In following up a twitter link I came across the US based organisation called Connected Learning which seems to share much of the ideology, educational orientations, passions and interests of Lifewide Education.

Connected Learning describes itself as an educational approach designed for our ever-changing world. It makes learning relevant to all populations, to real life and real work, and to the realities of the digital age, where the demand for learning never stops.
·  Learners are the focus: Specifically, developing lifelong learners with higher-order skills.
·  We build on the basics: The basics are important, but not enough for youth to thrive in our rapidly-changing world.
·  We connect three critical spheres of learning: academics, a learner’s interests, inspiring mentors and peers.
·  We harness the advances and innovations of our connected age to serve learning: Just as earlier generations
    tapped  the tools of their time to improve learning, we must do the same in the digital age.
·   Making, creating and producing are powerful paths to deeper learning and understanding: Connected learning 
    asks learners to experiment, to be hands-on, and to be active and entrepreneurial in their learning, recognizing that this
     is what is now needed to be successful in work and in life.

There is a lot of information on the website including a significant research report that I have yet to read. The website also hosts Connected Learning TV with regular programmes that feature different aspects of connected learning. For example the current series of programmes deals with Open badges and discovering pathways through connected learning. The video archives provide a fantastic resource for educators who are interested in encouraging and supporting lifewide learning. Connected Learning is a significant organisation and movement that Lifewide Education needs to connect with and learn from. I wrote to the CEO who kindly gave us permission to reproduce an edited version of one of their reports in Lifewide Magazine. 

I introduced my talk with a slide that portrayed my own ecological process for making my contribution to the event. I had concluded that my learning process had been purposeful and directional - towards creating the resources and personal knowledge to be able to contribute to the seminar and workshop and that it had also involved lots of other people - the people who had codified their understandings in the articles I had read and whose ideas I had assimilated and reused, the people I had talked to especially members of my family, the people who had written blogs which I had drawn on, accounts of learning written by past students at Surrey and my daughter's evolving account of learning as she helps us pilot the lifewide development award. My learning had been both a  constructive process and an organic social process. 

The workshop involved inviting participants to think of a learning project they had been involved in and to try in about fifteen minutes to record the key elements of their learning process. Each then told their story of learning and as a group we tried to think about the ecological aspects of the story. The process was quite revealing and on the train journey home (in true ecological spirit) I decided to email the people who had participated to invite them to continue working on the ideas that had emerged and to write them up as a co-authored paper to illustrate how such a workshop methodology can work in revealing the ecological process involved in lifewide learning. So far only two people have responded so I'm uncertain as to what will emerge from the process. But I feel sure that something useful will come from it. 

On Thursday I was thinking ahead to the next issue of Lifewide Magazine and thinking of potential contributors when I googled Jay Lemke - who has written extensively on ecosocial theory and  who I had really enjoyed reading. I came across a beautifully written and inspiring chapter he wrote in 2002.. on becoming a village.. I cite a passage below to illustrate..

An old saying has it that it takes a village to raise a child. As children, we know how much we need to learn about everything and everyone in our communities to live there successfully. As we learn, we gradually become our villages: we internalize the diversity of viewpoints that collectively make sense of all that goes on in the community. At the same time, we develop values and identities: in small tasks and large projects, we discover the ways we like to work, the people we want to be, the accomplishments that make us proud. In all these activities we constantly need to make sense of the ideas and values of others, to integrate differing viewpoints and desires, different ways of talking and doing. As we participate in community life, we inevitably become in part the people that others need us to be, and many of us also find at least some of our efforts unsupported or even strenuously opposed by others... The challenges of living in a village define fundamental issues for both education and development.1

His website had a contact email address and in the spirit of nothing ventured nothing gained  I decided to invite him to write a feature article for the next issue of the Magazine.. Within a few hours I had a very encouraging response which indicated that although in the midst of travelling from Europe to San Diego he had taken the trouble to follow the link I had given him to my website and had made a relational connection.. What a wonderful illustration of our ecologies in action.

