It's Saturday morning and I was doing my housework when I started a conversation with my son. I'd had an idea for one of the sessions in our forthcoming conference and I wanted to sound him out -  it was around the question why? Why would anyone invest time and effort in engaging in their own lifewide learning, and put intellectual effort into trying to understand it by planning it, paying attention to it, recording it and analysing it?  I sat down in my rubber gloves and we considered the idea through his own experience at university and then moved to more general perspectives. His reasons for doing the things he did while at university were driven by his intrinsic motivations particular his interests to make the most of the opportunities he had to develop himself. He didn't do things outside his course to gain any sort of recognition but because the opportunity was there for recognition he took it.

It made me think of my reasons for why I consciously engage in my own lifewide learning are motivated by interest but also a belief that by acting as an advocate I am doing something worthwhile and of potential value to others. By coincidence that afternoon I got involved in an email conversation with John Cowan and I asked him the why? question. His  reply "the reason I engage in LWL is neatly summed up by Emerson:  "Do not go where the path may lead.  Go instead where there is no path, and leave a trail."  My motive is not and has not been to leave a trail.  It is to find, explore and enjoy things which are new to me at least. for without that, life would have been totally stale." This seems a nice way to frame the why but it seems to emphasise only the intrinsic value to self rather than the value to others of what you are doing.

I was  intrigued to explore 'why we do what we do' a bit more so I spent a bit of time googling and found a nice summary by Anthony Robbins. He claims that there six fundamental human needs that everyone shares namely:
1. Certainty: assurance you can avoid pain and gain pleasure
2. Uncertainty/Variety: the need for the unknown, change, new stimuli
3. Significance: feeling unique, important, special or needed - drawing meaning from life
4. Connection/Love: a strong feeling of closeness or union with someone or something
5. Growth: an expansion of capacity, capability or understanding
6. Contribution: a sense of service and focus on helping, giving to and supporting others

Looking at the important things I do in my life I can see that these reasons provide many of the answers to the why question although the blend and balance of reasons is different in different aspects and at different times. These answers to why are the reasons that drive our learning ecologies and ultimately they lead to our deep sense of fulfilment when we believe that we are achieving in some way our purposes.

Returning to the question 'why would anyone invest time and effort in engaging in their own lifewide learning, and put intellectual effort into trying to understand it by planning it, paying attention to it, recording it and analysing it?  My son felt that the answer to this would be different for everyone but that the answer would be the driver for their involvement. Perhaps the most valuable aspect of engaging in a learning conscious way with your own lifewide learning is to explore the why question in each significant aspect of your life

As if to reinforce this message I received a linked-in notification yesterday to the well known TED talk by Simon Sinek  on the theme of 'people don't buy what you do they buy why you do it'. Why is as important in business as it is in the rest of life.

Tony Robbins blog
http://training.tonyrobbins.com/the-6-human-needs-why-we-do-what-we-do/

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

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

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

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

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

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

I had another experience of  'slogging' this week. One of my development projects on behalf of my family and my ancestors! is to try and construct our family history. I began by recording some conversations with my mum and dad. They are now approaching 90 and they are able to recollect their childhoods and the stories they were told about their families. I turned this into what I hope will be the first chapter of a family history that my siblings and my children can carry on developing. I then turned to Ancestry.com thanks to the generosity of my sister who bought a subscription. Over the last couple of months I have spent a lot of time (probably far too much)  slogging away at the various records that can be accessed. Sadly many of my ancestors were called Thomas Jackson and they lived in Manchester and that generates an awful lot of possibilities. So far I haven't even got my grandfathers birth certificate. But using my imagination and I hope reasoning power I have fabricated a lineage going back to the 1790's. It might of course all be wrong but the point of my story is that in slogging through the records this week for probably the best part of  6 hours and feeling very frustrated because I wasn't making any progress, I suddenly found a record that seemed to fit and push me back another generation. The joy that came from this moment of seeming to make progress out of this tedious search was enormous and it was a real boost to my morale causing me to stay with it for much longer than I intended. So out of slogging can come reward and satisfaction as a bit more of a problem seems to be resolved and out of these moments progress is made and potential solutions emerge that would not have happened without the slogging because the information or idea is deeply buried within the quest. So slogging away at something may be deeply dissatisfying but it is the pathway to discovery and achievement.

