I started my session by making reference to Stephen Johnson's RSA Animate talk - where great ideas come from and suggested that the workshop provided a great space for harnessing the thoughts and ideas of the participants on the matters we were focusing on. We worked through the approach that I had learned from Fred Buining, the great Dutch facilitator encouraging participants to suspend their disbelief and think imaginatively with purpose to explore the problem statement we had created and then generate many possible solutions. This process prepared them for the main task which was to work in two's or three's to create a poster to describe their solution to the problem. Here the process encouraged both imaginative and critical thinking within a well defined time frame. At the end of it each small group pitched their poster to the others and at the end of the pitch the other participants had to make at least one suggestion to add value to the ideas that had been pitched. What emerged were some 'great ideas' which had huge potential to be shaped into exciting new concepts and social practices. It was a wonderful experience and I caught the sense of excitement as some of the participants realised some of the potential in the ideas.  Feedback at the end on my contribution was very generous  and I went home a happy man.

On the long (5 hour journey back) I reflected on the experience. Travelling makes you do this doesn't it? I re-read a blog post I had downloaded by Carlo Miceli  who summarised the key points in Stephen Johnson's book and it seemed to me that the workshop satisfied two of his ten statements about where good ideas come from. 

First innovation pattern: The Adjacent Possible
The first pattern he recognises is that  ideas are connected like doors. Open a door and you can see new ideas, but only ideas that are connected can be seen. It’s by learning from other people’s ideas, or previous ideas of our own, that we come up with new ways of seeing the world. It’s a constant connection of innovation. The key is not to isolate your idea. Instead, try to connect it to as many doors -people, places, ideas – as possible. I think the 'design thinking' workshop provided an excellent space in which individuals could open the doors behind which their ideas sat and expose them to new possibilities.

Second innovation pattern: Liquid Networks
Ideas are not single elements. They are more like networks. They are not sparked by the connections between different elements: they ARE those connections. For ideas to happen, you have to place the elements at your disposal in environments where more connections  can occur in the right way. The best networks have two characteristics: they make it possible for its elements to make as many connections as possible, and they provide a random environment that encourages constant “collisions” between all of its elements. The elements are worthless if they are not properly connected.  The magic in the workshop is the way in which people who had participated in and shared a process were then connected in the act of designing their solution to the problem/opportunity. This was when ideas collided and new and better ideas emerged.

The following day I sat down and tried to catch some of my learning from the event. I was particularly interested in the high level concepts and how the rationale might be developed to support these. As I wrote I realised that I was embodying the first of Johnson's innovation patterns. During the process I had opened my door to share my ideas and then been rewarded with the open doors of participants through which they had shared their ideas. My writing process was the way in which I tried to select and make sense of the multitude of ideas. I tried to identify the big ideas and connect them to existing subsidiary ideas that gave the big idea substance and deeper meaning and ultimately might enable new social practices to be created. Finally, one other thing I now have which I didn't have before is a personally meaningful story I can use in my work in encouraging creativity to flourish in universities. Such stories are valuable ways of bridging the gap between the abstract ideas of Stephen Johnson to the real world of academics, educational developers and managers.

So this is how I witnessed the birth of some GOOD IDEAS. It was a deeply purposeful, social, collaborative, energetic and constructive and connected process and I feel privileged to have been a participant. But the good ideas are only that. They need to be developed and grown into something that can be brought into practical existence. This is the challenge for the developer - to seize the good idea and be inspired by it. To care enough about it to want to do something useful and practical with it. To accept the risk and discomfort of persuading and battling colleagues to convince them that this idea is worth investing time, effort and resources to bring it into existence. But that is an all together different story which I have yet to witness called,  'where good social practices come from'.

