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.

Here is the issue of Lifewide Magazine where we explore the theme - I now have a much better appreciation of what it might mean for contemporary life.

Putting the first mark on the paper is a scary thing but I know once I get going it's not so bad. The psychological barrier we have to confront when we make a start can be very hard to overcome. I recently spent 6 or 7 weeks prevaricating over a
chapter I had to write that I knew was going to be hard. Sadly, when I eventually started it was hard and I find it very easy to put it to one side  and start (and finish)something else. Not a good habit I know but I have managed to convince myself its part of my creative process and that because it's at the back of my mind (actually playing on my mind!) I'm still working on the ideas. So my question is do other people suffer from this problem and if they do have they learnt any strategies for
dealing with it. Generally once I get going my attitude changes and I become more positive so something obviously happens in the mind once a start has been made. 


Saturday 15/09 - my mums birthday- 86 today

Today I have a good example of making a start. One of my goals in my current development plan is to create a memorial garden for my first wife Jill. Immediately after she died in 1999 I spent 3 or 4 months building a water garden. It gave me a lot of comfort and the physical toiling under a hot sun helped me work through my grief.. Since I moved house I have felt guilty that I have not created a physical space for her. But it's one thing saying you are going to do something and another to do it. Anyway its a lovely sunny day and I have been in the garden chopping down trees. I decided to move one of our
benches into the woods.. We have 3 acres of woodland and apart from the paths it just runs wild.. As I was carrying it down to the woods I decided I'd like to put it in the middle somewhere and as I started looking the idea of the memorial garden came into my head again.. There is a sort of drainage channel through the middle with lots of reeds and in spring there is a swathe of forgetmenots.. which flowers in early May - the time Jill died... I know my daughters also share my delight in the forgetmenots so I decided that the naturalistic 'garden' just had to be there.. so rather than prevaricate any more I worked out a route
from the existing path, cleared the bigger logs and drove the tractor in to make a start on the pathway.. Standing back from the particularities of the situation I think my goal is to create something that I, and my children will value. I had a vision of what it will be like- pretty and natural like she was and surrounded by wild woodland but in the more open spaces where the light comes shining through and the wild flowers grow in spring. While my vision and enthusiasm was still in my head (and ignoring the other jobs I was in the middle of) I began creating a pathway towards achieving the vision.. I know its just a start, and
there will be a lot of hard work ahead, but it feels already as if I am a significant way towards my goal. I took some photos before I started so I can see the changes I make. I feel quite positive about it having made a start.
Sunday 16/09

Knowing I had a busy day ahead of me I got up at 7am and went down to the woods and spent several hours laying out the pathway. It was laborious work cutting through fallen logs, lugging fallen trees to line the pathway and trying to dig through the chalky rubble to fill in some of the hollows. I fell over several times as my foot caught in the brambles and got stung by nettles. Altogether it was a sweaty exhausting process but I could see the progress I was making so that spurred me on. I could see that although I had a rough idea for the direction of the pathway and the detail was designed as I went in order to miss trees and stumps that I hadn't at first appreciated were there because they were overgrown. It made me feel bad when I realised that the 4' wide pathway was going to destroy a lot of plants in the middle part of the new pathway. After thinking about if for a while I decided that I would only use the lawn mower in the middle part and have a narrow pathway through the reeds and bracken. I recognised that this was a better solution.

Monday 17/09

I should have been doing other things but I spent a couple of hours in the woods. It was hard work filling in valleys and fissures in the path and there is a lot of this to do before I have anything like a proper footpath. When I'm walking in some out of the way place I often think of the people who must have made the path originally. Making paths for future generations of people to follow seems to me to be a special task in life and it can be used as a metaphor for leading others. Today my woodland work was inspected by my mother and father in law who are visiting us. They love walking and they could see what I was trying to do and they recognised it as a good thing. We talked about how gardeners don't just make things for themselves they are creating something that other people can enjoy in the future. My insight today was to do with design - now that I have done what I have done I can see much more the potential in what I'm doing. Its only after you have got someway into a project that this potential can be appreciated.
Tuesday 18/09

