my ideas and the knowledge I bring together to support them, are of value. I recognise that much of my daily effort is directed to trying to 'move people' by influencing their thinking and beliefs. The way I share my ideas is primarily through my writing so I guess I'm a knowledge worker and that involves thinking, writing and communicating in different ways.

So how valid is my claim and what sorts of knowledge am I working with? 

This week my activity has been divided between work - promoting lifewide education, helping my family and doing some essential house-related jobs.  Three projects that directly related to knowledge working.

Firstly, I have put time and effort into the next issue of Lifewide Magazine. The Magazine is a vehicle for exploring ideas and it is a vehicle, persuading people to contribute ideas and for distributing ideas - over 800 downloads for last issue. This week I found and read a number of reports that have given me a better understanding of wellbeing. They provided me with a tool to understand what people are saying about what makes them happy and develop a sense of feeling fulfilled. I used this NEW LEARNING to provide clearer guidance to our illustrator on the ideas that are important to illustrate and the results were very pleasing. I also decided to use what I had discovered as the basis for a chapter for the e-book. Also persuaded RB to write pieces for the Magazine.

Personal Learning Ecologies - I have been thinking about the idea for a long time and this week I made a start on putting them on paper. I decided to use the CRA seminar to be held in June to motivate my learning by saying I will present and run a workshop on the theme. I downloaded several papers and began to read them and I am now starting to use the PLE idea as a lens to observe and interpret my activity. I began creating my talk (powerpoint slides) and identified themes that I will try to model. Because of my heightened awareness I am examining the my own practice and behaviour from the perspective of my learning ecologies to help me with my various 'projects'.

Seville Workshop - Future of Lifewide Learning. I am attending a workshop next weekend so I began to read the background papers that participants have written and a number of other reports on Open Education resources. I also downloaded a posting  Alison Littlejohn had done on twitter to identify the current state of play with OER. I was also invited to complete a template for the workshop which made me address questions of the how to do it type. I could see that I was part of someone else's ecosystem - EU researchers and that I was providing them with my personal knowledge to inform their research and report. They have started to try and develop a personal relationship and provided a tool for us to share our knowledge. The questions in the template made me think more deeply about some of the things I am proposing ie it caused me to make my thinking explicit.

So what sort  of knowledge have I been working with?
I've been mainly working with the codified knowledge contained in reports and scholarly articles, trying to make sense of it and connect it to my understandings and knowledge of lifewide learning. I have also drawn on my own experiential knowledge to think about the idea of personal ecologies. I have drawn on the personal knowledge of other people contributing the Lifewide Magazine and to the blogs I found. All these are being woven together in my own articles, e-book chapter and in illustrations I have commissioned. I was also involved in sharing my own personal knowledge by completing a template of questions for the organisers of the Seville workshop. I also consumed lots of knowledge through media reports, newspapers, TV and radio, Youtube and other on-line venues.

weekly report to myself

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/

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.