And yet one more example of emergence today. I had an email from a talented illustrator I had worked with in the past. It was a speculative email enquiring about possible work opportunities. I emailed back to open up a conversation about a possible role as an artist in residence at our forthcoming conference. Over 3 or 4 emails I tried to draw him in. I could see he was interested and he eventually agreed. I was delighted and immediately created a new web page to host information about our two artists. I then spent the best part of two hours creating a new explee animation to show off his work. It was both enjoyable and I felt creative and I was pleased with the result. There was no way that I could have anticipated this activity in advance of it happening. It emerged through interactions in my work ecology and being able to create opportunity for someone else to apply their talents to a new situation that they found appealing.

The creativity in development project focuses attention on the way creativity emerges through individuals' development processes but this week I have experienced very little creativity as I slogged away reading and editing contributions to an e-book. But 'creating' the e-book is a really important part of  our developmental strategy and giving feedback on each draft manuscript is essential to helping the contributors develop their piece. 

The experience caused me to reflect on the role of 'slogging' - in developmental processes.  To slog is to keep doing something even though it is difficult or boring. Slogging involves working on something in a steady, determined, methodical and often repetitive way. It also implies that progress is slow and perhaps laborious, in contrast to starting something new which is full of enjoyment or finishing something where there is a sense of achievement and fulfilment.

When you start something your imagination is engaged and you think freely and adventurously about the what it is you want to do. You feel energised as you put the building blocks in place like new relationships, infrastructure or the making of tools and you see a lot of progress in a short space of time. But after this initial excitement there is often a much longer period of 'slog', when you just have to knuckle down to work that is more systematic and routine and is perhaps not so interesting and exciting, but which is absolutely necessary for the success of the project. Slogging is often the way you complete something that you started and its where most of the effort and least of the reward resides.

Every significant developmental process has elements of slogging within it and the harder and more challenging it is the more slog there is. In fact for some development projects perhaps 80 or 90% of the time can be categorised as a slog. Slogging away at something requires persistence and determination and focus. It's easy to get distracted when you are in slogging mode. I recognise the symptoms of continuously looking for things to do other than the things that I should be working on - including writing this piece.

So how do I deal with this need to slog in a development process? The first strategy I use is to convince myself that it has to be done, not tomorrow or the next day but now, and the best way of doing this is to publicly commit to a timeline. Another strategy is to break the job that needs doing into smaller bits and set a target - I'm going to do these things by this time. The third thing I do is reward myself by taking a break and doing more interesting things when I have done a certain amount of slogging. My daughter who has been revising solidly for her mock GCSE's for several weeks became very adept in this technique. The fourth thing I do is periodically make a list of what I have done so I can see the progress I have actually made.

But even when we are slogging we can still be inspired if we are able to notice the right things. I watch my daughter, who is a mum to three young children including 18 month old twins... slogging away day after day. It's a good word to describe the daily routines she undertakes. I know it's hard work because I look after the twins one day a week.. The only thing she ever complains about is not having enough sleep and the effect that this has on her ability to perform her motherly duties the next day. The way she approaches her tasks  teaches me how to extract pleasure and joy from the many moments that emerge when you are looking after children if you approach them positively and imaginatively, and you look for the good and interesting things to emerge. She is a master at turning  the repetitive and mundane into joyful experience. And I guess this is where the inner motivation to sustain herself resides as well as the sense of purpose, duty and responsibility for the care and wellbeing of her children. I guess the reward for all the slogging involved in bringing up young children is to see them learn and develop so that they are able to do the things they need to be able to do to be successful in life.

Perhaps we derive different psychological benefits from starting something and slogging through it. Starting gives us the motivational force derived from visions and being able to see a different future while slogging enables us to build resolve and determination to secure that future. Looking back over the last few days I didn't feel at all creative and perhaps there is little in the way of opportunity for creativity when you are slogging away at something. But one thing is certain, while creativity is essential to the success of a development project so is slogging. Please share your experiences and insights of slogging in the development process.

