I had another powerful experience of co-creation this week at Sheffield Hallam University (SHU) Learning and Teaching Conference and I am thinking that creating processes for co-creation is a manifestation of learning and producing in the social age of learning (see julianstodd's blog).  The invitation to speak at SHU was unusual in that the organising team led by Andrew Middleton wanted to try something new - they wanted to link an idea I was presenting (learning ecologies) to a series of workshops in which conference participants could apply the idea to their own life and development process. Through Andrew's facilitation I was able to work with the organising team to devise a workshop that seems to have worked well though the organising team are still gathering feedback.

Working this way involves a lot more work than just turning up and presenting something but, as I facilitated one of the workshops, I realised it gave me a great deal of satisfaction to see and hear participants turning abstract idea into meaningful conversations and representations of lived experiences (some of them deeply personal). As a speaker I often have no way of knowing whether my ideas have any relevance to the lives of my audience but the workshop allowed me to see that at least on this occasion some of them did.

But the conference was also remarkable in the way I was able to involve many participants in sharing their knowledge and beliefs using an on-line survey administered just two days before the conference. I think the fact that the conference was imminent encouraged a very good response rate - 135 of the 300 people responded.  I used SurveyMonkey for the first time which meant the data were analysed and processed in real time and I was able not only to present the results to those attending the conference but I could give the contributors a link to the survey report. I think this new capacity to create, administer, analyse and use data from surveys has revolutionised the way I will approach my public speaking. It should also be acknowledge that the design of the survey had been informed by another collaborative exercise in which 8 SHU staff had contributed to an email survey on the meanings of personal and professional development. The feedback gained through this survey has reinforced my view that personal development is perceived as an ecologicial process - over 30% of responses to a question on what three words best describe the meaning of personal development used the terms growth and growing while another 27% used improvement and enhancing.

Using my experience to think about co-creation

Julian Stodd offers a perspective on co-creation in his Seven Strands of Co-creation blog He writes that 'social learning spaces do not just bring us together to share what we have learnt, they bring us together in spaces where we co-create meaning, Where we write a story together'. That is certainly true of this narrative of co-creation. Julian creates a conceptual tool with seven elements which provide a useful aid to reflect on the process of co-creation in the context of my experience.

Co-creation requires vision. Not the vision of the individual, but rather the shared vision of the community. A desire to learn, a desire to share ideas and do something worthwhile. We come together in these spaces because of the vision, to be inspired by others, as well as to offer inspiration ourselves. It’s also about our field of vision being wider with more eyes: more people bringing a wider range of experience, a wider range of sources, creating more wisdom and meaning. The breadth and differences within community make it stronger. Vision inspires us. JS

While I completely agree that vision and imagination is essential in any creative process I disagree with Julian when he says its not the vision of the individual but the vision of the community. In the co-creation processes I build and facilitate it has to be both. The vision of the individual who leads and facilitates co-creation is in the imagining of a process that can recruit, connect and harness the potential forces for collaboration and co-creation. It is in the imaginings of an ecology within which people will be motivated to contribute and to learn. This does not happen willy nilly - the conditions and opportunities have to be created.

The social space [containing the potential for co-creation] was the university's learning and teaching conference. The space for the purpose of sharing knowledge about learning and teaching provided me with opportunity to share my ideas and to refine (develop) the ideas further through the interactions and sharing of knowledge. Purpose also seems to me to be important - this may be a feature of the space but it also a feature of the process (see below). 

Shared value also sits at the heart of communication, we need to share value to understand each other and to develop more refined ideas. Social learning spaces allow us to share value and encourage us to do so by letting us understand the value of other participants. Shared value fosters cooperation and lets us build progressively more complex constructs, based on the foundation values, knowledge and understanding that we share. This is a co-creative process.

Standing in front of an audience certainly required me to state and share my values and I like to think that my values resonate with anyone who cares about the education and learning of our students. I agree with JS that people buy into your values before they cooperate and the high level of engagement of participants suggests to me that this certainly happened.

Part of refining our ideas and narratives in social spaces is that of editing things down. We can use social spaces in this function as we rehearse ideas.....Each time I tell the story, I get feedback and I refine what I say. The process of editing makes my narrative stronger. As my ideas reach maturity i should be able to edit them to the point that i can explain them concisely and with clarity. This only happens with careful editing and is central to the co-creative processes at play in social learning spaces.

This is certainly true I cannot give the same presentation twice I have to customise it for the audience and add new ways of explaining in the hope of clarifying ideas more than I was able to do before. I use pictures to help me and my refinements are usually in my images.