Sources
http://www.carlosmiceli.com/where-good-ideas-come-from/#sthash.Baif9dvQ.dpuf

I had another powerful experience of co-creation this week at Sheffield Hallam University (SHU) Learning and Teaching Conference and I am thinking that creating processes for co-creation is a manifestation of learning and producing in the social age of learning (see julianstodd's blog).  The invitation to speak at SHU was unusual in that the organising team led by Andrew Middleton wanted to try something new - they wanted to link an idea I was presenting (learning ecologies) to a series of workshops in which conference participants could apply the idea to their own life and development process. Through Andrew's facilitation I was able to work with the organising team to devise a workshop that seems to have worked well though the organising team are still gathering feedback.

Working this way involves a lot more work than just turning up and presenting something but, as I facilitated one of the workshops, I realised it gave me a great deal of satisfaction to see and hear participants turning abstract idea into meaningful conversations and representations of lived experiences (some of them deeply personal). As a speaker I often have no way of knowing whether my ideas have any relevance to the lives of my audience but the workshop allowed me to see that at least on this occasion some of them did.

But the conference was also remarkable in the way I was able to involve many participants in sharing their knowledge and beliefs using an on-line survey administered just two days before the conference. I think the fact that the conference was imminent encouraged a very good response rate - 135 of the 300 people responded.  I used SurveyMonkey for the first time which meant the data were analysed and processed in real time and I was able not only to present the results to those attending the conference but I could give the contributors a link to the survey report. I think this new capacity to create, administer, analyse and use data from surveys has revolutionised the way I will approach my public speaking. It should also be acknowledge that the design of the survey had been informed by another collaborative exercise in which 8 SHU staff had contributed to an email survey on the meanings of personal and professional development. The feedback gained through this survey has reinforced my view that personal development is perceived as an ecologicial process - over 30% of responses to a question on what three words best describe the meaning of personal development used the terms growth and growing while another 27% used improvement and enhancing.

Using my experience to think about co-creation

Julian Stodd offers a perspective on co-creation in his Seven Strands of Co-creation blog He writes that 'social learning spaces do not just bring us together to share what we have learnt, they bring us together in spaces where we co-create meaning, Where we write a story together'. That is certainly true of this narrative of co-creation. Julian creates a conceptual tool with seven elements which provide a useful aid to reflect on the process of co-creation in the context of my experience.

Co-creation requires vision. Not the vision of the individual, but rather the shared vision of the community. A desire to learn, a desire to share ideas and do something worthwhile. We come together in these spaces because of the vision, to be inspired by others, as well as to offer inspiration ourselves. It’s also about our field of vision being wider with more eyes: more people bringing a wider range of experience, a wider range of sources, creating more wisdom and meaning. The breadth and differences within community make it stronger. Vision inspires us. JS

While I completely agree that vision and imagination is essential in any creative process I disagree with Julian when he says its not the vision of the individual but the vision of the community. In the co-creation processes I build and facilitate it has to be both. The vision of the individual who leads and facilitates co-creation is in the imagining of a process that can recruit, connect and harness the potential forces for collaboration and co-creation. It is in the imaginings of an ecology within which people will be motivated to contribute and to learn. This does not happen willy nilly - the conditions and opportunities have to be created.

The social space [containing the potential for co-creation] was the university's learning and teaching conference. The space for the purpose of sharing knowledge about learning and teaching provided me with opportunity to share my ideas and to refine (develop) the ideas further through the interactions and sharing of knowledge. Purpose also seems to me to be important - this may be a feature of the space but it also a feature of the process (see below). 

Shared value also sits at the heart of communication, we need to share value to understand each other and to develop more refined ideas. Social learning spaces allow us to share value and encourage us to do so by letting us understand the value of other participants. Shared value fosters cooperation and lets us build progressively more complex constructs, based on the foundation values, knowledge and understanding that we share. This is a co-creative process.

Standing in front of an audience certainly required me to state and share my values and I like to think that my values resonate with anyone who cares about the education and learning of our students. I agree with JS that people buy into your values before they cooperate and the high level of engagement of participants suggests to me that this certainly happened.

Part of refining our ideas and narratives in social spaces is that of editing things down. We can use social spaces in this function as we rehearse ideas.....Each time I tell the story, I get feedback and I refine what I say. The process of editing makes my narrative stronger. As my ideas reach maturity i should be able to edit them to the point that i can explain them concisely and with clarity. This only happens with careful editing and is central to the co-creative processes at play in social learning spaces.

