Putting the first mark on the paper is a scary thing but I know once I get going it's not so bad. The psychological barrier we have to confront when we make a start can be very hard to overcome. I recently spent 6 or 7 weeks prevaricating over a
chapter I had to write that I knew was going to be hard. Sadly, when I eventually started it was hard and I find it very easy to put it to one side  and start (and finish)something else. Not a good habit I know but I have managed to convince myself its part of my creative process and that because it's at the back of my mind (actually playing on my mind!) I'm still working on the ideas. So my question is do other people suffer from this problem and if they do have they learnt any strategies for
dealing with it. Generally once I get going my attitude changes and I become more positive so something obviously happens in the mind once a start has been made. 


Saturday 15/09 - my mums birthday- 86 today

Today I have a good example of making a start. One of my goals in my current development plan is to create a memorial garden for my first wife Jill. Immediately after she died in 1999 I spent 3 or 4 months building a water garden. It gave me a lot of comfort and the physical toiling under a hot sun helped me work through my grief.. Since I moved house I have felt guilty that I have not created a physical space for her. But it's one thing saying you are going to do something and another to do it. Anyway its a lovely sunny day and I have been in the garden chopping down trees. I decided to move one of our
benches into the woods.. We have 3 acres of woodland and apart from the paths it just runs wild.. As I was carrying it down to the woods I decided I'd like to put it in the middle somewhere and as I started looking the idea of the memorial garden came into my head again.. There is a sort of drainage channel through the middle with lots of reeds and in spring there is a swathe of forgetmenots.. which flowers in early May - the time Jill died... I know my daughters also share my delight in the forgetmenots so I decided that the naturalistic 'garden' just had to be there.. so rather than prevaricate any more I worked out a route
from the existing path, cleared the bigger logs and drove the tractor in to make a start on the pathway.. Standing back from the particularities of the situation I think my goal is to create something that I, and my children will value. I had a vision of what it will be like- pretty and natural like she was and surrounded by wild woodland but in the more open spaces where the light comes shining through and the wild flowers grow in spring. While my vision and enthusiasm was still in my head (and ignoring the other jobs I was in the middle of) I began creating a pathway towards achieving the vision.. I know its just a start, and
there will be a lot of hard work ahead, but it feels already as if I am a significant way towards my goal. I took some photos before I started so I can see the changes I make. I feel quite positive about it having made a start.
Sunday 16/09

Knowing I had a busy day ahead of me I got up at 7am and went down to the woods and spent several hours laying out the pathway. It was laborious work cutting through fallen logs, lugging fallen trees to line the pathway and trying to dig through the chalky rubble to fill in some of the hollows. I fell over several times as my foot caught in the brambles and got stung by nettles. Altogether it was a sweaty exhausting process but I could see the progress I was making so that spurred me on. I could see that although I had a rough idea for the direction of the pathway and the detail was designed as I went in order to miss trees and stumps that I hadn't at first appreciated were there because they were overgrown. It made me feel bad when I realised that the 4' wide pathway was going to destroy a lot of plants in the middle part of the new pathway. After thinking about if for a while I decided that I would only use the lawn mower in the middle part and have a narrow pathway through the reeds and bracken. I recognised that this was a better solution.

Monday 17/09

I should have been doing other things but I spent a couple of hours in the woods. It was hard work filling in valleys and fissures in the path and there is a lot of this to do before I have anything like a proper footpath. When I'm walking in some out of the way place I often think of the people who must have made the path originally. Making paths for future generations of people to follow seems to me to be a special task in life and it can be used as a metaphor for leading others. Today my woodland work was inspected by my mother and father in law who are visiting us. They love walking and they could see what I was trying to do and they recognised it as a good thing. We talked about how gardeners don't just make things for themselves they are creating something that other people can enjoy in the future. My insight today was to do with design - now that I have done what I have done I can see much more the potential in what I'm doing. Its only after you have got someway into a project that this potential can be appreciated.
Tuesday 18/09

Well I think I have found a solution to my bumpy path problem. I went for a walk around the garden and behind some fir trees I found a pile of builders rubble which I had put there 4 years ago when we had a garage conversion done. The only snag is it's a long way to hump it down to the woods. So I have to convince myself the exercise will do me good. I spent a couple of hours humping the rubble down - altogether I made 4 trips with a full barrow.. fortunately its downhill and the last one I got a puncture and ended up having to pull the barrow. This is the slogging part of the process with little joy. It took me two hours to grade 2 meters so I can estimate that there is a couple of weeks work if I try to stick to my two hours a day. It was sunny though and paused to imagine several times what I could do when I start to create the woodland garden.. The results are good and I covered up the rubble with woodland soil so it looks fairly natural. Today's reflection is on the role of 'sustained slog' in trying to accomplish anything of significance. Once the initial enthusiasm of starting is over there is usually a lot of labour which is not very rewarding emotionally. I'm going to use John Cowan's idea of finding two hours a day to keep chipping away at the 'problem'. I probably won't make any more entries until I get to the next stage.