Well I think I have found a solution to my bumpy path problem. I went for a walk around the garden and behind some fir trees I found a pile of builders rubble which I had put there 4 years ago when we had a garage conversion done. The only snag is it's a long way to hump it down to the woods. So I have to convince myself the exercise will do me good. I spent a couple of hours humping the rubble down - altogether I made 4 trips with a full barrow.. fortunately its downhill and the last one I got a puncture and ended up having to pull the barrow. This is the slogging part of the process with little joy. It took me two hours to grade 2 meters so I can estimate that there is a couple of weeks work if I try to stick to my two hours a day. It was sunny though and paused to imagine several times what I could do when I start to create the woodland garden.. The results are good and I covered up the rubble with woodland soil so it looks fairly natural. Today's reflection is on the role of 'sustained slog' in trying to accomplish anything of significance. Once the initial enthusiasm of starting is over there is usually a lot of labour which is not very rewarding emotionally. I'm going to use John Cowan's idea of finding two hours a day to keep chipping away at the 'problem'. I probably won't make any more entries until I get to the next stage.

 I didn't intend to do this today - it just happened. So this is my reflections on how and why it happened. Working
backwards from the provisional outcome - the outcome was an email invitation to John Cowan to share his expertise and wisdom in mentoring through a Guide on how we might mentor learners on the lifewide learning award which we
are planning to start with a group of students in 3 weeks time. In framing this invitation in an email I had to think through the dimensions of the problem - they won't be complete but they do represent a significant chunk of the problem.

The story began 2 hours earlier when I sat down to update the front page of my website. From this action I went to my blog and felt it needed updating but wondered what I would write about. I decided I needed to amend my Personal Development Activity Plan to include the URL of my blog and this took me back to the Lifewide Award Guidance Document. I re-read the Guidance and made a number of amendments including a summary statement on the front page explaining what someone had to do to participate in and achieve the award (a recommendation that had been made by my daughter who is trying out the tools). Having updated my own PDAD and lifewide activity map and the Guidance I decided it was time to get final  feedback from the team on these documents before we start using them. Also we are going to expose them in an online seminar in two weeks time. So I emailed John who emailed back saying 'Good to hear from you and be given something to do'. I always get a nice feeling when I sense that someone enjoys doing the things I like doing, so seeing an opportunity to involve John further I put my invitation email together. 

Through this unfolding process I feel I've made a bit of progress towards achieving one of my goals and more importantly I have tuned in again to the continuous development needs of the LWE project, drawing it from the back to the front of my awareness again. So not only do I feel good because I have made a bit of progress, I am re-engaging with the challenge and as a biproduct I have an example of emergent learning for my blog!!!!

Looking back over the last eight months I can see that I have learnt quite a lot about the use of technology to desig and build websites. I have also learnt quite a lot about the use of some well known social media tools. My learning and development  has been partly planned in the sense that decisions were made and a strategy was developed - like the design of my website and the planning for five twitter exchanges. But it has also been partly reactive to the situations as they arose - like  NB's invitation to get involved in Twitter and seeing an example of an organisational facebook page and thinking that this would be a good thing to do.

This journey has involved:
1)   creating my own website using weebly tools - then applying my learning to develop five other websites for different purposes using the same tools.
2) creating and maintaining a blog on my weebly website
3)  opening a twitter account and participating in four twitter exchanges as well as behaving as an individual 
4)  setting up a 'scrapbook' to enable me to provide supplementary materials for twitter
5) opening a facebook account and with the help of my daughter setting up a lifewide education facebook page and making postings to the pagehttp://www.facebook.com/LifewideEducation 
6) setting up a Lifewide Education Twitter account and linking it to the Facebook pagehttps://twitter.com/#!/ 
6) setting up a lifewide education organisational page and promoting discussions on linked in.

What I have learnt through this process of participation?
I realise I can make effective use of these technologies - I am not scared of making postings and I can see how they work in terms of attracting an audience or following. I'm also beginning to understand how I have to behave in order to attract a social network. These things have been learnt through 1) trial and error - just trying them out 2) being guided by people who were already experienced in using them 3) observing how other users use them and copying them 4) trying to involve other people. 