This is certainly true I cannot give the same presentation twice I have to customise it for the audience and add new ways of explaining in the hope of clarifying ideas more than I was able to do before. I use pictures to help me and my refinements are usually in my images.

[In] our understanding of how people learn, reflection is a key but often neglected part. We need to take the learning and reflect upon it, to stand up the new learning against what we already know to be true and to develop our thinking accordingly. We may accept or reject new knowledge, but it’s an active process that takes reflection.

 I think it is essential but it is more than thinking about something after the event it is thinking about it while it is happening and if necessary adjusting some aspect of process or performance in order to make the process better for co-creation. If you don't engage in the metacognitive process then you miss opportunities.

Tempo  has a role too: one of the ways to drive up engagement in social learning spaces is to restrict the length of time that a community space is available, to give it a definite end. This helps drive up the tempo.

Most processes have a natural cycle and the conference had a definite time frame. There was a long lead in time but apart from preparation most of the action took place in the few days prior to the conference and during the conference. The social space for co-creation was indeed deliberately constrained. But I don't think it always has to be.

Challenge  is a vital part of learning: it’s something that is done well, if constructively, in social learning spaces. We can challenge ideas, argue our case and co-create a shared narrative out of it.

Trying to interest and engage 300 busy people in an organisation is undoubtedly a challenge. The process of public speaking expects challenge and the live twitter stream ensured that challenges and alternative ideas and viewpoints could be posted and viewed in a very public way.

So what's missing?
For me it's the notion of a process with purpose - a purpose that people buy into because they can see the value in doing so. Spaces are necessary - they provide the context for any co-creative exercise but so are processes that empower and enable people to contribute and within that process the resources and tools that are used to stimulate and engage people, and eventually gather and process knowledge that is shared. What is missing is missing from Julian's conceptual aid is the idea that co-creation is an ecological process involving people interacting with each and with the social space, tools and resources that have been created for the purpose of supporting co-creation. When I look back at the ecologies I have created over the last 12 months all have been social spaces and habitats for co-creation - the idea of developing knowledge through collaboration has been at the heart of the ecology. Such ecologies not only grow new knowledge and perspectives they facilitate access to the products of co-creation so there needs to be provision for collation, sense making and open access curation to enable future ecologies for co-creation to prosper. They connect the past with the present and provide the seeds from which new ecologies can be grown. For example already I am seeking to find out if others have conducted similar surveys on the meanings of personal and professional development.

Finally there is one more perspective I want to offer - the advent of social media has opened up entirely new possibilities for sharing views particularly in conference social spaces. This was brought home to be very forcibly when I reviewed the twitter feed  for the #SHULT14  conference as a whole and for my presentation in particular. For the first time I could see what people were taking from what I was saying albeit on a highly selective basis and it has given me confidence that my ideas resonate with at least a few people. I quite like this one.

Hilary Cunliffe ‏@hilary_cunliffe  Jun 19
#SHULT14 learning ecologies and the dreaded PDP. So how many program specifications include creativity? Go for it Norman Jackson!

What next?
Every learning ecology should contain within it the potential for further growth because of the relationships and resources that have been developed and the questions that have been raised. So I should also ask myself how can I make this ecological process even more powerful as a vehicle for co-creation? This is something I thought about as I was fulfilling my duties as the cleaner this morning!

Clearly there is still work to be done on analysing and reporting the survey but beyond this I thought that we might produce an issue of Lifewide Magazine on the Ecology of Development theme and invite workshop participants to contribute a narrative and a visual representation and perhaps extend this into a co-created chapter for the Creativity in Development e-book? I can also use a similar methodology in another talk I'm giving in a few weeks time - adapting the questionnaire in the light of this experience. In this way I can continue to build perspectives on the meanings of personal and professional development within universities. I also put out an enquiry into the SEDA Jisc mail list to see if anyone else had done any surveys or research - I was encouraged to have four responses back very quickly. Let's see where these ideas and actions take me.