Fortified by insights gained at the CRA workshop, the other important decision I made this week was to reframe the conference we are planning for next year to focus attention on the way that universities are supporting lifewidelearning ie I turned it from a criticism of inaction to the opportunity to celebrate achievement and progress. In spite of uncertainties I went ahead and booked the venue thus committing Lifewide Education to the conference in March next year. Making these decisions brought a sense of relief, as so often decision making does, and I was much happier at the end of the week than I had been at the start.

1 Lemke J L (2002) Becoming the Village: Education across lives, in G. Wells and G. Claxton (eds) Learning for Life in the 21st Century: Sociocultural Perspectives on the Future of Education Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Oxford, UK available on-line at http://www.jaylemke.com/storage/becoming-the-village.pdf

Opportunities to help shape thinking about the future of learning and education don't come very often so I jumped at the chance to submit a paper to the EU's Joint Research Centre Call for Vision Papers on the Future of Open Education. 

In 2011 the European Commission's Joint Research Centre, Institute for Prospective Technological Studies published a report on the Future of Learning in which they outlined a vision for learning that was 'lifewide and lifelong'.  Not surprisingly we used our own Lifewide Development Award as a model for an European Award and related this to the ways in which it might support the vision of personalised, collaborative and informal learning that was envisioned in the Future of Learning Report. Our paper was not only accepted but was deemed a winning entry by the organisers so, as the author of the paper I was invited to a Foresight Workshop led by Christine Redecker in Seville at the end of April.

About twenty people with backgrounds in HE education, policy, research, commercial learning enterprises, interests in technology and not for profit educational enterprises were brought together to engage in a facilitated structured process to consider the question of Open Education and Open Education Resources in 2030 in the context of lifelong learning. Underlying this exercise is the political movement towards greater openness especially with open publication of data and information and the European Commission's new initiative on "Opening-up Education" to be launched mid-2013. 

With such a diverse group of people contributing to the workshop it was not surprising that there were tensions, for example between those who seemed only to be concerned with meeting the learning needs of people developing themselves for work, and those who wanted to adopt a more holistic view of lifelong-lifewide learning.  Some participants were primarily concerned with formal learning that was designed and directed by institutional or commercial providers, and more or less conformed to traditional content-based, transmission models of education, while others were concerned to recognise the needs and interests of self-motivated, self-organised/self-managed learners who would create their own ecosystems for learning and personal development and draw on networks and communities and information from many sources rather than simply relying on pre-packaged educational materials. This group also saw the value of multiple sources and types of recognition systems eg open badges and open awards as well as more traditional forms of assessment and recognition. The workshop revealed that openness and trust are important cultural requisites to achieve the 2030 vision.

Some of the more significant discussion themes are listed below.

1 The need for a 2030 society that values lifewide-lifelong learning and is committed to openness. We need to start talking about lifewide learning if it is be a recognised reality.

2 The need to develop capabilities and confidence of learners of all ages for the diverse forms of learning that are envisaged in the Future of Learning vision.

3 An abundance of open source information resources including OER and vast quantities of information not specifically designed for educational purposes. Knowledge grown in social networks and personal narratives of growth and development are likely to be important contributors.

4 The need to maintain good levels of competency in a technologically enabled world. In 2030 technology will be used to help people in all aspects of their learning and development eg

·         to reflect on their situations and evaluate their learning and development needs

·         to help match needs and interests to high quality relevant information and learning opportunities

·         to identify trustworthy communities where knowledge is being co-created

·         to provide on-going support and feedback

·         to identify potential sources of recognition and accreditation of learning and perhaps make comparisons between 
          sites

·         to enable people to capture and represent their learning and development in ways that will be accepted by any
          scheme for recognition

·         to help them create the narratives of their development.

5 A wealth of open educational practices to support individuals learning - the issue will be decided which practices to adopt.