[In] our understanding of how people learn, reflection is a key but often neglected part. We need to take the learning and reflect upon it, to stand up the new learning against what we already know to be true and to develop our thinking accordingly. We may accept or reject new knowledge, but it’s an active process that takes reflection.

 I think it is essential but it is more than thinking about something after the event it is thinking about it while it is happening and if necessary adjusting some aspect of process or performance in order to make the process better for co-creation. If you don't engage in the metacognitive process then you miss opportunities.

Tempo  has a role too: one of the ways to drive up engagement in social learning spaces is to restrict the length of time that a community space is available, to give it a definite end. This helps drive up the tempo.

Most processes have a natural cycle and the conference had a definite time frame. There was a long lead in time but apart from preparation most of the action took place in the few days prior to the conference and during the conference. The social space for co-creation was indeed deliberately constrained. But I don't think it always has to be.

Challenge  is a vital part of learning: it’s something that is done well, if constructively, in social learning spaces. We can challenge ideas, argue our case and co-create a shared narrative out of it.

Trying to interest and engage 300 busy people in an organisation is undoubtedly a challenge. The process of public speaking expects challenge and the live twitter stream ensured that challenges and alternative ideas and viewpoints could be posted and viewed in a very public way.

So what's missing?
For me it's the notion of a process with purpose - a purpose that people buy into because they can see the value in doing so. Spaces are necessary - they provide the context for any co-creative exercise but so are processes that empower and enable people to contribute and within that process the resources and tools that are used to stimulate and engage people, and eventually gather and process knowledge that is shared. What is missing is missing from Julian's conceptual aid is the idea that co-creation is an ecological process involving people interacting with each and with the social space, tools and resources that have been created for the purpose of supporting co-creation. When I look back at the ecologies I have created over the last 12 months all have been social spaces and habitats for co-creation - the idea of developing knowledge through collaboration has been at the heart of the ecology. Such ecologies not only grow new knowledge and perspectives they facilitate access to the products of co-creation so there needs to be provision for collation, sense making and open access curation to enable future ecologies for co-creation to prosper. They connect the past with the present and provide the seeds from which new ecologies can be grown. For example already I am seeking to find out if others have conducted similar surveys on the meanings of personal and professional development.

Finally there is one more perspective I want to offer - the advent of social media has opened up entirely new possibilities for sharing views particularly in conference social spaces. This was brought home to be very forcibly when I reviewed the twitter feed  for the #SHULT14  conference as a whole and for my presentation in particular. For the first time I could see what people were taking from what I was saying albeit on a highly selective basis and it has given me confidence that my ideas resonate with at least a few people. I quite like this one.

Hilary Cunliffe ‏@hilary_cunliffe  Jun 19
#SHULT14 learning ecologies and the dreaded PDP. So how many program specifications include creativity? Go for it Norman Jackson!

What next?
Every learning ecology should contain within it the potential for further growth because of the relationships and resources that have been developed and the questions that have been raised. So I should also ask myself how can I make this ecological process even more powerful as a vehicle for co-creation? This is something I thought about as I was fulfilling my duties as the cleaner this morning!

Clearly there is still work to be done on analysing and reporting the survey but beyond this I thought that we might produce an issue of Lifewide Magazine on the Ecology of Development theme and invite workshop participants to contribute a narrative and a visual representation and perhaps extend this into a co-created chapter for the Creativity in Development e-book? I can also use a similar methodology in another talk I'm giving in a few weeks time - adapting the questionnaire in the light of this experience. In this way I can continue to build perspectives on the meanings of personal and professional development within universities. I also put out an enquiry into the SEDA Jisc mail list to see if anyone else had done any surveys or research - I was encouraged to have four responses back very quickly. Let's see where these ideas and actions take me.

This week I began in earnest to begin helping to shape the next issue of Lifewide Magazine which is guest edited by Chrissi and Sue. They have organised the most of the content but there are always what I call 'bits and bobs' to be gathered, illustrations to be commissioned, images to be found and above all an identity to be created that is much more than the sum of the collection of articles. As I was googling 'social technologies' - one of the terms that defines the issue I came across Julian Stodd's blog. I immediately recognised a kindred spirit in someone who is thinking and writing about the everyday world of contemporary learning with a particular interest in the role played by technology. I read many of Julian's blogs and loved his simple visualisations. I felt that here was someone I would involve in my learning ecologies. I found one that I thought we might use in the Magazine - Our complex relationship with technology. I emailed him to check it was okay and received a friendly positive response such that it made me want to invite him to connect with our work in a significant way. So who knows what the future will bring?

One of his blogs elaborates his idea of the social age we now live in.. which he describes in these terms..