It’s interesting how new relationships form. Like many other things that are meaningful in life it’s a co-creative process. A few weeks ago while working on the production (co-creation) of the next issue of Lifewide Magazine I came across Julian Stodd’s blog (1). I immediately saw the value of his thinking for our work and emailed him to see if we might draw on his blog for an article in the magazine. He readily agreed and over a week or so I wrote an article based on extracts from three of his blogs. In fact this article then shaped the title for the issue ‘Using social media in the age of social learning’. I shared the piece with Julian and he was happy for me to have taken and adapted his work in this way. I this way I had appropriated some of his thinking and writing and contextualised it for our own purpose. We also added a couple of illustrations that I commissioned from our community artist and finally another person formatted the article and incorporated it into the magazine. So ultimately four people were involved in this simple example of a co-creative process in which, the crystallised thoughts of one person shared through a blog were adapted and repurposed by another, illustrated by another and packaged by another to create a novel product (our magazine) that could be used to communicate with and engage others. In Carl Rogers' words, ‘a novel relational product has grown out of the uniqueness of the individuals and the circumstances and materials of their lives.’ (2)

During this process Julian said he’d like to meet up to share some stories and invited me to participate in a workshop he was running on the theme of co-creation, music and agility. I decided to take up his offer and on Wednesday I joined nine others in a conversation that was masterfully facilitated by Julian supported by Cath a singer/musician. What emerged was a rich and enjoyable conversation that was animated and illuminated by the insights and stories of participants. In other words together we co-created our experience even to the point where, after a little experimentation and guidance we collectively produced a simple tune using the ‘keezy’ app.

One of the things I like about Julian’s blog is the way he makes his thoughts visible using a word picture. These provide simple but powerful tools for reflection and analysis. The thing I like about them is that they are provisional. They provide a starting point not a conclusion and they contain within them the space and opportunity for improvisation. We started the day with his creation figure.

I did not agree with Julian when he said creation is not a process. The very act of constructing a process for learning or achieving something is a creative act. It brings the means to achieve something into existence and then executing it and inevitably adapting it along the way gives meaning and continuity to this act. And it's certainly about will and intention to think and act in a certain way to achieve something that is valued and meaningful. But stuff happens along the way that is not anticipated that we can latch onto and let it take us where it takes us so it's also about working with emergence.  Co-creation involves the thinking and doing of two or more people over a period of time in a context bound together in some sort of purposeful relationship. It might be a relationship that is invented for the purpose - that grows through the co-creative experience or it might be an existing relationships in which purposes are grown by people who already know and are involved with each other. The ten people involved in the workshop spent the best part of seven hours together talking and sharing ideas and perspectives on the topics we discussed drawing on our own past histories and projecting our imaginations into the contexts and situations we had encountered or created in the past or might see ourselves in, in the future. While we worked within a process designed by the facilitators what emerged from the process was the novel collective product of all the individuals who participated. I'm sure we have all gone away and reflected on and perhaps acted on what we have learnt so the effects of that time bounded process continue and who knows where it will take us (this blog for example or perhaps future collaborations involving participants). In this way one co-creative process spawns others. That is why it all feels ecological to me 4.

Julian's 7 stands of co-creation image (3) seems to contain many of the salient features of co-creation - assuming that it is all about people in purposeful and intentional relationship in which the intention to pay attention and add value to the products of each other's thinking is paramount. What is missing from the conceptual aid is any representation of the dynamic of how two or more people in a purposeful relationship bring into existence 'novel relational products grown out of the uniqueness of the individuals and the circumstances and materials of their lives.’2  It's all subsumed within the word 'co-creation.'