6 A wealth of mechanisms and practices for valuing individuals' learning and development. 'By 2030 I want any aspect of my learning and development to be recognised and validated by an appropriate authority if I wanted it to' (workshop participant). The issue will be decided which practices to adopt.

7 A policy that supported the vision but contained plenty of space and resource for improvising and responding to the unexpected.

Reflections on the process

I am thinking about the idea of personal learning ecologies and the process I got involved in provided a good example of one that was partly my own creation and partly someone else's (the JRCs).  My own ecology comprises my big learning ecology to support the lifewide learning enterprise. Much of the learning is emergent and comes from seeking an opportinity - like the call for vision papers - and working with it. But once involved I had to quickly grow an understanding of Open Education. But I was aware that I was part of the learning ecology the JRC team had built to fulfil its goals of exploring open education.

Because of this process I have realised that what we were trying to do in the Lifewide Education community is entirely consistent with the visions for lifewide-lifelong learning being developed by the JRC team for Europe. I now see the lifewide education enterprise as open educational practice being co-created and shared by a trustworthy community. Our Magazine, e-book and PoD book are open educational resources and we are continually growing these within our community. We distribute the knowledge we have grown through a suite of websites and make it freely available to anyone who sees value in what we have produced.  We also offer open educational services through our Lifewide Development Award and we are growing open educational practices to help learners gain recognition for their lifewide learning. For Lifewide Education, Open Education is already here, we provide a concrete example of an idealistic, inclusive, free, community-based learning enterprise that embodies the Future of Learning vision.

The EU Commissions Open Education/ Future of Learning project provides Lifewide Education with a fantastic opportunity to contribute ideas on how the 2030 vision might be realised.

Joint Research Centre, Institute for Prospective Technological Studies WEBSITE
http://blogs.ec.europa.eu/openeducation2030/

References
Jackson N J  An EU-wide Lifewide Development Award. Open Education 2030 Vision Paper
http://blogs.ec.europa.eu/openeducation2030/files/2013/04/OE2030_LLL_Booklet.pdf

'The Future of Learning: An EU Lifewide Development Award' can be found in the Booklet 'Open Education 2030' Contributions to the JRC-IPTS call for vision papers Part 1 Lifelong Learning Available online at:
http://blogs.ec.europa.eu/openeducation2030/files/2013/04/OE2030_LLL_Booklet.pdf

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

weekly report to myself

The sun is shining and spring is in the air and I just completed my bimonthly report in which I reflect on the progress we have made in the lifewide education enterprise. I circulated my report to the team to let them have my overview and invited them to add items that I don't know about. In this way we can all keep up to date. I also hope that the information will help convey a sense of achievement and pride. I suppose I am using it as both a tool for monitoring progress and a means of trying to keep people involved.  All in all I feel we have made good progress in most of the areas we identified in our 2013 work plan. 

I gave myself a break to wander around the garden looking for signs of spring which I captured in some lovely photos. I noiiced that the pathway I had made in September now looked as if it had always been a part of the woods which looked as if they were j

Travel certainly broadens the mind by opening your eyes to worlds that are very different to your own. I am in Riyadh attending the International Forum of Innovative University Teachers being held at the Imam Muhammad Ibn Saud Islamic University. I lived in Saudi Arabia over 30 years ago and I was keen to see how it might have changed. I realised very quickly that some things never change as I sat clutching the seat (no seat belts), as my taxi driver remonstrated with an overtaking car at 50mph..on the drive from the airport!!!! The second thing that hadn't changed was the generosity and hospitality of my Saudi hosts who looked after me very well. The photo shows some of the many people, including students, who helped make the conference a success.

I had been invited to give a talk on my study of change in a university (see below). I was worried that what I had to say about change and innovation in an English university would not translate into what seemed to me to be a very different culture of higher education. But when I asked this question I was told by the Dean of Development and a number of university teachers that they recognised the factors and conditions that were relevant to change and innovation in their universities. I was greatly relieved and also pleased that what I had discovered were some universal principles that might be applied to universities in any higher education system so that was important learning for me.