 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. 

There is nothing quite like experiencing a new place for bringing home to you the importance of place and space in determining who you are and I have always thought that travel, especially if it involves going somewhere you have never been before, can fundamentally change your understanding about the world

I have just spent 5 days in Chengdu, a large city in the west of China, to attend a conference on creativity in higher education. I was met at the airport by two very likeable student volunteers who are studying English and translation studies at Sichuan University. By volunteering to meet and greet they felt they were enhancing their education. The plane was delayed so it was quite late when we arrived but I was greatly relieved to see them and they whisked me the hotel in the centre of the city and then helped me check in - which was great because I my room booking hadn't worked and the receptionist did not speak English. It required quite a lot of negotiation.

The city at night looked like any other city but I took a walk in the early morning rush hour and it is quite different to anywhere else I have been. We are on  a busy main road, 3 lanes in each direction and  tall grey concrete buildings on either side.  At 8am it was really bustling with traffic in all directions including bikes and motorbikes/scooters on the pavement. The sounds were like any city but the smells were different to anything I had experienced before, except perhaps for Chinatown in London. The people looked similar as they walked briskly to work or university, which is just next door to the hotel. One interesting thing I noticed was that the footbridges over the busy road did not have steps that had stepped ramps and then I realised these were to enable scooters to ride over them.

When I got back I went to breakfast determined to try the Chinese  cuisine. In fact, there was only Chinese cuisine. A long table with perhaps 30 dishes on it and many vegetables I had never seen before (there were no labels). I had a good go at trying about 15 of them I recon.. Only small amounts but enough to discover which I likes and which I didn't. Many of the tastes were familiar from the Chinese food I'd eaten before but a lot were alien to my taste buds - quite a lot were very bland or subtle depending on your point of view. What was also strange to me was sitting at large round tables with people who I didn't know. In English hotels we have small tables and you keep to your own space.

It does us good from time to time to experience a new place which is culturally very different from our own in order to remind us what it feels like to experience that sense of foreignness and inadequacy (because of an absence of language and cultural understanding), unfamiliarity and uncertainty because the context is so very different to what we know.

The conference itself was focused on how to bring about change in higher education so that it is more able to develop students' creative potential..with a strong focus on the reform of Chinese universities so that can prepare students so that they are more innovative.  I was an invited speaker and I was treated with great respect.  My presentation, on the afternoon of the first day on developing personal creativity through lifewide education seemed to be well received although the ideas were alien to many of the participants. When I reflect on the conference  I don't think I learnt very much about creativity - there was too much replication of existing ideas and not enough new ideas (for me). But I realise I wasn't there for me. I was there to play my part in sharing some of my ideas. And what really struck me was the enormous thirst for knowledge and new ideas that might form the basis for new strategies to help China move forward in the direction it has set itself.  I was delighted and honoured to be told that my book Developing creativity in higher education was being translated by students of the university as one of 10 books on creativity that have been selected to provide a starting point for creative scholarship and practice. 

So what did I learn? By being in Chengdu, by listening to the Sichuan University institutional leaders, talking to participants especially the students who did all the behind the scenes organisation and looked after participants individual needs, I felt I learnt a lot about Chinese higher education and what it was trying to accomplish. From the students I learnt what it was like to be a student and for a young person to live in China today. In other words my most important learning was contextual and relational.

I also learnt a lot about what is valued in Chinese culture. Throughout the conference the meals had been one of the highlights - Sichuan food is some of the most delicious food I have ever taken and it is a very social affair. We were also treated to some wonderful restaurants - some of which were in buildings constructed in a traditional way. Chengdu is full of wonderfully recreated old buildings that enable you to appreciate the past.

But the last day in Chengdu was very special. The university had provided us with a conducted tour of the city with an emphasis on giving us a flavour of their cultural heritage. The tour guide 'Bobby' was a brilliant and knowledgeable communicator -perhaps the most creative person I had met all week. Written on his T-short were the words There are two sorts of people in the world - those that entertain and those that observe.. he was most definitely in the first category.

We set off at 8.30am and he talked us through the day on the way to our first stop the Panda sanctuary about an hour out of the city where I expanded my knowledge of Panda's a thousand fold..and got some great photos.. 