Another context - In the workshop we used the ‘process’ of making music as a way of capturing important aspects of co-creation something I can relate to through my experience of being in a band. On Thursday evening my band came together for a practice. We hadn’t practiced for over a month following our last gig – several members had been away. Over the years we have been together we have discovered that although we enjoy the experience of just playing together we get bored and demotivated if we do not have a purpose – like rehearsing for a gig or a recording session. Practising the same stuff over and over again is not enough to hold us together. Fortunately, we have a couple of gigs coming up so we have a purpose and one of these involves introducing new songs to our repertoire (chosen by the host) and an invitation to write and record a song for their daughter. So we have a real challenge and a context for co-creation relating to both adaptation (new cover songs) and invention (creation of a song that has never existed before). The first process is fairly straightforward and does not involve too much creativity – it’s more of a technical exercise to replicate a song that is usually well known to us perhaps with a few tweaks although generally we try to faithfully reproduce what already exists. Co-creativity here involves the blending of our skills and sounds to make music that others would recognise. The dynamic of co-creative invention is quite different – I would describe it as ecological. Paul our singer had several conversations with the host to build a picture of their daughter for whom the song is being written then went away on holiday and wrote some lyrics. Simultaneously and independently our most prolific song writer created two new tunes and also wrote some words. The two of them then met up and tried to connect their two independent contributions. At our rehearsal they shared their ideas as work in progress and we all added our interpretations until a coherent sound began to emerge. We didn’t go very far with this on Thursday as it’s a work in progress and we trust that it will evolve over the next few weeks (because we have done it before).


It illustrates the sort of co-creative process we use to produce our music. Invention and originality generally takes place in the minds and embodiments of one person, who then works with another to develop and refine until the products of this process are shared with the other members of the band who then build on it. Perhaps we might call this phase ‘development’. The product of our collective efforts gradually emerges over a period of time usually several weeks. As we reach agreement on the overall sound our efforts turn to replicating the song in exactly the same way each time we do it and this is eventually codified in a recording (production/reproduction). We seem to be following a well trodden path as this seems to be the way that Lennon and MaCartney and the Beetles worked -  so we are in good company. Through this process we have all contributed to the ‘novel relational product’ but in different and unequal ways. You can hear an example of our co-creativity ‘Song for Ollie’ here http://freeworlders.weebly.com/

1 Julian Stodd http://julianstodd.wordpress.com/
2 Carl Rogers (1961) On becoming a person. Boston: Houghton Mifflin
3 http://julianstodd.wordpress.com/2013/02/26/seven-strands-of-co-creation-reflecting-on-how-we-learn-together-in-social-learning-spaces/
4 Norman Jackson (2014) Creativity in Development: An Ecological Perspective in N J Jackson Creativity in Development: A Higher Education Perspective, Lifewide Education Chapter 1 Available online at: http://www.creativityindevelopment.co.uk/

During our recent conference Professor Ronald Barnett positioned himself as a critical friend and  issued a challenge for the advocates of lifewide learning. He raised an issue which was about the potential of lifewide learners to be selfishly concerned with themselves rather than the issues and challenges of others in a locally disconnected but globally connected world.

In his speech Ron said

It may sound as if this [lifewidelearning] is a project concerned with individuals as individuals. It is concerned about their welfare, their needs, their possibilities, their own learning. Is this an agenda for late capitalism, in which everyone looks out for themselves - and reconstructs themselves (for a fluid world) and goes on developing themselves for themselves? Cf ‘Bowling Alone’.  A solipsistic educational journey devoid of any sense of universal claims and possibilities. There is a real world – it’s not just a matter of our life-projects. It is a globalised world  and a world riven with conflicts, power differentials, and ideologies. Willy-nilly, we are embedded in networks – antagonistic as they are. A challenge then [for lifewide learning] is that of bringing a (greater) concern for the world into our learning tasks.Neither self-centred nor selfish but self-less, not merely immersed in the world but engaging critically with the world - with a care for its flourishing.

