It's a grey November Friday afternoon. Although I've had quite a pleasant and productive day and I really have no reason to be fed up, I am a little because I'm wondering what I will say in my blog this week. I was not impressed with my own ideas and didn't feel motivated. I kept updating my email which is always a sure sign that something isn't write and I'm looking for something to emerge.

I even followed a link to the Linked in Learning without Frontiers forum and clicked on a link to a truly inspiring TED talk by Henry Evans - it changed my perspective on something that has bothered me for a long time. What value and meaning does the idea of lifewide learning have for people who are physically not able to interact with the world around them? Henry opened up a whole new way of seeing how technology assists people who are severely disabled so that their opportunities for interacting with the world and enjoying and learning from their experiences is greatly expanded.

At age 40, Henry Evans was left mute and quadriplegic after a stroke-like attack caused by a hidden birth defect. Years of therapy helped him learn to move his head and use a finger -- which allows him to use a head-tracking device to communicate with a computer using experimental interfaces.

Now, Henry is a frequent and enthusiastic collaborator with robotics teams who are developing tools to help the severely disabled navigate their lives. He collaborates with Georgia Tech professor Charlie Kemp on using the Willow Garage PR2 robot as a surrogate, as well as Chad Jenkins' RLAB at Brown on quadrotors for expanding range of motion.

As the Willow Garage blog post says: "Every day, people take for granted the simple act of scratching an itch. In Henry's case, 2-3 times every hour of every day he gets an itch he can't scratch. With the aid of a PR2, Henry is able to scratch an itch for himself for the first time in 10 years."

Towards the end of his talk Henry says something that really gives hope to everyone who is unable to directly experience the world themselves.

'With this drone setup, we show the potential for bedridden people to once again be able to explore the outside world, and robotics will eventually provide a level playing field where one is only limited by their mental acuity and imagination, where the disabled are able to perform the same activities as everyone else, and perhaps better, and technology will even allow us to provide an outlet for many people who are presently considered vegetables.'

Thank you Henry you have given me new hope for my own disabled grandson.

I love working with the talented illustrator Kiboko Hachiyon to try and turn abstract ideas into images that convey meanings in different and often more powerful ways than the written word alone. I wanted to create an image for my talk  that embodied the ideas of creative thought, development and production which results in innovation. I had a some scenes that Kiboko had produced that I wanted to re-use so I made a mock up (prototype?) of the narrative on a powerpoint slide with suggestions for additional pictures to complete the narrative. 

The result is shown above and it tells the story of a young man listening to his ipod and looking at some cakes and having the idea of creating a cake that when you eat it plays the tunes you like to hear. He knew that this was the first time he had ever had the idea so it was new to him and when he mentioned it to other people he could see it was also novel for them. The more he thought about it the more he could see the potential and the more he became motivated to make such a cake. His passion drove him to sit at his computer for hours working out what he had to do and finding out waht he needed to know in order to achieve his ambition. He began experimenting making cakes and also building the electronics mindful of costs and health and safety issues. 

Notwithstanding the complexity and difficulty of the challenge he is successful and one day he produces a musical cake at a price that people are willing buy. He also manages to persuade a local bakery to produce the cakes for him. He has
created a new product that is valued and judged to be new and different to any other cake by the people who want to buy it and a business would like to sell it.

We can apply this narrative to any process in which creativity is involved - including this narrative picture, in which a someone imagines something for the first time and is inspired to try to turn their idea into something tangible. They spend time and effort researching and developing their idea, perhaps drawing in other people to help them and if necessary raising money to fund their experiments. Eventually they are able to realise their idea in a form that can be enjoyed or utilised by other people.

This week I spoke at the SEDA conference in Bristol on the theme of Creativity in Educational Development. I was very grateful for the opportunity as it gave me a reason to discover how educational developers perceived creativity and how they used their creativity in their work. The idea of development is also close to me as I consider my life is a process of continuous development some of which I intentionally orchestrate and some of which is more accidental or opportunistic.
Furthermore, all the roles I have performed in my career have a strong developmental basis and many have involved me in explicitly developmental roles for the organisations I have worked for.

