New developmental needs pop up all the time in life, some of them are driven by interests and curiosity and some are forced on us. For example, this week my laptop suddenly packed up.  It was Monday morning  and I had just started to prepare a presentation. There was a bit of a crunching noise and then a few minutes later the screen went black. I tried to restart it a few times but it went off after a few seconds. All sorts of things go through your mind but the main one is the possible ‘loss’ of all that stuff on the hard disc. This is quickly followed by - 'I wish I'd backed it up recently'.



After complaining loudly to anyone who would listen to me. I put my coat on and took it to our local computer man - Keith who can fix anything. He wasn’t there but his kind assistant went through his routine examination and concluded the fan had gone. It could be repaired for a tidy sum but it should work again.. I was much relieved.

I have another computer a MacBook Pro which I have hardly used and this became the focus for my development this week. Now others have told me how hard they have found learning to use the Mac so I was forewarned.  Everything felt unfamiliar and everything took so long to figure out. I had a deep sense of lacking basic knowledge. I know I have developed a lot of knowledge about PC's over the two decades of working with them and perhaps I assumed that this would transfer easily to the Mac. Most of it did but every so often I would discover that I didn't know how to do something. On the Mac I lacked the skill to do some very basic things, like take a screen shot and re-find my safari short cut when it suddenly disappeared off the bottom navigation bar! The absence of right click and the need to use the top navigation bar all the time felt ponderous and I had to unlearn this procedure.  This carried on like for the rest of the week. I struggled to do tasks that I normally accomplished easily on my old laptop. Even trying to save things in the right folder, or create a new folder to save something in, took time to work out. I noticed that I wasn’t very patient with myself. Instead of thinking - oh this is great I'm finally learning how to use the Mac
I was quite negative and angry about the experience. (Actually there were other things going on like the boiler not working and being cold and having no hot water that added to this mood!).

I have now been using it for a few days and I’m getting better and its obvious that I know more about how the Mac works and I can do more things now than I could a few days ago. I know how to access my emails, I can edit my website and find and upload images to it after downloading  adobe flash player. I activated my iTunes account and downloaded Garage Band and then did the first lesson for piano. And did some Christmas shopping on line. I have more or less completed my presentation in powerpoint but was stopped from copying slides from one presentation to another with an error message I still don't understand. Not much but it’s a start. Even though I know I have learnt something nothing felt creative. In fact quite the opposite I felt unable to do certain things so my creativity was thwarted.  So I guess this bit of personal development is just about acquiring some basic competency before I can do anything creative. I've now got my laptop back and the challenges will be to persist with my Mac and carry on using it.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

weekly report to myself

https://www.50things.org.uk/

I went for a walk with my daughter and grandson on Box Hill.. It was wet and very windy and quite bracing.. my grandson ran around quite wild as the wind took his breath away... Afterwards we went to the cafe for a hot drink and I picked up the National Trust leaflet called  '50 things to do before you are 11 & 3/4'. It's a brilliant approach to encouraging lifewide activity, through which children (and their parents) can learn and develop, and a  great way to encourage kids to explore the world and to talk about their adventures. Perhaps there is something in the approach that we could adapt for our lifewide development award. Could we perhaps use it as a design tool to encourage people to create a  list of 10 new things to do during 2013 as a personal goal?


Postscript: I signed up as a learner and periodically I receive email prompts with suggestions of things I might do reflecting the time of year we are in..

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

 





Here is my completed log for the week

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

I have been experimenting with twitter and discovered that the 140 characters were very restrictive. In the past I linked any substantial and personal thoughts to my blog but I decided that this was inappropriate. So I set up a scrapbook which allows me to record my thoughts on specific topics. It is effectively an extension of this blog. The first topic I used it for was the Olympics.   http://lifewidescrapbook.weebly.com/

There is nothing quite like experiencing a new place for bringing home to you the importance of place and space in determining who you are and I have always thought that travel, especially if it involves going somewhere you have never been before, can fundamentally change your understanding about the world

I have just spent 5 days in Chengdu, a large city in the west of China, to attend a conference on creativity in higher education. I was met at the airport by two very likeable student volunteers who are studying English and translation studies at Sichuan University. By volunteering to meet and greet they felt they were enhancing their education. The plane was delayed so it was quite late when we arrived but I was greatly relieved to see them and they whisked me the hotel in the centre of the city and then helped me check in - which was great because I my room booking hadn't worked and the receptionist did not speak English. It required quite a lot of negotiation.

The city at night looked like any other city but I took a walk in the early morning rush hour and it is quite different to anywhere else I have been. We are on  a busy main road, 3 lanes in each direction and  tall grey concrete buildings on either side.  At 8am it was really bustling with traffic in all directions including bikes and motorbikes/scooters on the pavement. The sounds were like any city but the smells were different to anything I had experienced before, except perhaps for Chinatown in London. The people looked similar as they walked briskly to work or university, which is just next door to the hotel. One interesting thing I noticed was that the footbridges over the busy road did not have steps that had stepped ramps and then I realised these were to enable scooters to ride over them.