I suppose it's inevitable as we come to the end of year that we look back on it. This year has been particularly eventful with my daughter's wedding, serious illness in the family, visits to family in Australia and visits from family in Iran and many other smaller events and achievements that connect us as a family in interesting and unpredictable ways.

This reflective mood encouraged me to think of the idea of development in the context of being part of a family. It seems to me that development is an important process for keeping the family together and for continually engaging members of the family in the process of nurturing or enabling the development of its members sometimes by design but often as a consequence of the way life unfolds.

Development as a family comes from sharing experiences good or bad and participating in and talking about small and significant events and people so that members of the family develop a shared sense of history and belonging. This was brought home to me recently as I interviewed my mother and father who are in their late 80's in order to record the story of their early life growing up in Manchester in the 1920's and 30's. One reason for doing this was to provide our family with a clearer sense of our history the detail of which will be forgotten when they are no longer with us. In fact the stories that parents tell about us and our childhood are one way in which we can appreciate our own development.

Development as a family manifests itself in what we do to, with and for each other, the sacrifices that are made and the willingness to take on rather than avoid family commitments regardless of cost. In a well functioning and caring family everyone is involved in developing themselves - to be better parents/grandparents, spouses, workers, students etc.. and often for others - children, grandchildren, siblings or the children of siblings.

A year in the life of a large family inevitably contains many events some of which cannot be predicted in advance. This year the serious illness of one family member completely disrupted our plans yet brought us together to support each other. We are all different and more empathic having had this challenging experience but we would have never wished for such an experience.

Development is easiest to see in the youngest members of the family for example my youngest grandson was born exactly a year ago and in the space of a year he has grown from a tiny helpless baby into a little boy able to walk and let you know what he wants and doesn't want to do. But another grandson shows me that not all babies are able to develop at such a pace if they are born with conditions that affect their physical and cognitive development.  Their measures of progress are smaller and much harder to see and harder for them to accomplish. Nevertheless when witnessed they bring much joy and hope for a better future.

Formal learning has an important role to play in the development of a child. A year ago my six year old grandson was a hesitant and reluctant reader. Thanks to the efforts of his mum and school he is now a fluent reader willing to search for and read the books that interest and inspire him opening up a world that is not accessible to those who cannot read. While they are at school or university our children's developmental processes are mostly hidden from us - we gain insights when we see them doing their homework or more intensely when they revise. My youngest daughter is revising intensively for her mock GCSE's at the moment - it's a serious arduous task and she is far more engaged than I ever was at  her age.

As parents we encourage our children to develop their interests beyond the classroom - we want them to have friends and be confident socially, to enjoy and engage in sport, to join clubs and societies, have hobbies and be aware of the world around them. We are happy when they want to get involved but are disappointed when they do not use the opportunities they have and sometimes we pressurise them into doing things that we believe are for their own good. We push and pull, reason and cajole, and sometimes just insist in what we believe is for the greater good of encouraging development that will help and enable our children to be happy, fulfilled and successful in the future. Sometimes these actions result in tensions as our children let us know that this is not what they want to do.

Perhaps our creative involvement as parents in these forms of development is in the success we have in enabling our children to discover things that interest them that they value rather than imposing on them what interests us and what we value. I learnt this the hard way: the fact that I was a geologist seemed to be a burden when I tried to interest my three children in the geology at our feet when we were on holiday. I carried on behaving like this with my three step children. I failed to interest any of them in something I was passionate about but when one of them became fascinated in archaeology he reluctantly admitted that he could see the parallels and could see why I was interested in it!

So our involvement in our own children's development must balance the aspirations we have for them and the need for our children to discover for themselves their own purposes and ambitions and create their own intrinsic motivations for pursuing what they value. There comes a point in this familial developmental process where we start thinking that our children must do things for themselves. For several years we tried to encourage our son to learn to drive. Thanks to friends who were willing to give him lifts and the absence of a need while at university to drive he put it off until he suddenly realised he needed it in order to get a particular job. So he paid for his own lessons and after three goes he passed his driving test. We all rejoiced at the new freedom's this act of development afforded but it only came about when his need created the desire for him to persist until he had achieved this goal.