Then it was back into the city for a wonderful traditional Sichuan lunch shared with the other participants on our day trip. - the wonderful multidish Sichuan 'snack'

After lunch we went to the most amazing museum built on the site of a 3000 year  old town - the Jinsha site museum. The architecture and the methods used to display the site will remain with me for ever... It was impossible not to be humbled by the creativity and craftsmanship and use of technology by these ancient people and at the same time be overwhelmed by the creativity in the architects' designs (apparently a graduate student who won an open competition, and the way artefacts had been displayed. I could not help but compare these concrete manifestations of creativity with our thinking and talking about it in an abstract way.   

After another splendid meal in the evening we went to the Sichuan opera and were treated to another cultural feast - including opera,  shadow shapes, Erhu music, drama, and costume/face changing.. all local traditions and very interesting.. Again I was struck by the enormous creative talent on display.

The audio file records some of the Chinese opera.

Postscript: At the end of my talk one of the participants asked me a question which I did not fully understand.. he was making a comment about the contribution of personal creativity to culture equating to the production of low culture... It was only after experiencing the things that I have described that I now understand what he was saying. I think he was saying that  personal creativity unless it is dedicated to contributing to a form of art or craft that is accepted as an important form of cultural reproduction will only ever produce/re-reproduce low cultural forms - popular culture.

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

We launched our first twitter exchange - a totally new experience for me and for most of the others in the lifewide education team so I guess I might predict that by the end of the day I will have some experience-based knowledge of how this works.I've already been involved in a twitter practice which was more frustrating than enlightening so some might say we are taking a risk in trying to do something that we have not already made to work. But in the scheme of things its only a small risk and nothing ventured nothing gained. In responding to N's opening question I decided I was going to create a learning experience out of today by thinking about what I was learning through the day. My tool for thinking about learning was a simple word document which I would try to update every hour.

I made my first posting at 8.40 in response to Nick's opening question and then I emailed a couple of people to let them know that we had started our exchange.

8hLifewideLearning ‏ @Lifewiders
What are your initial questions and what are your experiences of life-wide learning? #LW1
6m norman jackson ‏ @lifewider1
A day holds many experiences and incidents but we rarely ask ourselves what did we learn today? How am I different? #LW1
3mnorman jackson ‏ @lifewider1
To try to understand my own LWL I'm going to try to be aware of what happens today. Its only 8.45 and already I'm surprised! #LW1

09.00am Looking back - I woke at 7.00 this morning and my wife was already awake. I offered to make a cup of tea but we spent the first hour in bed chatting about our children. Sharing our anxieties and trying to predict likely scenarios and future events. I'm worried about my daughter who is pregnant with twins and a five year old. There is a good chance that they will be born early. If they arrive very early I will be in Australia visiting my family. We went into problem solving mode. My wife is very practical and started thinking about other ways of helping her through paying for a maternity nurse for a few weeks.. we looked at a website with some rates.. I took a shower and it became crystal clear to me that I should cancel my trip to Australia and China if it looked they would be delivered early. I felt relieved once I had made the decision and I could tell her to relieve her anxiety. 

Learning - In the space of just over an hour we had shared personal information about the children. Used our imaginations to identify challenges and issues and done some problem solving  - she had come up with one solution and we found information about costs and services and I had come up with another potential solution and made a decision. We had pooled our personal knowledge about our children and the circumstances and our resources to come up with practical solutions which we hope will help our children.

10.00am I want this twitter exchange to be successful so I know that I will have to do things and learn how to engage and involve people. This is a familiar challenge for me but its an unfamiliar context. I have spent the last 30mins trying to work out a strategy for promoting our lifewide twitter exchange. I know that things dont happen by themselves you have to stimulate activity. My first thought was to email people I know who use twitter and invite them personally. I sent out five emails. I then went to linked in and updated my profile but also composed a message for the groups I belong to. I decided to hold the message until we had a few more contributions things on our twitter page. Now time for breakfast and the sun is shining. I'm happy because we have made some progress in getting this far. Postscript - by 10.54 one of the people I had invited was making significant contributions to the discussion.
11.00am this is turning out to be very interesting. In the kitchen I had a conversation with one of my daughters. She is revising for A levels and her mum and I try to encourage her with her revision. She has worked very hard on her revision for a long time and she begins her exams next week. She is also familiar with the idea of lifewide learning and with me talking about it. I asked her about her current learning and she of course said it was all focused in this intensive effort of revision (8 or 10 hours a day). But she said she didn't think this was lifewide learning - she thought of it as memorising to get through the exam. I was surprised she had made the distinction but she was saying that for her lifewide learning was something more than memorising.