I learnt that Saudi Arabia is growing its university system very quickly (someone said 26% of GDP was going into higher education). What was clear was that university teachers are grappling with the same issues in developing more engaging and relevant forms of learning as university teachers in the UK and elsewhere.  The same sorts of topics were being covered - e-learning, e-portfolios and social networking, project based learning and problem based learning and many other progressive forms of learning activity. Amongst the many excellent contributions was a presentation given by a medical educator Dr Ammar Attar Umm al-Qura , who is pioneering a lifewide approach in the medical curriculum. (Students undertake a project of their choice that must relate to their personal interests and passions and then put on an exhibition for the benefit of staff and students. Students were motivated to produce books, films, poems and many different artefacts and through their creativity they connected their products to the medical disciplinary field. A great example of LWE in action. Dr Attar kindly agreed to join our community and represent LWE in the Kingdom.

The one thing that felt very strange was the fact that men and women sat in different conference theatres that were linked through sound and projection.. Interestingly, the women could see us but we could not see them. It was my first experience of this form of segregation and it felt very strange though of course I respect that this is deeply cultural. 

I take home with me many happy memories and several new friendships that I hope will be continued.

My presentation

This week will be interesting because I'm contributing to a survey LWE survey aimed at revealing how, what and why we learn through our everyday experiences. It should reveal the ecology of  my lifwide learning. Three times a day I will spend  about 10mins recording these things and at the end of the week pool them with other contributors to see what emerges. I will also reflect on what my log tells me. Anyone is welcome to join the survey even if its only for a few days.  DOWNLOAD SURVEY TEMPLATE

 





Here is my completed log for the week

A Week in My Life - making sense of my activities and the learning/meaning I derive from them 

My week was atypical in the sense that it is not every week that I get the chance to participate in a conference and interact with people who shared the same sorts of interests and values as I have. But the rest of the week was typical of my current life. So what have I learnt from the process of recording and thinking about my experiences? 

ACTIVITIES
Out of a possible 168 hours (7x24h) I was active for about 112h (averaging about 16h per day). These were broken down into the following categories of activity 

WORK About 50 hours includes work for my company Chalk Mountain and Lifewide Education. This week it including  attending a conference. This week I spent considerably more time on LWE work. Also includes 6h for this recording and reflecting exercise. Quite a lot of my time was spent either preparing for the conference or trying to fix a problem with a website.            

FAMILY About 24h this includes family at home (my wife and daughter), family elsewhere (children at university and children/grandchildren living locally), and family overseas (mother and father in Australia and sisters in Australia).

DOWNTIME about 18h includes reading, listening to music, watching TV/ youtube for pleasure and education like Time Team and playing my drums

TRAVELLING about 14h mainly time in the car being a taxi service or travelling to friends and family. This week included travelling to and from Leeds to participate in a conference

CHORES about 6h includes - cleaning, shopping, preparing meals, ironing, doing odd jobs in house/garden

HABBITS
I am clearly a creature of habit and my life is quite routinised. I get up and go to bed at more or less the same time. I have breakfast, lunch and dinner at more or less the same time,   and the pattern of what I do each day when I am at home is more or less the same. I start working at around 8am and work until 12ish.. I eat lunch and watch time team, I work pm until late afternoon or evening. I have dinner at more or less the same time with my family and we use this opportunity of being together to learn about each other's lives, discuss family and make plans. Evenings after dinner are generally devoted to relaxing and I seem to do the same sort of things most evenings..  This routine might be seen in a negative way but they do not feel boring or constraining because I generally value what I am doing and derive meaning and enjoyment from the things I am doing most of the time. Indeed, negative emotions generally emerge when things get in the way of the things I am trying to do - like having to complete my tax returns.