Most personal development goes on unseen, unrecorded and unrecognised. It just goes on and on as our children grow into the people we hope and they want to become. As parents we rejoice when we think our children are moving in a direction that we think holds promise but despair when they make decisions that we don't think will lead to anything of value.

All too often we forget that much of our own learning was through the experience of trying - regardless of whether something worked out or not. Perhaps this is the hardest lesson in the family development process letting our children make their own mistakes - and being ready to help them when they do. And it can be painful process. There are times when our children develop us in directions that we do not want to go. At times we may have to compromise our beliefs in order to maintain the relationships that make up a family. Above all we have to trust that they will find their own way and make the decisions that are right for them in their circumstances.

So the continuous process of creating and recreating family is a never ending developmental process in which all members are involved for themselves and for others.

I suppose it's inevitable as we come to the end of year that we look back on the year. It sort of emerges through the process of receiving Christmas cards as friends and family send their circular newsletters recounting the significant events in their life. We never produce a letter but we do have family conversations looking back over the year, and the same thing happens when you meet up with friends who you haven't seen for a while. This year has been particularly eventful with a wedding, serious illnesses, visits to family in Australia and visits from family in Iran and many other smaller events and achievements that connect us as a family in interesting and unpredictable ways.

This reflective mood is also triggered when I make myself take stock of the progress we have made with Lifewide Education. A year in the life of a project is a significant chunk of time to think about and evaluate the effects of trying to turn ideas into reality.

During the year our community of interest grew steadily and we currently have around 320 registered members. We maintained our existing websites and our presence on Facebook, Linked-in and Twitter and we added our Values Exchange website which enables us to be part of a global network of Vx sites concerned with values and ethics in education. It also gives us new capacity to undertake on-line surveys.  Since April we have undertaken four surveys. It has proved to be particularly useful in engaging people before an event so that the results of the survey can be utilised in the presentations - for example a keynote presentation at the annual SEDA conference was formed around the results of a survey into creativity in educational development.

Under the editorial stewardship of Jenny Willis, we produced four issues of LIfewide Magazine each dedicated to a theme that enabled us to add new knowledge and understanding to our lifewide concept. Brian Cooper's diligent editing enabled us to publish  eleven chapters in our Lifewide Education E-Book - including conceptual reviews and syntheses on wellbeing and learning ecologies, moving biographical accounts of lifewide learning, research into wellbeing and learning ecologies and overviews of lifewide learning in universities and colleges. Our research and scholarship has focused primarily on examining the idea and perceptions of wellbeing and developing and applying the concept of learning ecologies to individuals' learning and development processes, work that will continue through the coming year.

We also developed further our tools for supporting lifewide learning and my daughter (one of our student volunteers) helped us pilot our approach and successfully completed the Lifewide Development Award (LDA) providing future learners with an example of an on-line portfolio of recorded learning and development. We also explored the idea of Open Badges and we are now introducing them in the current stage of piloting. We are working with Christine Fountain at Southampton Solent University's Business School with students on the HR Management masters course to examine the ways in which the LDA might be incorporated into the learning experiences of students.

Members of the team contributed to, and or participated in a total of ten conferences in the UK and overseas. In June, after submitting a paper outlining the idea of an EU-wide Lifewide Development Award I was invited to participate in an EU Foresight workshop by the research group who support development of EU educational policy. This was the first time that LWE has been invited to share our views in a close to policy forum. Through our involvement in conferences we have formed new relationships have with people who are sympathetic to lifewide learning in Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, China and Argentina.  Ultimately, our future lies in the relationships we form with the people who want to promote and implement lifewide learning in their own educational and learning contexts.

Periodically taking stock of where you have got to in any project is a necessary and important aspect of the development process. It helps you maintain that sense of wellbeing knowing that you have tried to fulfil your purposes. Looking back enables you to take pride in achievements and develop a better and more realistic perspective on what has been accomplished so that questions of what to do next become clearer. 

