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.

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

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.

POST REWRITTEN 21 Nov   I just spent 15-20mins thinking up a nice process for a workshop at a conference on Friday.. Creating the ideas was enjoyable and they flowed easily but I know the really hard part will be to make the design work - to sell the idea quickly and get people engaged and get them to use their creativity to invent, record and share their own designs.  That will be the hard part of creation. The other thing I realised afterwards was the way I thought about the problem 'can you put on a workshop on this theme? was something I could not have done a few months ago because I did not have the skills or experience to use the technology in the way I have. So turning imagination into practical reality is clearly constrained by the skills and experiences we have. Here is my workshop design.  to be continued after the workshop....

Post workshop - the session was not so hard because I put a lot of time and effort into preparing the resources - a web page with instructions and examples. My role then became one of motivating and time keeping. I think the session went well and it was well received by the participants. Some of the products are posted HERE

My activities this week have been mainly focused on three areas of my life - my family, my work (ChalkMountain book project) and LifewideEducation (launching our Award). 

1 Chalk Mountain - Last week I talked about how difficult it is sometimes to make a start. The chapter I have been writing has been a struggle over a long period of time. I put it off and put it off. I did bits here and there and generally hated doing it which is very unusual for me when the task involves writing. But eventually, when I couldn't put it off any longer, and having missed my own deadline twice, I did knuckle down and did it and the result was okay. At least it got us to the stage where we can see where to go next with it. This was in complete contrast to the experience I had writing another chapter the week before which was a joy and just flowed from my mind... I am not sure I learnt much from this struggle but I did get valuable feedback on both chapters which means I can now shape them to make a better fit with what the institution wants.. So the learning is reinforcing what I already know about the need for feedback in order to produce work that is useful.

 2 Lifewide Education - My biggest achievement this week was to launch the Lifewide Development Award on the 28/09. I spent time preparing a slide show for the introductory talk and gave the talk to students on the MA Human Resources Management course at Southampton Solent University. I have worked for a long time to reach this moment and done much work to create the guidance and the website infrastructure. It gave me a real sense of satisfaction in talking about what we are doing and explaining the strong positive ideas that underpin the practice.

 'Making' the slide show was enjoyable and I felt creative. It  resulted in some useful materials to help me explain the background, purposes,  structure, process and tools underlying the scheme. I realise that this slideshow is an important tool and I can see how I might produce a podcast for the  website from the materials. I think this was an example of 'learning by making  a tool'. It's always hard to judge what participants are thinking but my sense is that they found it interesting and I am hoping they will want to participate.

 In putting the materials together I came across the old African proverb - it takes a village to raise a child and recognised the wisdom in this and its value to LWE as a concept. It is a great metaphor for thecommunity-based enterprise that will have to underlie the Award if it is to be successful.  I'm delighted that the on-line Community Forum I established two weeks ago is working really well and I hope that we can draw in the learners to share their experiences.
 
3 My third area of activity relates to my family.. At the weekend my wife and I took our daughter to university. Not surprisingly she was  apprehensive and anxious moving away from home for the first time.  We had prepared her as best we could and she had prepared herself by spending three weeks in France - her first independent holiday. After an emotional farewell we left her to get on with it. A week later she tells us how hard it's been - surprisingly she is 'having to juggle loads of things' and
'it's been so frustrating spending three days trying to get logged on to the university system' and 'everywhere is so big and it's easy to get lost' and 'the buses don't come and I spent an hour waiting for one in the rain'. This is why
going to university is good for you - it's a nice (protected) wake up call to the real world after years of timetabled familiarity..

My oldest daughter is very much in the real world with one child of 5 and two month old twins and a husband in America.. So I spent some time trying to help.. I was even left for 2 hours by myself with them - that was quite an experience and only filled me even more with admiration.  But at least I can feed them both at the same time now and I am growing in confidence and experience of how to look after them.. Incidentally, she is also two thirds through on OU degree trying to
fit in the assignments around babies and no sleep.. Its quite humbling...

 So an interesting week in which I think I have achieved in three areas of my development plan..

Learning in passing -I clicked a Linked-In Learning without Frontiers  link to a blog by Gaurav Gupta http://agoodschool.blogspot.co.uk and discovered a lovely little blog site called the Good School site..In it I
found the it takes a village to raise a child proverb and I contacted the writer (an Indian) with an invitation to write a short piece for Lifewide Magazine which he is doing.. I feel its a good example of useful knowledge and relationships emerging by just following links.

 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!!!!

PROGRESS REPORT 20/04/12
Another take on fostering creativity in others.. Following TA's progress principle (my blog  17 March) I now try to provide regular updates to show the team how much progress we are making with our lifewide education project. Earlier this week I thought we weren't making much progress but things seemed to come together today. I agree with teressa if you feel good about what you are doing and then throw yourself into the enterprise.

So here is my progress report...

RSA Catalyst grant bid - still awaiting outcome.. I judge our chances 50:50 Russ and Jenny are now Fellows so there are three of us and perhaps we could organise an event just for Fellows who might be interested in what we are doing.

Summer Newsletter - Jenny has done an excellent job again and we have some great pieces - thanks Jenny. Today I received a really good piece from two Harvard Professor. Its great to think we are attracting such distinguished people.

Twitter seminars - Nick has come up trumps with a really good idea for a series of twitter seminars. I particularly like it because it will 1) help us engage our 200 members 2) help us move outside our membership  3) it wont cost us anything.

E-book - Brian has been busy sorting out guidance for authors and we have written a short introduction. Nathan has agreed to design a book cover and I have applied for an ISSN number. I have also finished a first draft of chapter 1 which I hope to circulate to you next week after a bit more work. Our target for publication is May 15th. Harvey Brough has chapter 2 well in hand and I think it will be a cracker. My hope is that we can publish a Chapter 1 month for the first 6 months to get it established then ease off to 1 every 6-8weeks.

Possible HE partner  I have sounded out the Director of Solent University Business School with a view to involving her and the School in developing the Learning Partnership scheme with some of her students. She is very enthusiastic and for all sorts of reasons I think this would be a good uni to work with.

 China conference - I have written my paper for the Creativity in Higher Education conference in Chengdu. Its called Developing Personal Creativity through Lifewide Education and I will use it to take the ideas into a different sort of audience.  Eventually, it can become a chapter in the e-book.

PLEASE ADD ANY OTHER THINGS THAT WE CAN CELEBRATE