When I got back I went to breakfast determined to try the Chinese  cuisine. In fact, there was only Chinese cuisine. A long table with perhaps 30 dishes on it and many vegetables I had never seen before (there were no labels). I had a good go at trying about 15 of them I recon.. Only small amounts but enough to discover which I likes and which I didn't. Many of the tastes were familiar from the Chinese food I'd eaten before but a lot were alien to my taste buds - quite a lot were very bland or subtle depending on your point of view. What was also strange to me was sitting at large round tables with people who I didn't know. In English hotels we have small tables and you keep to your own space.

It does us good from time to time to experience a new place which is culturally very different from our own in order to remind us what it feels like to experience that sense of foreignness and inadequacy (because of an absence of language and cultural understanding), unfamiliarity and uncertainty because the context is so very different to what we know.

The conference itself was focused on how to bring about change in higher education so that it is more able to develop students' creative potential..with a strong focus on the reform of Chinese universities so that can prepare students so that they are more innovative.  I was an invited speaker and I was treated with great respect.  My presentation, on the afternoon of the first day on developing personal creativity through lifewide education seemed to be well received although the ideas were alien to many of the participants. When I reflect on the conference  I don't think I learnt very much about creativity - there was too much replication of existing ideas and not enough new ideas (for me). But I realise I wasn't there for me. I was there to play my part in sharing some of my ideas. And what really struck me was the enormous thirst for knowledge and new ideas that might form the basis for new strategies to help China move forward in the direction it has set itself.  I was delighted and honoured to be told that my book Developing creativity in higher education was being translated by students of the university as one of 10 books on creativity that have been selected to provide a starting point for creative scholarship and practice. 

So what did I learn? By being in Chengdu, by listening to the Sichuan University institutional leaders, talking to participants especially the students who did all the behind the scenes organisation and looked after participants individual needs, I felt I learnt a lot about Chinese higher education and what it was trying to accomplish. From the students I learnt what it was like to be a student and for a young person to live in China today. In other words my most important learning was contextual and relational.

I also learnt a lot about what is valued in Chinese culture. Throughout the conference the meals had been one of the highlights - Sichuan food is some of the most delicious food I have ever taken and it is a very social affair. We were also treated to some wonderful restaurants - some of which were in buildings constructed in a traditional way. Chengdu is full of wonderfully recreated old buildings that enable you to appreciate the past.

But the last day in Chengdu was very special. The university had provided us with a conducted tour of the city with an emphasis on giving us a flavour of their cultural heritage. The tour guide 'Bobby' was a brilliant and knowledgeable communicator -perhaps the most creative person I had met all week. Written on his T-short were the words There are two sorts of people in the world - those that entertain and those that observe.. he was most definitely in the first category.

We set off at 8.30am and he talked us through the day on the way to our first stop the Panda sanctuary about an hour out of the city where I expanded my knowledge of Panda's a thousand fold..and got some great photos.. 

Then it was back into the city for a wonderful traditional Sichuan lunch shared with the other participants on our day trip. - the wonderful multidish Sichuan 'snack'

After lunch we went to the most amazing museum built on the site of a 3000 year  old town - the Jinsha site museum. The architecture and the methods used to display the site will remain with me for ever... It was impossible not to be humbled by the creativity and craftsmanship and use of technology by these ancient people and at the same time be overwhelmed by the creativity in the architects' designs (apparently a graduate student who won an open competition, and the way artefacts had been displayed. I could not help but compare these concrete manifestations of creativity with our thinking and talking about it in an abstract way.   

After another splendid meal in the evening we went to the Sichuan opera and were treated to another cultural feast - including opera,  shadow shapes, Erhu music, drama, and costume/face changing.. all local traditions and very interesting.. Again I was struck by the enormous creative talent on display.

The audio file records some of the Chinese opera.

Postscript: At the end of my talk one of the participants asked me a question which I did not fully understand.. he was making a comment about the contribution of personal creativity to culture equating to the production of low culture... It was only after experiencing the things that I have described that I now understand what he was saying. I think he was saying that  personal creativity unless it is dedicated to contributing to a form of art or craft that is accepted as an important form of cultural reproduction will only ever produce/re-reproduce low cultural forms - popular culture.

My youngest daughter taught me a new concept today. She asked me to print an essay she had written and like any nosey parent I read it only asking for permission later! Here is a short extract.

...... I will be talking about what affects my idiolect - the different ways in which I speak to people in different situations. One of the main things I found affects what I say and how I say it is who I am talking to. For example, with my friends I would talk casually and on the same level as them, using more slang words like “yer” and “cos”, as well as lot of likes in my sentences, the same might be true when I am having a causal conversation with an adult I am confident and familiar with, like with my mum, I would probably use several of the same words that I would with my friends, for example I would use “yer” but maybe not use “like” as often. On the other hand if I am with an adult that I have not met before or I have to be respectful to whether I want to be or not, I would not use any slang at all and would have a more formal tone to the conversation. I do this because it is the way I have been brought up, unless an adult invites you to talk to them equally and on the same level, you always talk to them with respect, often  putting personal thoughts and opinions aside. In doing so I think it makes the adults think that I agree with what they are saying, which pleases them but irritates me.