Documenting achievements makes public the ways in which you have lived your life according to the purposes and goals you have established. Publishing our annual review so that the community can appreciate the hard work and contributions that many individuals have made enables the members of the team to gain the credit they deserve. None of the things we have achieved in 2013 would have been possible without the help, support and encouragement of a wonderful group of volunteers and the generous financial support of our corporate sponsor Chalk Mountain Education and Media Services. 

Kiboko's latest illustration sums conveys well the way in which the achievements and experiences of the past year provides the launchpad for the future.The coming year will inevitably bring with it new challenges and opportunities which we can face with confidence.  In March we will achieve another of our ambitions - to host our first national conference on lifewide learning and education in universities and colleges and publish a new E-book on lifewide learning and education in universities and colleges.

It's a grey November Friday afternoon. Although I've had quite a pleasant and productive day and I really have no reason to be fed up, I am a little because I'm wondering what I will say in my blog this week. I was not impressed with my own ideas and didn't feel motivated. I kept updating my email which is always a sure sign that something isn't write and I'm looking for something to emerge.

I even followed a link to the Linked in Learning without Frontiers forum and clicked on a link to a truly inspiring TED talk by Henry Evans - it changed my perspective on something that has bothered me for a long time. What value and meaning does the idea of lifewide learning have for people who are physically not able to interact with the world around them? Henry opened up a whole new way of seeing how technology assists people who are severely disabled so that their opportunities for interacting with the world and enjoying and learning from their experiences is greatly expanded.

At age 40, Henry Evans was left mute and quadriplegic after a stroke-like attack caused by a hidden birth defect. Years of therapy helped him learn to move his head and use a finger -- which allows him to use a head-tracking device to communicate with a computer using experimental interfaces.

Now, Henry is a frequent and enthusiastic collaborator with robotics teams who are developing tools to help the severely disabled navigate their lives. He collaborates with Georgia Tech professor Charlie Kemp on using the Willow Garage PR2 robot as a surrogate, as well as Chad Jenkins' RLAB at Brown on quadrotors for expanding range of motion.

As the Willow Garage blog post says: "Every day, people take for granted the simple act of scratching an itch. In Henry's case, 2-3 times every hour of every day he gets an itch he can't scratch. With the aid of a PR2, Henry is able to scratch an itch for himself for the first time in 10 years."

Towards the end of his talk Henry says something that really gives hope to everyone who is unable to directly experience the world themselves.

'With this drone setup, we show the potential for bedridden people to once again be able to explore the outside world, and robotics will eventually provide a level playing field where one is only limited by their mental acuity and imagination, where the disabled are able to perform the same activities as everyone else, and perhaps better, and technology will even allow us to provide an outlet for many people who are presently considered vegetables.'

Thank you Henry you have given me new hope for my own disabled grandson.

The marks on this garage door record the growth of a family- more specifically the changes in height over time of grandchildren and some great grandchildren recorded over the 27 years that my parents have lived in this house after they retired to Narrawallee in New South Wales. My own children's heights were recorded on that door when we visited in 1993, 2003 and 2005. My parents are quite old now, approaching 90, and they are preparing to move to somewhere more manageable - so the door will eventually be painted over and this unique record of family history will be lost. There are of course other ways to record our histories like the photographs on the walls and in the albums or our computers, and in the stories that our parents tell about us. But when they are gone and the family photo albums are dispersed there is no repository for family history and knowledge about the members of the family gets dispersed to the branches of the family and much of it will be lost.

The loss of key family members diminishes the knowledge we have about ourselves, or our children. I have become more and more aware of this as I have got older. In 1999 when my wife Jill died of cancer one of the things I grieved for was the loss of our family history. All the little events in the lives of our children that were memorable to her that she had stored away and was able to tell in the way that only she could do because it had been her experience and her memory that had captured those moments.

I read somewhere that as parents we are not only the archive of memory of our children's passage through early life, and of our own childhood that provides them with a deeper sense of who they are, the digital age has made us custodians of our children's digital record until such time that they need to take it over. To this end I have begun to set up a family website and to digitise our hard copy photographs. It's going to be a big job but it's one I feel is my duty to undertake.