Learning - my daughter's views and I perspective I hadn't considered before that certain things might not, in an individual's mind count as lifewide learning. It made me think that actually the discipline of revision (self-teaching) is actually very important in the context of going to university and life more generally so although it might seem like a test of memorisation its a discipline for all sorts of things like managing and organising time, prioritising, building stamina, being able to focus, getting better at evaluating yourself - what you know and don't know and developing tools and strategies for coping and getting yourself in the best position to be able to do well in unseen exams..
After breakfast I knew I had to make a start on the weekly house clean which I dislike but which I volunteered to do as I wasn't working any more. It takes about 3-4hours if I do it in one go. I started in the kitchen and put the telly on as background and as I cleaned I listened to a hectic debate on BBC The Big Questions - involving GPs debating the question - should doctors be forced to go against their conscience (I putting their patients interests before their own beliefs).. It was a good discussion with opinions on both sides and it opened up some challenging areas for anyone as the question could be extended to anyone's situation.

Learning - I was challenged/made to think about when it might be wrong to put our own beliefs first.

12.00 Much of my learning comes from trying to achieve something I haven't done before. One of my priorities today is to learn how to maximise the potential for learning through our twitter discussion. I carried on looking for possible resources and connections I might utilise in my linked in connections I came across a great posting by 13 ways Twitter improves education which I am going to re-post on the  lifewide education website. I emailed the author to invite her to join us.

Learning here is about trying to find people who can help us by contributing useful perspectives. Learning also enabled me to act - In the evening I reposted the twitter article on the lifewide education website with a new intro. I also acted on my new relational knowledge - about the author by emailing her and within a few hours she had made a twitter posting.

Responding to a question posed by one of the participants is reflection any different to thinking? - my reaction was reflection is purposeful thinking about your own situations and what you are learning. I checked out google and found a nice expression  form of words that captured this idea - Reflective thinking involves personal consideration of one’s own learning.

13.00 I have just spent the last hour cleaning the house. Perhaps because I go on autopilot when I do it my wife thinks I am not very good at it.. Its all relative - I'm a lot better than I used to be. What happens though with these sorts of routine tasks is that my mind starts working and I think about lots of things in a reflective/sense making way. It's not all retrospective though quite a lot is prospective planning trying to answer the what should I do next question. Well I have a big garden and the sun is shining and the grass is long so I know the answer to that one, which means I will probably carry on in the same mode of thinking.

14.00 Lunch was a quick affair a bowl of tomato soup with my daughter. Because the telly was on and she was watching a film we didn't talk much. After lunch I carried on cutting the grass. The thinking about all sorts of stuff mainly triggered by what I saw.. damage by rabbits and the remains of dead rabbits which I knew our friendly fox had taken as we had seen him carrying them more or less every day.  I watched him go to where the rabbit burrows were and waited for 20 mins to see if I could get a photo but the battery on my camera ran out so I missed the opportunity. I went and recharged my battery and an hour later our Canada geese with six fluffy chicks obligingly came to the kitchen window so I took a photo of them. One thing I realised as I was cutting the grass was that I had a problem with the cutter on the back of the tractor - it wasn't cutting the grass evenly. So I know I couldn't put off the service I have put off for so long. [In fact I booked the service the next morning].

Learning is all about what is happening in the garden especially its wild life..and especially how to deal with the rabbits which are digging holes everywhere.. the fox is a huge blessing...I also think about what needs repairing, what can I leave and what do I need to fix.I decided that in the week I would tackle the drive which has got overgrown.. a bit everyday I'm working at home if it isn't raining.

15.00 I came in and posted a discussion on the RSA Fellowship Forum to see if I could attract some interest in our twitter conversation.  Then I went to help my wife with a website she is building..She is doing well but she lacks confidence..and doesn't  have much patience so she wants to give up..

17.00 - 19.00 I was listening to the five live football commentary while I was preparing the Sunday roast. Its the last day of the season and my team Man United are second behind Man City. There is so much emotional engagement through the radio and especially today as the season reaches this climax.... Man U beat Sunderland 1.0 but QPR are drawing with city until the last five minutes when they score two.. Its all over in the last five mins of the season. Both teams have the same points but city win on goal difference that is the narrowness of the margin.. In a post-match interview with the united manager Alex Ferguson reflects on the situation and responding to a question about the effects of the team said it's great to win but if you lose that memory stays with you and makes you more determined.. Wise words..but I was still a bit fed up that my team had just lost the premiership.