I looked up the definition on wikepedia and it said..  In linguistics, an idiolect is a variety of language that is unique to a person, as manifested by the patterns of vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation that the person uses. As I thought about it I began to realise that our idiolect my must be an important feature of our lifewide learning. In the different spaces which we occupy we interact with different people and talk to them in different ways. Using my daughter as an example the way shoe talks to her friends at school or on skype or texting is very different to the way she talks to her parents and teachers, and is certainly different to the way she talks to other adult when they visit us. Each life space creates different situations and spoken language is an essential feature of the situations in those life spaces.

Perhaps as adults we have less variation in our idiolect..but there again the language / jargon we use in work situations, or the way we speak to different people in the work environment depending on the relationships we have and their organisational role, bosses versus colleagues for example are likely to be different to the way we talk to our wives, brothers and sisters, children, grandchildren, friends....

So I'm very grateful to my daughter for drawing my attention to something I havent really thought about before in the context of lifewide learning.

I made a mistake. We had commissioned an artist to provide some illustrations. I thought they were not very imaginative. passed them to the author who also felt they weren't very good. I suggested that she sends her suggestions to the illustrator. Not surprisingly he didnt like it. He felt his work was not appreciated and felt that working process, that had worked well so far, had been compromised. I knew I had to apologise and try to re-build bridges and create better conditions for working. He is a great illustrator and I didn't want to lose him.  


Applying wisdom - In my life I have made many mistakes that have the potential to damage relationships but way back I learnt that these situations often hold much potential for strengthening a relationship.It all depends on how you respond. I am delighted to say that this is exactly what happened on this occasion. Here is the email which shows how I tried to deal with the situation I had created. 


MY EMAIL TO TRY AND DEAL WITH THE SITUATION
Dear ......
I apologise for any confusion. I indicated in my email that I was sending your illustrations to the author of the booklet to get her responses. I hadn't in any way signed off the work. I am at fault for suggesting the author contacted you directly rather than directing her responses through me believing that you should talk to her directly. In future I will make sure that all conversations are directed through me to avoid any confusion.

In future 
1) I shall be more specific in my brief
2) I will be the single point of contact for discussion and approval
3) I will try to give you at least two weeks
In return I will expect you to provide preliminary sketches for discussion/approval

I accept responsibility for the situation and if you are happy to continue we will
1) Cover the cost of the original brief the agreed £xxx fee once the revised cover image is supplied
 2) Treat the additions as a new commission ie five new illustrations £xxx with sketches for approval followed by completion in two weeks.

Is this acceptable? 

I do appreciate that you have chosen to work with us because you enjoy the work and you also believe in what we are doing. It is very important to me to know this because I want to work with people who also see the value in what we are trying to do. I also wanted to say that we do appreciate your work very much. After me, J.. (the author) is one of your biggest fans and when I invityed her to pick an illustrator she chose you rather than several others we have worked with.

Once again sincere apologies for the confusion. I hope that you will want to continue working with us.

best wishes
N

Sent: Wednesday, 23 May 2012, 14:27
Subject: RE: chalk mountain commission

Hello N
I think we have managed to strike and understanding, and the fault rests equally on both our shoulders, we can agree on that and start afresh. I am happy with your porposal and I will try my best to stick to my side of the agreement. I would also like to keep our flexibility arrangements in place, I am happy to edit works unitl both parties are satisfied.

To confirm what you have written, the deadline for the works is no longer this Friday, I get two weeks to work on the illustrations.

If possible, can I start on the works from this coming Monday, including the front cover. I ask because, the way I work, the first illustration sets the tone and informs the rest and I usually work on multiple illustrations at the same time. This way, I can revise images as they are done, and also know from the onset what will work stylistically and what will not.
I work well with your art direction as you digest the material and point out what you thinks will stand out, or will work as an illustration, and I would like us to continue working this way. If you still need the cover illustration before Monday, please let me know and I will start emailing you the roughs as soon as I have something concrete on paper. Also to confirm, the final fee at the end of the project will be £xxx

I apologise for any inconvenience caused on my behalf, and if I have delayed the publication of THE article. I will endeavour to make sure this does not happen again. I am more than happy to continue working with you and your team. The few benefits of working freelance is being able to choose who you want to work with and on what projects. Last few lesson's I was taught at University was to have integrity in one's work, to choose who to work with and work for, and to choose the reasons that will make me be satisfied with the outcomes of the project and work, irrespective of the monetary rewards. I believe your company is one such experience. You aim to improve the state of others, and I am to use my work to aid in that vision.

Regards
KMY RETURN EMAILThank you for your understanding. I am very impressed with the professional way you raised the issue and how you have dealt with it. It speaks volumes for your integrity and like you I only want to work with people who act in this way. Yes we will start a fresh from Monday. I had hoped to get the guide out sooner so we will, in the first instance publish, it without illustrations. 
bw norman