My response to this is that a life with purposes that are only directed to self-development and the benfit of the individual is not a life worth living. I illustrate this through a story about the band I play in. We have been together for many years now - you might and we frequently do say we are growing old together and our jokes are about age, decrepitude and decline... but there is something magical in coming together to play music and try to get better at what we do. Except, when our practices serve no purpose other than for our own benefit we lose momentum. People make excuses and don't turn up. The secret we have discovered is to have a goal - in the form of a performance or a recording. Having a goal focuses attention and we can all work together to achieve it. Even better is to have a goal that is beyond our own immediate interests where we feel we are doing some good. A few months ago we decided to put on a charity gig to raise money for a worthy cause at our own expense in the local village hall. Then we heard about a local family trying to raise money for their child who needed treatment for a brain tumour in America. We adopted this cause and have all entered the spirit of raising money by selling tickets, recording songs for a CD which we will sell and then various activities on the night of the fund raising gig. We are also going to talk about it and the broader issue of raining money for a children's cancer charity on local radio.  Over the last few months the band has been brought together and we have learnt and developed through the process. We have also started collaborating with other musicians which might open up some new opportunities for us. Undoubtedly, we have been inspired by having a purpose that is greater than our own needs and interests.

This week has been another busy week.. immediately following our conference I discovered that a possible invitation to teach a module in the professional development programme at the University of Limerick had become a concrete possibility with an email from the programme director..

I am following up on an email my colleague sent you regarding your willingness to teach a module on our Specialist Diploma in Teaching, Learning and Scholarship.  The course is a level 9 course consisting of ten modules each with three credits and it is designed to equip  participants with high level competence in Teaching , Learning, Scholarship and Innovation in Higher Education settings (I have attached a copy of the Diploma handbook for your information). The module we would like you to teach covers Scholarly innovation and creativity. I have attached the module outline used previously and the type of assessment students have been given in the past, to give you an idea of what is involved. Of course given the module is about innovation and creativity in scholarship, you have freedom to teach this module in the manner you feel is better for you
 
The email went on to inform me that the module was to be run in six days seven April 3/4 if I was willing to do it so I had to decide on whether I could take it on. Effectively I had 6 days to prepare but I also had a lot of other commitments in that time. Two things grabbed my attention - the fact that I could teach it how I wanted to and the focus on personal everyday creativity.. So I said yes and spent every spare hour I could over the next six days 'preparing'.

The experience was a good one  in all sorts of ways and I am writing a reflective essay to consolidate my thoughts and feelings. Here I focus on its value to me as a reminder of what it is like to teach. I had a group of 18 professional learners ranging in age from early 20's to 50 at various stages of their careers. All were leading busy lives and had to fit in the 10hours over two days during which the course ran. As a teacher I designed a process which included content - mainly my writings on the topics we covered, activities - the tasks I designed before, during and after the event and a few more spontaneous situations. But you cannot predict how learners will respond. It was my good fortune that they engaged in the way I had hoped and the whole experience for me became reaffirming. It made me feel like I used to feel as a teacher when the situations I had crafted produced the desired results in terms of learner interest, engagement, discussion and the application of the learning. I still have to mark the two assignments I set which will give me more feedback on whether the ideas and knowledge I worked with has been assimilated and applied and I want to gather the learners' feedback on the course - but the experience has shown me something that I miss so I am going to try to market the short course to other  institutions.

Thank you Limerick Creatives!

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

Sometimes the development of an idea falters because it is just too expensive to turn the idea into a practical reality. But good ideas are never lost they just get put on the back burner. About 18 months ago I started a business project called storyshare. The basic idea was to help people create stories that were personally meaningful and help them bring their story to life through illustration, sound and animation. I made a business plan and attempted to find some illustrators - one of these became our LWE community illustrator so this part of the process was a success. But at the time I failed to see how I could make it a commercial success as I could not animate the illustrations without a great deal of expense and I knew that the potential market would not buy the service at a price that would cover the costs and make a small profit. So the idea was put on hold - until this week when I discovered the explee animation tool. I can now see how it will be possible to animate the illustrations in an inexpensive way so the cost of the service would be limited to the illustrations themselves. I thought it was a great example of how advances in technology can suddenly liberate and idea.  I offer my story as an illustration of what explee can do.  The illustrator is Kiboko Hachiyon. Thanks again to Chrissi Nerantzi who drew my attention to explee.

If creativity is a novel relational 'product' growing out of the circumstances of our life (Carl Rogers 1960) then development - the ability to be able to do something new,  is an example of such a product.