SOCIAL INTERACTIONS
My main social interaction day to day is with my family wife and children, and thanks to my sister's call - my family in Australia. Some of these interactions are face to face and some via email/skype/telephone. Conversations and activities encourage the sharing  of daily events or news in each others lives the disclosure of feelings and practical and emotional support.

Another sort of social interaction is related to work and this is mainly focused on trying to make progress. Communication is mainly through email and I am grateful for the help and support given to me by other people involved in LWE.

Life is punctuated by less regular events like participating in conferences and this provides opportunity for face to face social interaction. 

PLANNED & UNPLANNED ACTIVITY
While there is a consistency regarding the pattern of my  activity the detail is only roughly planned from day to day. At the start of the week I know roughly what I want to try and achieve. But the details of each day only unfold within the day. There are also unanticipated events that emerge and create problems and new opportunities. This week I had two emergent situations. The first involved having to resolve a problem with the LWE website created by the person who hosts it making changes to the front page that I didn't like. The second event involved me responding to an email from Rob Ward offering me the chance to design and facilitate a workshop at the CRA conference on Friday. This is how it happened..

********************************
From: Rob Ward 
Sent: 19 November 2012 10:10
To: Norman Jasckson
Subject: Forthcoming Residential
Importance: High

Hi Norman
I'm needing to do some last minute tweaking of the Residential programme as the final short session on 'Creativity and PDP' (plenary workshop,
14.20-15.00 on Friday) can't now go ahead as planned.  Would you bewilling/able to offer a short contribution on this theme here?

Apologies for the short notice! BW Rob
********************************

Once I had thought about it I did see it as a real opportunity to try something new and develop myself in the process. 

**********************************************
From: Norman Jasckson
Sent: Mon 11/19/2012 2:14 PM
To: Rob Ward
Subject: RE: Forthcoming Residential
Okay how about trying to model creative use of technology? This process would need the room to be connected to internet and two CRA
staff to support - 1 connected to twitter, 1 connected to weebly.com a website building tool

THEME 'Using technology to stimulate students' creativity in recording ideas, experiences, learning and achievement'
Participants to assume that there are no constraints on the way technology might be used in their own PDP environments ie a blank sheet of paper.

DESIGN - process
1) Self-organise into groups of about 4 people. Groups must include someone with a smart phone.
2) 10mins - pool ideas in the group drawn from personal or imagined experiences
3) 10mins - choose 1 idea and create a poster on a sheet of flip chart paper to explain the idea also prepare a 1 min pitch
4) 5mins - find a quiet corner and person with smart phone a) takes a photo of poster  b) records 1 min explanatory pitch on phone
5) 5 mins group composes 140 character tweet to capture the essence of theiridea for twitter and tweet, photo of poster and 1 min video clip emailed to
CRA address
6) 10 mins CRA colleagues a) post tweets & images on twitter & B) upload video clips to weebly website..

outcome
The tweets would be displayed on the projector screen and if we had two screens we could also display the video clips.. People can go away and look
at the results.
*********************************************************

Between this email and the workshop I did the preparatory work necessary to make it work, I got support from JW who provided illustrative poster and recording and I liaised with DB from CRA to make sure we could do it. The workshop worked very well and I know I can add this sort of technologically enabled workshop to my repertoire of facilitation techniques. I had no idea that this would happen at the start of the week.

LEARNING & DEVELOPMENT
Unusually for me this week some of my learning was formal in the sense that I put myself into situations (presentations and workshops) with the intention of learning something. But, more typically, most of my learning was informal usually goal/achievement driven... a) completing my book project or b) trying to advance LWE. I did try several things I hadn't done before including a workshop design that seemed to engage participants and get some great results. Much of my learning was simply about gaining some new knowledge and much of it was through conversation mainly with people I already knew but who I had lost touch with. Most of my follow-up actions will be linked to this relational knowledge.  I would say that quite a lot of activity I engaged in did not lead to any significant or recognisable learning.  In terms of personal development - what I can do now that I couldn't do before the week started I would identify the workshop I facilitated and the techniques I developed to engage people and record their creations. That experiential knowledge, the capability I developed and used and the confidence I gained can be used again.