I cheered up when I looked out of the kitchen window and saw two small brown fox clubs. The joys of the garden. Unfortunately by the time I got my camera they had disappeared. Later I saw them on the other side of our fence. But I now have a new objective to keep a watchful eye  and try to photograph them so I have left my camera on the kitchen window sill.

Learning  was discovering that we now had some fox cubs and this is again causing me to act - I want a photo of them so I'm telling everyone to watch out for them and keeping my camera ready. Though disappointing the football matches were quite incredible indeed historic and the commentary triggered all sorts of emotions. Its knowledge I will need  to talk be able to talk about the game with my sons and others. I guess AFs wise words reinforced my existing  belief that setbacks make you more determined than ever whereas success is just a transient good feeling. Its dissatisfaction that drives you.

20.00 - 21.30 Because I had cooked dinner I was 'allowed' to read my newspaper. So after checking in to see whether the twitter discussion had evolved I picked my favourite armchair and settled down to a good read only to be interrupted by my wife needing help with her weebly website. I realised as I sat next to her explaining what to do that I was sharing my knowledge/my learning - stuff that I have only learnt myself in the last couple of months. Between us - her with her specialist knowledge and me with my knowledge of weebly we managed to make good progress.

21.30 We both felt we needed to relax so we put the TV on and watched an episode of Doc Martin which we both like. I only had one eye on the telly as I was at last reading my newspaper dipping into the stories that took my fancy. I like the Sunday papers because they cover so much ground in so many different ways and I updated my knowledge on the latest terrorist techniques, problems in Greece/Spain,  7-up TV series and many other titbits.. After Doc Martin we watched the BBC news for 20mins before turning over to watch the unbelievable end to the football season with my team winning but still loosing the title to CIty who scored twice in the last 3 mins of their game.  This blokey knowledge of how it happened will stand me in good stead when I talk to other people about it.

Learning was via the experiences of reading a newspaper and watching TV. It was predominantly about finding out what was happening in the world that day or within the recent past together with bits and bobs that I just found interesting.
11.00 When I got to be my wife was reading so I read a Leadership Foundation paper that was on the table next to my bed on Developing the Whole Student by Kathleen Quinlan. What she was saying was so relevant to what we are trying to do that I  immediately started writing a letter to her with a view to trying to involve her.

Learning involved relational knowledge about finding someone who we could potentially form an alliance with and then using that knowledge to act - to try to communicate with the person.

 Reflections on the day: Looking back over the day I had had a lot of different sorts of experiences and I learnt things in a variety of ways - through physical experience, conversations, observations, listening, accessing and processing information. Most of what I learnt was 'in passing'. It was incidental and subtle and was just part of the experience. But I did have quite a lot of intentional learning because I was grappling with how twitter worked and also focusing on my own learning for the day as this had become a major objective for me. I would not normally think about what I had learnt in this way it was only because I was trying to be conscious about it and I took the trouble to record my experiences and think about them while I was having them and after the event that I became aware of what I had learnt.

I had experienced numerous conversations with my family and through these learnt things that were related to our day to day circumstances, their needs and interests. I had learnt stuff about my house and garden and the animals living with us in the garden. Learning that we had some fox cubs on our doorstep was particularly pleasurable.  Realising I had a problem with my tractor will make me book a service.

Not surprisingly, given that the day was spent in the home, much of the knowledge I had developed  was relational to do with my family. I had gained some of it by thinking over situations that affected me and my family. 

I had accessed a range of information sources - internet - websites, blogs, twitter, email social networking sites; radio and TV, newspaper and an academic paper through which I could develop new knowledge. I had acted on quite a bit of this knowledge. I had responded to twitter, emailed a number of people from my networks and started to compose  a letter.  

Thanks to the media I had access to I had new knowledge about what had happened in the world that day, all be it highly selective, and I had had a sort of shared experience with all other Man U and Man City supporters (thanks to radio and TV) I had emotional and factual knowledge about the way the football season ended. Because I had engaged with twitter and tried to draw people into discussion about lifewide learning I had knew knowledge about how I had tried to make it happen and had found some new and useful resources in the process.

Reflecting on the web article I had acquired on reflection - Reflective thinking involves personal consideration of one’s own learning. It considers personal achievements and failures and asks what worked, what didn’t, and what needs improvement (Given, 2002). It asks the learner to think about her own thinking.  I realise that my own reflections were not so much focused on what the writer claimed to be the purpose of reflection. Rather, as the day progressed I was concerned mainly to use bits of knowledge I was developing to act - to try to achieve something.

Looking back it has been a worthwhile exercise to record what I thought I had learnt through the day.