As I see it, the wicked problem  facing all universities, is fundamentally a developmental challenge focused on the question of 'how we prepare learners for the challenges they will face in their future lives'. Nested in this challenge is the developmental problem of how teachers and other professionals directly involved in student development develop themselves so that they can support and enable students to develop themselves so that they can act effectively in the future worlds they will inhabit.  For institutional leaders the developmental challenge is concerned with the continual process of change so that the people who work in the organisation are able to engage effectively with this challenge. People who work in a developmental role fulfil a unique role in enabling the institution to meet this challenge. Fundamentally this is a story of development - at personal, professional, curriculum, infrastructure and whole institution levels and what I want to discover is how personal creativity contributes to this process.

To prepare for my talk I created, over about four months, an ecology that is represented in the illustration. It involved conducting two surveys to try and discover the beliefs of educational developers. I am very grateful for everyone who took the time and effort to get involved and I have identified people who gave me particular support and encouragement and te sort of feedback we need to progress our thinking. It is lonely life being a developer and we need the emotional and intellectual support of others to sustain and expand our learning projects.

I have documented the results of  the surveys which are consistent with other studies I have made relating to perceptions of creativity in higher education. My hope is that my presentation will lead to the involvement of more developers in the process and to new as yet unimagined possibilities and opportunities.

The marks on this garage door record the growth of a family- more specifically the changes in height over time of grandchildren and some great grandchildren recorded over the 27 years that my parents have lived in this house after they retired to Narrawallee in New South Wales. My own children's heights were recorded on that door when we visited in 1993, 2003 and 2005. My parents are quite old now, approaching 90, and they are preparing to move to somewhere more manageable - so the door will eventually be painted over and this unique record of family history will be lost. There are of course other ways to record our histories like the photographs on the walls and in the albums or our computers, and in the stories that our parents tell about us. But when they are gone and the family photo albums are dispersed there is no repository for family history and knowledge about the members of the family gets dispersed to the branches of the family and much of it will be lost.

The loss of key family members diminishes the knowledge we have about ourselves, or our children. I have become more and more aware of this as I have got older. In 1999 when my wife Jill died of cancer one of the things I grieved for was the loss of our family history. All the little events in the lives of our children that were memorable to her that she had stored away and was able to tell in the way that only she could do because it had been her experience and her memory that had captured those moments.

I read somewhere that as parents we are not only the archive of memory of our children's passage through early life, and of our own childhood that provides them with a deeper sense of who they are, the digital age has made us custodians of our children's digital record until such time that they need to take it over. To this end I have begun to set up a family website and to digitise our hard copy photographs. It's going to be a big job but it's one I feel is my duty to undertake.

But I have also come to realise, for example through Jill's passing, that histories are not just snapshots of life they are stories containing the meanings we construct around them. Meaningful stories are as important as our genes in transmitting who we are and how we have become who we are. So now that I have more time, I have taken it upon myself to record my mother and father's stories about their lives as audio files and as a transcribed text so that more of our history is preserved. I have made a good start and I think that they are pleased to have their stories written down.

On my visit in 2013 I have found this place holds so many memories - the house and garden, the beach and the journey here - some are happy and some are sad. But listening to my parents talk again about their lives I have been inspired to spend some time researching my father's family going back in time as far as I can. It looks as if our roots lie in Scotland and Ireland on both sides of the family. The second is to set down my own story, at least that part I am willing to tell, and I have made a good start while I am here.

As I write this another idea is emerging from my thoughts that there must be lots of people who are reaching my age who would perhaps like to record their parent's histories or tell their own life stories. Helping people create such personal records would be a worthwhile thing to do so perhaps there is a role for me to play and a business to create?