Most of my learning was driven by my needs. I needed to modify a logo so I learnt how to use photoshop top do it. I uploaded a slide show to weebly for the first time. I learned how to design and facilitate a workshop I took on. Some of my learning was simply a biproduct of enjoying myself.. like searching for music on Youtube, spotting a new band I liked on Later with Jools Holland. There is also learning of a more strategic in nature which is linked to my work namely reading articles and books that enable me to add to my understanding. This week I read a transcript and watched a video clip of John Seeley Brown's talk on the entrepreneurial learner which I think LWE can use. I had picked this up from a link in a blog by Jane Hart that I was examining with a view to commissioning a chapter for LWE e-book. Much of my learning comes from this sort of intelligent and sometimes haphazard searching.

I also continued to develop my understandings of the ways of thinking promoted by Clayton Christiensen by reading his book and trying to apply his ideas to what I was doing which I know will  have significance for LWE. 

Some of my learning has come from using tools like stat counter to monitor how my websites are being used. This is a new form of learning over the time the knowledge will be valuable to know what interventions draw people to our resources.

In a more typical week I would do a lot more writing. For me writing is a very important way of developing and organising my thinking, creating meaning and recording my understandings.  This log and the reflective piece served as my main writing task this week. 

MEANINGIn my family context meaning is created through the day to interactions and conversations we have and the things we do to help and encourage each other and give each other emotional and practical support.

In the work context meaning is created through my book and in developing and promoting LWE. I feel I made quite a lot of progress with the later this week both in the redesign of the website and in my involvement with the conference. Meaning is also created through interaction with my family and feeling that I am in some way helping them. Reflecting on my experience of participating at the CRA conference I felt that I had, at least momentarily, regained a lost identity and renewed a set of friendships/relationships with people and higher education that had been eroded because it was no longer part of my everyday experience. This meant a lot to me and it has taught me the value of trying to find or create these opportunities for my own wellbeing. I devoted a lot of time this week to intentionally learn about my own learning and meaning making. I probably spent 4 or 5 hours this week recording and analysing my activities and what I have learnt from them. The value in the process is that it has enabled me to examine more systematically what I'm doing and how I draw meaning and learning from my activities.

VALUES  & IDENTITIES
One of the purposes of this exercise was to examine the ways in which activities and behaviours, and what motivates them, reflect values and identities. Through the week I was mainly working with two sorts of identity.

The first identity I embodied was my working identity - my work is essentially academic (eg being a writer/scholar - the book commission I worked on), educational (applying my knowledge of how people learn to the concept of lifewide learning)  and educational developer (trying to influence other educators). The central values here are those of being professional in these fields and trying, through hard work, thinking and creativity to progress each of my work enterprises. An important part of my identity as a teacher is my ability to communicate ideas and engage people in using them. Because of the conference I was able to do both of these in presenting my ideas on lifewide development and facilitating a couple of workshops which enabled people to try out some tools I had developed, or enabled small groups to share ideas and create some original educational designs. It is very important for me to maintain this part of my identity but which is quite hard to do now that I am no longer working in an institution. As a result of reflecting on this I strengthened the way I market this aspect of my professional work on my website.

The second identity I embodied relates to me as a member of a large family and a complex set of relationships that make up my family ... as a father/step father, husband, grandfather, brother and son.... the central value here is the love for my family and my desire to care for and help family members and the value of staying in touch with each other.  This week, thanks to technology I was able to have interactions and good conversations with my wife and daughter at home.. with my daughter and son at university - telephone/skype, with my wife when I was a away and she was away by telephone and skype, with my mum and dad in Australia (telephone), my two sisters in Australia (skype) and my daughter and my three grandsons. This record shows the value of the technologies we have for enabling us to communicate across the world.

