This week I began in earnest to begin helping to shape the next issue of Lifewide Magazine which is guest edited by Chrissi and Sue. They have organised the most of the content but there are always what I call 'bits and bobs' to be gathered, illustrations to be commissioned, images to be found and above all an identity to be created that is much more than the sum of the collection of articles. As I was googling 'social technologies' - one of the terms that defines the issue I came across Julian Stodd's blog. I immediately recognised a kindred spirit in someone who is thinking and writing about the everyday world of contemporary learning with a particular interest in the role played by technology. I read many of Julian's blogs and loved his simple visualisations. I felt that here was someone I would involve in my learning ecologies. I found one that I thought we might use in the Magazine - Our complex relationship with technology. I emailed him to check it was okay and received a friendly positive response such that it made me want to invite him to connect with our work in a significant way. So who knows what the future will bring?

One of his blogs elaborates his idea of the social age we now live in.. which he describes in these terms..

I use the term ‘The Social Age’ to talk about the environment we inhabit today: it’s a time when the very nature of work is evolving, changing to reflect a revised social contract and the advancement of technology to facilitate sharing and community. In the Manufacturing Age, we used to make stuff: banging together lumps of iron, burning coal, wrestling value from the very earth itself as we wrought iron and carved railways through the landscape, smelting and creating, until we outsourced it all and specialised production in a global network of trade and exchange, bringing us to the Knowledge Age. We convinced ourselves that this was ok: we no longer made stuff, but we had the knowledge, we did the clever bit ourselves and the knowledge was what really mattered. But then the internet evolved and Google was born, phones got smart and small and our relationship with knowledge changed. Finding stuff out is easy. Making sense of it is what counts. Welcome to the Social Age. Power and authority, that used to be gained through knowledge alone, is now based more in effectiveness, in being able to create value and meaning through the effective use of knowledge and resources in agile ways. Simply knowing stuff is not enough............... The Social Age is about high levels of engagement through informal, socially collaborative technology. It supports agility by allowing many and varied connections and the rapid iteration of ideas in communities that are ‘sense making’.

I have undoubtedly grown up and through the knowledge age. I was (and still am) a knowledge worker so the question for me is to what extent I am also part of the social age. As I look back over the last twenty years I can see that many of the roles I had involved co-creating knowledge in a social way. The basic social technology tools I used (and still use) is email, either in the form of an open mail list or in the form of surveys. More recently I have orchestrated on-line questionnaire surveys or posted questions in LinkedIn Groups. I have a Facebook page but rarely use it but I do use twitter for disseminating ideas and work. I have barely begun to utilise the social technology tools that characterise the social age and perhaps I never will embrace them in the way that people who are now growing up in this age use them as if they are second nature. Perhaps I will always remain a knowledge worker operating in a social age without really making use of the many social technologies that grow day by day - only time will tell.

This week as preparation for a meeting with students enrolled on the Lifewide Development Award I invited them to complete a 10min a day diary during the week and at the end of the week reflect on various dimensions of their experience. I felt obliged to do the same and in doing so the words of Kielsgauard Sorenson came to mind - 'we live our life forwards but we make sense of it backwards'.

It's not been a typical week as last weekend we journeyed to see family in Norfolk - grandma, aunts/uncles/inlaws, and cousins/nephews/nieces. My wife's first husband's family is large but fortunately many of them live in the same place. I have been accepted into the family as if I was one of their own and I'm very grateful for this. So my learning log reflected three days of travelling and being with family - which was fundamentally about renewing our bonds and reaffirming our relationships as members of the same family. It was great listening to grandma talk about her childhood growing up in London in the 1920's-30's and outlining the background to the families fruit and veg business and then tracing the family roots through the west country and the channel islands to Normandy. The older I get the more I appreciate our ancestry and this connects to my research into my own families history. In fact when I got back waiting for me in the post was my own grandfather's marriage certificate which someone helping me at UKinfo helped me locate. It proved his father's name was Tom which until now I had only been able to infer from my searches on Ancestry.com. It gave me confidence in the other inferences I have made about my grandfather's ancestors.

My activity log this week also reflects the time I spent with my own daughter's children. Its half term so I looked after all three grandchildren on my child care day. I don't mind admitting that it is hard work to have sole responsibility for them between 8am to 5pm but it's also a great joy. I also had my older grandson for a sleepover, swimming and generally being together. It's rare that we spend 1:1 time together so for me it's a real treat to do so.

I did other things this week but looking back these acts of being a member of the families to which I belong and acting as father, step-father, grandfather, brother in law and uncle was by far the most important thing I did. It seemed to me that this was another manifestation of commitment drawn from long lasting relationships with people I care about and love who I want to influence and be influenced by. Who are willing to involve me in their lives.

Through commitment we do things for each other. We stay connected and we listen and appreciate each other's stories of how our lives are unfolding and how our past histories contribute to who we are and to the existence of our offspring. The commitment to family means that we can stay connected to our children and help them in the caring and development of their own children. And it is deeply satisfying to see our children learn the value of extended family and continue this process of commitment that binds us all together. Family is an important dimension of our wellbeing and the cause of unhappiness when there is discord or conflict. Family This is one of the important ways we grow into our village and help our children and grandchildren  grow into their village.

Returning to my visit to Southampton, I was pleased with the way the simple aid to recording and reflecting on the way a week of life unfolds provided the basis for a good conversation about what was important and meaningful in the students' lives. Interestingly, they also extracted far more meaning and personal significance in the things they had done, than the learning they had gained from their activities. Perhaps that is a fair reflection of their relative importance in everyday life.

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.

 Ariel Diaz talking at TEDxCambridge 2013 tells the story of how, as a 10 year old boy, he became fascinated by Formula One racing cars and it inspired him to study engineering. As an undergraduate studying Engineering at Dartmouth College  he found himself leading a team to build a race car and immersed in equations that enabled him to understand the dynamics of the vehicle. He spent night after night getting deep into these formulas but it was exciting and the purpose of this deep involvement was realised in the making and the creation of the race car. He argues that he would never have wanted to learn and master the equations if he had been made to memorise them without appreciating their purpose and significance and then goes on to draw the analogy with education. 

In his view 'we are forcing students to memorize seemingly irrelevant and mundane and boring details before allowing them to see the beauty and excitement intrinsic in every subject that they're about to study'. He maintains that 'education is created by experts and because they have so much knowledge about their subject they try to teach the detail before they share their understanding of the the beauty of the subject that got them excited in that subject in the first place'. His solution is to invert the curriculum - begin with the big inspiring ideas that give the context and purpose for studying something... then take students along a pathway which allows them to discover things for themselves before immersing them in the detail that reveals the inner workings of the subject. The wisdom in this story is that this is the way we learn in life outside the abstracted world of formal education. We find things we are interested in or need to know about and then work out how to gain a deeper understanding. Our interests, passions and needs provide us with the purpose that makes us want to learn more. We begin with the problem, the opportunity or the vision, we work out some ways of finding out more before we get into the detail of problem working or solution finding.

Diaz's solution to making formal education more relevant, exciting and meaningful is to flip the entire curriculum  'we need to start with the big ideas because when you start with big ideas you give students a great context and relevance for the subject they're about to study and also create inspiration and motivation. Then when you have this context and motivation you're able to create a natural and not forced learning pathway because that excitement that motivation leads to questions - how and why and then by answering those questions you get to organically build a deep [and personally significant] knowledge and a deep expertise.'

I picked this up through a twitter link.