I use the term ‘The Social Age’ to talk about the environment we inhabit today: it’s a time when the very nature of work is evolving, changing to reflect a revised social contract and the advancement of technology to facilitate sharing and community. In the Manufacturing Age, we used to make stuff: banging together lumps of iron, burning coal, wrestling value from the very earth itself as we wrought iron and carved railways through the landscape, smelting and creating, until we outsourced it all and specialised production in a global network of trade and exchange, bringing us to the Knowledge Age. We convinced ourselves that this was ok: we no longer made stuff, but we had the knowledge, we did the clever bit ourselves and the knowledge was what really mattered. But then the internet evolved and Google was born, phones got smart and small and our relationship with knowledge changed. Finding stuff out is easy. Making sense of it is what counts. Welcome to the Social Age. Power and authority, that used to be gained through knowledge alone, is now based more in effectiveness, in being able to create value and meaning through the effective use of knowledge and resources in agile ways. Simply knowing stuff is not enough............... The Social Age is about high levels of engagement through informal, socially collaborative technology. It supports agility by allowing many and varied connections and the rapid iteration of ideas in communities that are ‘sense making’.

I have undoubtedly grown up and through the knowledge age. I was (and still am) a knowledge worker so the question for me is to what extent I am also part of the social age. As I look back over the last twenty years I can see that many of the roles I had involved co-creating knowledge in a social way. The basic social technology tools I used (and still use) is email, either in the form of an open mail list or in the form of surveys. More recently I have orchestrated on-line questionnaire surveys or posted questions in LinkedIn Groups. I have a Facebook page but rarely use it but I do use twitter for disseminating ideas and work. I have barely begun to utilise the social technology tools that characterise the social age and perhaps I never will embrace them in the way that people who are now growing up in this age use them as if they are second nature. Perhaps I will always remain a knowledge worker operating in a social age without really making use of the many social technologies that grow day by day - only time will tell.

To commit to something is to harness your own willpower to pursue and engage with a purpose, a cause, a problem, challenge or opportunity. By committing to something you are reducing your freedom to engage with other things. Fundamentally committing to something is a choice - we may feel obligated or coerced but we are still making a decision to engage with something conscientiously and to the best of our ability. We usually commit to something because we care about it and it's personally meaningful and or has deep intrinsic interest or value. Commitment to something is deeply relational whether it is with people, ideas, objects or enterprises. When we commit to something we usually know that it will involve us over a significant period of time.For some things we want to know exactly what are commitment will be before we agree to getting involved but for other things, particularly involving relationships that are most significant to us, we are willing to enter into a commitment without knowing the detail of the obligation. 

Developing something is a major focus for commitment. It requires us to commit time, energy and effort (physical, intellectual and emotional) and it usually involves reducing our involvement in other things. Life is never simple and all the things that are important to us require our commitment so we end up with lots of commitments that jostle and compete for our attention - our families and relationships within them, our jobs, our own interests and aspirations. So everyday life is made up of lots of commitments that connect and span our lifewide experiences. Our commitments are closely associated with what we perceive are our purposes which are ultimately the things that drive us and give our life substance and meaning. By taking on new commitments we are extending our learning ecologies.

These thoughts were prompted by my recent involvement in an on-line 'course' called 'bring your own device for learning' (BYOD4L) designed and organised by Chrissi Nerantzi and Sue Beckingham. When I reflect on the experience as a development process  commitment seemed to very important - perhaps because by joining the course I was adding to my existing commitments and that required effort above and beyond what I was already doing.

The course required commitment to sign up, familiarise myself with the design and expectations, engage with the resources and the learning opportunity (in my own way), and try to record my own learning process and what I think I gained from it. The commitment to try and apply what I learnt and to keep trying even when something didn't seem to work and overcome the inevitable barriers of using these new forms of social media for someone who is not particularly adept. 

During the course I was conscious of juggling this new commitment with my other obligations - like the two days I look after my daughter's twins and various work obligations and I was conscious of the opportunity cost in engaging with technology initially to be competent and confident in using it and then to apply it. I had several instances during and immediately after the week when what I tried didn't work and I felt frustrated and demotivated because I hadn't made the progress I had hoped for and these feelings of negativity had to be overcome.

I was thankful that one person tweeted that they had had trouble with an app. I often have trouble trying to make things work and this aspect of learning often gets glossed over in the enthusiasm for the technology. The things I valued most - that encouraged me to persist and therefore facilitated my development were: 
1 The resources. Sue's collections of tools and the introductory videos are a great resource that I have embedded in my own website for future use. 
2 Examples and illustrations of the use of the technologies.. these were great in showing what could be done. In particular some of the curatorial tools like scoop.it and paper.li. which I have tried to apply. 