I also experienced two other sorts of identity during the week..

The first was a sense of regaining, at least for a short time, an identity I held a few years ago as a respected thought leader in higher education. By being with a group or people I had worked with, including people from two agencies I had worked for, and being reminded of the roles I played in enabling change to happen in the HE system, I felt part of that society or community again. Here the values were around championing an educational cause (PDP, and providing concrete practical support to enabling it to be implemented. The fact that my commitment has carried on beyond employment gives me credibility in this respect.

Another identity I nurtured was my identity as a drummer in a band. We normally practice every week so this identity gets validated when we come together. When I'm listening to music in the car I sometimes play our own music or I imagine playing the drums to whatever is being played. This week we didn't have a practice but I had an hours work out on Sunday. Here my values relate to my love of music and of making music particularly with others and trying to improve myself as a drummer.

COMPARISON OF HOW I USED MY RESOURCES WITH MY PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT PLAN
This is the first time I have ever taken a week of my life and tried to record how I have used it. In his book on Measuring Your Life Clayton Christensen (p62) talks about strategy -   Real strategy .. in our daily lives is created through hundreds of everyday decisions about how we spend our resources (our time). As you're living your life from day to day, how do you make sure you are holding in the right direction? Watch where your resources flow. If they are not supporting the strategy you have decided upon, then you're not implementing that strategy at all.  The personal development plan I made in September identified my most important goals as:

1 To lead and contribute to the further development and promotion of the Lifewide Education enterprise
2 To grow the Chalk Mountain business and deliver a good service to clients
3 To support my (large) family - do whatever is necessary to help them
4 To build a recording studio and develop the technical skills to record my band
5 To create a woodland garden
6 To be open and responsive to new possibilities and adapt to or take advantage of the unplanned and unexpected

I think my life this week has supported achievement of the first three goals and I had a good example of responding to goal six in accepting at short notice, the challenge to facilitate a workshop at the CRA conference.  Goals 4&5 are much lower in my list of priorities than the first three goals. So it would appear that, this week at least, is quite closely aligned to my personal strategy.

CONTEXTS & PROBLEM SOLVING
I often use John Stephenson's contexts and challenges tool to help me reflect on the things I am doing.  I would say that this week. Most of my activities have been in the familiar context and familiar problems domain but the conference and the activities I undertook did put me outside my comfort zone (unfamiliar context) and tackle an unfamiliar challenge ( the workshop on creative use of technology).


VALUE OF THE EXERCISE
I estimate that the whole exercise of recording and analysing my log took me about 7 hours which I have allocated to LWE work. So was it worth it? I think it's helped me appreciate the value of this sort of tool and reflective process to helping people appreciate their learning and development in their everyday lives. I now think that the process and outcomes could be usefully integrated into the Lifewide Development Award.

The exercise has:
1) enabled me to see my life as an integrated whole (during this period of time) and see how different parts of my life interact
2) revealed the patterns of daily activity in my life highlighting routines and more unusual activity and the motives for engaging in such activity
3) forced me to think about the learning that is associated with different sorts of activity and the potential ways in which I have developed/changed through only a week of living - indeed this reflective exercise has made a significant contribution to my learning this week added to my understanding of how to promote reflection on our own LWE
4) encouraged me to see the meaning I attribute to different activity in my life
5) enabled me to check how I am allocating my resources to the things I value and confirmed  that I am spending my time in ways that are consistent with the goals I set out in my personal development plan
6) enabled me to recognise that the identities I embody and enact  which are closely related to the things I value 
7) enabled me to apply some of the wisdom I have recently discovered in Clayton Christensen's book  to reflect on my own activity and behaviour. This has helped me see how some of the ideas in this book might be incorporated into the guidance and support we give to lifewide learners.

 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.