When we launched LWE two years ago one of our goals was to support the people working in HE who are helping learners develop themselves through all their experiences. Our ambition was to try to bring people together to share their experiences and perspectives. Last week we ran our first ever conference  in at Birkbeck College London - so our Learning Lives conference  enabled us to achieve an important goal that we set out at the start of our existence.

Overall I felt the conference was a success - we attracted 65 people, we broke even on the costs, the contributors created an attractive programme and participants seemed to enjoy the day. They engaged and interacted well and their feedback to me was positive.

But in achieving the goal you realise that a conference is a process not an event. For the organisers it requires planning, designing, organising and promoting over a long period of time. It requires relationships to be made with people who are contributing and conversations about the nature of the contributions. It requires new infrastructures to be developed like the conference website.

For the contributors it requires them to invest time and effort in preparing their talks so that their personal knowledge can be shared in the most engaging way in the short time that is available.

For those who attend it involves engaging in the unfolding narrative and contributing their own stories to the narrative. In this modern age participants also play an important role in broadcasting through twitter the things that they find interesting so that others might learn.

So a conference is much more than an event. It is a tremendous collaborative, collegial, value-based effort that benefits not only the participants who are involved in the event but many people who we will never know who will access and make use of the resources we have created in future. 

A flavour of the conference can be gained from the conference tweets 
@lifewider
#lifewideeducation

I was also pleased with the design of the Magazine cover which I had worked on with Kiboko... Although he had come up with the basic design I was able to influence the content which was formed around the idea of building knowledge to make a cake! 

But the most significant thing I did was begin building a new learning ecology to develop knowledge for  a talk I'm giving in November... Its still about 3 months off but I know how slow these processes can be. I want to find about the ways in which educational developers view their creativity in relation to their development work.  I decided to keep a record of my process to help me recognise and define my learning ecology. 

MY LOG
09/08
1    Wrote an abstract for the conference cannibalising an abstract I had         written but committing myself to a new theme that I new I had to  research
2  Already in email conversation with JC invited him to be my first subject
3  Created a rough plan for gaining knowledge and interacting with people




4   Spent some time searching using google scholar for obvious resources - eg 'relationship between creativity and development' 'creativity and educational development' - found nothing
5   Began compiling a list of educational developers I knew who I would  approach
6    Went on SEDA website and began searching through the journals for names of  educational developers who had written articles for Educational Developments.
7   Began thinking of social networks that I might engage and designed a simple  enquiry which I posted in two Linked-In networks.  'If, as Enrico Coen claims, 'creativity is a developmental process and development is a creative process,' then the two concepts are inextricably linked. What aspects of your development work cause you to use your creativity and how do you develop through this process? I  will happily produce a summary of any contributions.'
8   In email conversation with an e-portfolio developer KC invited her to contribute an interview. - she agreed

The actions with JC and KC showed that I was trying to engage people who I was already engaged with. The invitations I sent to talk to me about the role of their creativity in development caused me to think about the questions I would ask them. 

In my google search I discovered a review of Enrico Coen's which included an idea that was central to what I wanted to explore 'creativity is a developmental process and development is a creative process'. I formed my central research question around this.

In the context of your work as a developer in the field of education - What is the relationship between your creativity,  your development work and your own development?

15/08  
1) A chance email on the SEDA maillist mentioning an educational developer by name led to me contacting her by email to invite her to share her views. This required me to formulate an email enquiry.. Once this had been done I was more confident in contacting people.
2) I decided to cast my net more widely (internationally) and designed an email questionnaire. I googled educational developer blogs and found a number of contacts in the USA, Australia and Canada and contacted them speculatively..
3) Returning to Linked-in I spent several hours searching for 'educational developers'. I ended up with a list of twenty many of whom I knew and wrote a personalised email to each inviting them to share their perspectives through my simple questionnaire.

16/08 
This morning I had one reply to my enquiry with a set of responses and then another really interesting email from someone I had not seen for over 13 years indicating that they were very interested in a conversation. I replied at leangth.

TO BE CONTINUED

Reflections on my learning ecology:  With reference to my tool for visualising the components of a learning ecology. I had a context (a problem or challenge in my working life), I had the will and my decision to act was driven by a concern for the amount of time I had left to do the work. I used my imagination to create a rough plan of how I would proceed. I used my capability and knowledge of unstructured enquiry processes to make a start and trusted that what I sought would emerge. I made good use of google and Linked-in (especially) and used my existing knowledge resources derived from my work on creativity and how people bring about change in universities, I also used my knowledge of people I knew of who were involved in educational development. I used my existing relationships - making it a more personal and more natural engagement and more likely that the people I was interacting with would respond. I tried to personalise all my email communications. Results are limited so far but because I trust my process and believe that people will see the value and be interested in the outcomes - I believe that the information and insights I need will flow.

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 European Commission Call for Visionary Papers on the Future of Open Education. It was one of those opportunities that came out of the blue.. It was the Monday four days before I was going to China and I had a lot of things to do when I suddenly came across an email from the Future of Learning Linked in group saying that there was a call for vision papers. I knew I had to go for it so I immediately put together a one page summary of an idea for an EU-wide Lifewide Development Award and sent it off to some of the members of the team I thought might be interested. All replied quickly in an encouraging way and I gained some very useful feedback. I set about crafting a short six page paper and by Wednesday, in spite of everything else I had to do, I had the basic content, again I circulated for comment and again I got back some useful feedback with a couple of pointers that helped me refine what I had written. I banged it off to the organisers and went off to China. While I was there I got an email saying thanks for your paper which was quickly followed by another saying that the paper was considered to be one of the winning entries and I have been invited to a workshop in Seville at the end of April. So what do I learn from this? It reinforces my view that opportunities emerge and you have to a) in some way be connected to them b) be able to recognise them c) be able to respond to them. The latter may not be easy given that generally we are always busy with other things but if you miss the chance you might not get another.  So hopefully good things will come from this opportunity.All the papers can be viewed at http://blogs.ec.europa.eu/openeducation2030/vision-papers-on-open-education-2030-part-1-lifelong-learning/

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