But I have also come to realise, for example through Jill's passing, that histories are not just snapshots of life they are stories containing the meanings we construct around them. Meaningful stories are as important as our genes in transmitting who we are and how we have become who we are. So now that I have more time, I have taken it upon myself to record my mother and father's stories about their lives as audio files and as a transcribed text so that more of our history is preserved. I have made a good start and I think that they are pleased to have their stories written down.

On my visit in 2013 I have found this place holds so many memories - the house and garden, the beach and the journey here - some are happy and some are sad. But listening to my parents talk again about their lives I have been inspired to spend some time researching my father's family going back in time as far as I can. It looks as if our roots lie in Scotland and Ireland on both sides of the family. The second is to set down my own story, at least that part I am willing to tell, and I have made a good start while I am here.

As I write this another idea is emerging from my thoughts that there must be lots of people who are reaching my age who would perhaps like to record their parent's histories or tell their own life stories. Helping people create such personal records would be a worthwhile thing to do so perhaps there is a role for me to play and a business to create?

I'm writing this blog on my way to Australia. With my head full of the bright sunlight of 35,000 feet. The last week has been a bit frantic as I got ready for my trip but nothing cIompared to the traumas of last week when the twins were quite poorly in hospital. Thankfully they are both well now and I had a lovely day looking after them rejoicing in their 'wellness'. In fact they provide the stimulus for my reflections this week which are focused on learning trajectories - which I touched on in my writing for the Creativity in Development e-book. I have watched them grow and develop from premature babies 16 months ago but they are developing at very different rates because one has global development delay. It brings home quite starkly what happens when the natural process of development is disturbed and I have to ask myself what does lifewide development mean in such circumstances.

All of our thinking and development work to date has focused on fully functioning people, and mainly young people who are already well developed and mature in their developmental outlook. Michael Eraut used the term trajectory to describe the developmental pathways we create for ourselves but others influence as we journey through our lives. He developed the idea in the context of his extended studies of how people learn through their work but they are relevant to any facet of life and therefore are relevant to lifewide learning and development. Michael talks about development being a function of the opportunities we have for experiences that will enable us to fulfil particular roles and tasks and in that process develop ourselves, on the assumption that we have the capability to occupy the role. The absence of opportunity, over a sustained period leads to regression of capability.  Conversely, we need to create particular types of opportunity for ourselves in order to progress along the developmental trajectories we aspire.

As I watch the twins I can see that one is able to create opportunity for himself as he plays and explores his surroundings because he has attained a certain capability, while the other twin, who has no mobility, is much more dependent on those near to him to provide opportunity and to help him lead a good life. And this in turn his making his mum develop herself in order to serve his needs. In this way their developmental trajectories are intertwined.  I am forced to wonder whether our approach to lifewide learning is only relevant to those people who are able to create their own opportunities for development.

I have just finished the second chapter I was writing on learning ecologies and during the final stages of writing another example of a learning ecology came to me when my daughter explained how she had tried to develop her communication skills while she was at university. During the last twelve months she participated in half a dozen activities that involved her in using different forms of communication and creating new relationships and networking - both friendships and professional relationships. Most of the experiences involved her putting herself into unfamiliar contexts knowing that it would afford her the opportunity to learn something new. Through  the whole process she has gained valuable insights into what she enjoys doing and what she is good at, and is motivated to explore further the potential of broadcasting as a career. She has also learnt the importance of forming professional relationships to gain the feedback she needs to improve herself.  Her narrative helped me complete the chapter by enabling me to connect the idea of learning ecologies to students' experiences while they are at university..

This week we published Lifewide Magazine on the theme of learning ecologists. Using a combination of mail lists and placements on discussion forum's I recon I distributed a notice to about 15,000 people. It will be very interesting to see who actually downloads the page. It will also be interesting to see if there are any unanticipated consequences.

The magazine can be accessed from this URL
http://www.lifewidemagazine.co.uk/