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/

After years of resisting Facebook I fnally succumbed and decided that we 'Lifewide Education' had to have a presence. It was infact triggered by a long discussion with the team on the merits of twitter for engaging people in conversations. It didn't seem to be working for many people.So with the help of my daughter we set up a page  and posted our first discussion item on the Olympics. Only time will tell whether it will be useful or not but it is all about learning how to do it. The interesting thing though was how it has stimulated discussion with my children about the use of social media and facebook and twitter in particular. Because I have experience of both of these technologies I feel I have more understanding about what they are saying.

http://www.facebook.com/LifewideEducation 

World events come in all shapes and sizes but the Olympics - especially when they are hosted by your own country are pretty big and sustained. Of course I love sport and having been sporty as a youth I can relate to what these elite athletes are going through and appreciate something of the dedication, commitment, sacrifice and pain they have gone through to prepare themselves for their moment.

I can honestly say I have been blown away by the spectacle from the opening ceremony which filled me with pride through all the drama as it unfolds. Not retrospective analysis but raw gut feelings to what is happening or has just happened involving the people who it is happening to. Having the time to follow multiple events on the BBC internet service I have been totally enthralled by the drama and the spectacle. I also managed to experience two events - football and volley ball. 

There is no doubt that the media have a huge role to play in engaging people in the Olympic experience especially for people who are unable to directly experience an event. The BBC coverage has been exceptional - through the profiles of the athletes I have learnt about them as individuals - their families, their sporting history and what it means to them and the coaches who encourage and help them perform. Through the events we learn about the different sports and what individuals have to do and of course we witness people performing at the highest level.

I expect I'm no different to anyone else when I witness - albeit through the BBC - someone winning an event in the Olympics. On every occasion I experience a rollercoaster of emotions that begins with willing people on and then there is an overwhelming feeling in which tears well up and I connect with the moment being shared by athlete and audiences all over the world .. It is an amazing feeling of happiness, pride and gratitude for someone who has achieved their dream after devoting their life for this moment. And they share their overwhelming joy and thank all the people who have helped them and made sacrifices too.. And I can't help but be moved and feel uplifted as I experience this wonderfully human feeling over and over again.

                                                 Laura Trott just after she won gold in the cycling rejoicing with her family. 

But what about the downside of the emotional rollercoaster? The side that is not joyful but broken-hearted. Thanks to TV we also witness the total dejection of people who judge themselves to have fallen short of their goal, who perform well below what they are capable of doing or who injure themselves in competition. We see interviews of people who have given everything and were piped at the post like Mark Hunter and Zac Purchase in their dramatic lightweight double sculls final when they led all the way until the last few metres and were beaten by inches into the silver medal position. They were barely able to talk because they were physically shattered and choked with emotion. And our empathetic brains kick in again as we share their utter devastation and empathise with their situation. 

And I'm sure the memories will live on until I can remember no more and just as I was inspired by Sebastian Coe and Steve Ovet in the 1980's many young people will have been inspired by the performances of participants in these games and their influences and effects will be immeasurable. 

I haven't felt like writing anything for a few weeks... in spite of spending a week in Spain on holiday.. I know its because I felt in mood that I have only ever felt once before - when I was trying to come to terms with the knowledge that my wife was going to die.. That's the only way I can describe it and I just did not feel like writing anything positive. The source of course was thinking about my daughter and her small babies struggling to be given a chance to live a normal fulfilled life, and the news that one of them may have suffered some brain damage at some point in his early life with all the anxiety that brings.. Actually not 'might' but according to the doctors who have had little positive to say - 'will'. What has made me more positive and happier than I have been for many weeks was the babies coming home and seeing my daughter happy again and seeing these two little identical babies guzzling their milk. a.nd being loved to bits. And more than anything else the hope that my daughter was given by a physiotherapist who on examining them before they were allowed to go home, said that alfie was behaving like any other baby.. Just a few positive words was all it took to rekindle the spark of optimism.. that we all need to live our lives...

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.