Sunday was mostly a wet and windy day so I spent quite a bit of time on my computer. I began exchanging emails with Chrissi Nerantzi about the possibility of creating an on-line course and over the space of a few hours she sent me and my son, who is also working with us, a whole pile of links to various web tools and examples of what the tool was capable of doing.  Here's an example
From: Chrissi Nerantzi
Sent: 05 January 2014 22:23
Subject: You have received a YouTube video!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dksXr4GQMfk&sns=em
Something like this might also work for the conference? 
Chrissi

My son followed the link and gave me a glimpse of what it could do. It's a powerful, intuitive drag and drop tool for creating short animations which can be uploaded to youtube. I love animations and over the years I had financed and collaborated in a number of animation projects and I know how expensive and time consuming they are to produce so I was really excited about the possibility of being able to produce one for myself.

This morning I had a go at making my own animation through a process of trial and error. Over an hour I managed to create a 40 sec clip introducing our conference which I embedded in the conference website. In doing it I knew I was trying to achieve something specific. Looking back I can see that I had engaged in a piece of personal development through which I learnt how to make an animation using this software. It was very satisfying to make something so quickly and so easily. I also felt that I was being creative and the clip I produced, being entirely new to the world - was creative.

So my development and creativity emerged and merged from and through the circumstances of my life. Thanks to Chrissi who drew my attention to the tool and my son for showing me how easy it was to use, and having the time, interest and a potential use for the product - I engaged in and completed a piece of impromptu personal development and was able to be and feel creative in the process!

A contribution to the Creativity in Development Narrative Inquiry
http://www.creativityindevelopment.co.uk/

A new development process may begin with an idea, and that idea might take a while to germinate, but it only begins to become a reality when thoughts are acted upon. This week I embarked on another development process that had grown out of 
an earlier process in which I tried to develop a better understanding of the role of creativity in individual's developmental processes. This work was motivated by the need to give a talk at the SEDA conference in November and my desire to try to make my talk relevant and interesting for participants. I created an ecology for learning that I described in a previous blog  (11/15/13) and out of this emerged the suggestion by one of the participants that I might see if others would be interested in sharing their understandings of how their creativity is involved in a particular developmental process by creating a narrative inquiry.

Over the last few weeks I contacted a number of people to see if they would be interested in joining a process. Their enthusiasm for the idea provided the motivation I needed to act. So on Sunday I set up a project website to encourage people to get involved and provide participants with the means to share their narratives and understandings. I also invited one of the enthusiasts Chrissi Nerantz to join me as co-convenor which she readily agreed. I also wrote a short article for Lifewide Magazine to advertise it and posted it on ACADEMIA.COM & LINKED-IN. Only time will tell whether ambitions will be realised but one thing is certain there is much potential and possibility in the idea.

So my new developmental project involves contributing to the process as a participant and supporting the process and encouraging the involvement of others.

So where is the creativity involved in starting this new developmental project? The idea for a narrative inquiry around the theme of creativity in development was not my own so I cannot claim an original thought, neither is the idea new to me because I am aware of other examples. To some extent it must be present in imagining the possibility that new things will or might be brought into existence if certain things are done or put in place. It is the vision of what might come out of the project that provides the energy to actually do something. Organised processes for learning require structures to support communication and interaction. Before today this website did not exist. I have developed websites before so making one is not new to me but the design and content of this one are new. Creativity must also lie in the way a project is framed and communicated to others so that more  of the potential in the idea can be realised. It is most definitely in the way that people are encouraged to become involved and 'selling' the value of being involved. It is also in the way relationships are grown to create the energy, spirit, capacity, agency and inventiveness when people come together around the things they care about. I am delighted that CN has agreed to be a co-facilitator. She positively oozes energy and enthusiasm and it will be enjoyable working with her. Also her willingness to collaborate combined with all the ideas that she will bring increases the potential for me to be creative. Creativity in development is in the thinking, the actions and interactions and their effects, and the relationships that hold the potential for new possibilities

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.