It was also great seeing the enthusiasm, commitment, teamwork, care and attention and personal support the facilitators gave to the process and the people in it. A real lesson in the energy, passion, care, dedication and expertise necessary to make these sorts of learning experiences work. And hopefully I could use the experience and insights to design my own on-line learning experience. I was particularly appreciative of the fact that I was able to navigate through the resources and prompts in my own way. There was a structure but no one forced me to follow the linear pathway. I could chart my own 'course'.

Offline I had some good conversations with my son who managed to spend a bit of time looking at the resources and tuned into the twitter conversation most evenings. So it achieved that objective. 

I did try to reflect on my own thinking and practice in the contexts of my own circumstances and I set up a dedicated BYOD4L blog for this. 

The proof of learning is in the doing. It's one thing to know how to do or use something but another to apply that learning. Since the course I have continued to use paper.li and develop 'lifewide zine' a twitter-sourced companion to Lifewide Magazine. I also felt more confident in using twitter and I spent more time on it. I felt that I understood it much more. I taught myself how to embed twitter feeds and tweet buttons into our websites and then populated resources like e-book chapters and magazine issues with tweet buttons in the hope that when people come across them they will retweet.

I also 'played with' paper.li  With Chrissi's help I set up a Lifewide Zine as a twitter-based companion to Lifewide Magazine. There is still lots to learn but I got over the initial hurdle. I also continued to develop my use of explee animation software creating and embedding several animations in our websites.

These three tools - twitter, explee and paper.li have opened up a whole new area of communication for me that if I had not committed time, energy and effort would have remained hidden. The value of commitment to personal development is in being able to do something I couldn't do before and in this way improving my ability to continue working with my higher purpose - to promote lifewide education.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In his book CREATIVITY Flow and the psychology of discovery and invention  which greatly influenced my thinking when I was trying to understand what creativity meant in academic disciplines, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi argues that creativity cannot be understood by looking only at the people who appear to make it happen. Creative ideas need a receptive audience to receive and use them. And without the acceptance and judgements of competent others, we cannot decide whether someone's claims for creativity are valid. 

Csikszentmihalyi developed a 'systems' model for creativity which contains three components. The first of these is the domain, which consists of a set of symbolic rules and procedures. The second component of creativity is the field, which includes all the individuals who contribute to the field who act as the gatekeepers to the domain. They decide whether a new idea or product can be accepted. These people decide what new contributions are relevant and what should be recognised, preserved and remembered. The third component is the individual, who using symbols of a given domain, comes up with a new idea or sees a new pattern or contributes a performance that adds value to the field. It is the thoughts and actions of individuals or co-creating groups of people whose thoughts or actions change a domain, or establish a new domain.

My own research into higher education practices aligns with this well established conceptual framework but how does it relate to my own learning ecology. The domain I am contributing my thinking and writing too is the domain of education/higher education and the field I am trying to influence is the field of educational practice - particularly  people who have a developmental role within universities (educational, professional, curriculum, student development and organisational development). Looking back I can see that I have tried to engage with and influence the field of practitioners in four ways.

Firstly, I tried to grow the knowledge from the field itself by involving practitioners in the study. It is their knowledge and perspectives that provide the new and original contribution

in the e-book. The act of feeding back the views of other members of the field and inviting comment was a way of testing whether the products have value to the field and ultimately the domain. I did not receive any negative feedback and the positive feedback gave me confidence that what I had produced was of value.

Secondly, I tried to engage other practitioners through an on-line survey. While very few members of the field accepted the invitation to complete the survey the notice was circulated by email to many hundreds of practitioners on the specialist mail lists or postings in on-line special interest groups. The small numbers of respondents might suggest that what I was doing was of no interest to them or it might indicate that culturally most practitioners do not get involved in on-line surveys.

Thirdly, thanks to two invitations to speak on the subject of creativity in higher education I will be able to present and discuss my ideas at two conferences in November.

Fourthly, my consolidated learning has been made explicit in an e-book which provides me with the vehicle for recording my contribution to the domain and I will publish it on a website under a creative commons license so that practitioners can access it with no financial cost to themselves. This means that the ideas will be publicly accessible in a global sense.

Finally, when the work is complete I will make it freely available and disseminate information about its availability to the field via email networks. In this way I anticipate that those who are interested and willing to spend the time reading, will access my ideas and take from them those aspects that they find useful and meaningful.

Only time will tell whether the ideas contained in my e-book will be seen by the domain as being relevant and significant enough to warrant citation and adoption by practitioners in the field. By putting a stat counter on the web page I can monitor how many people access it so that will give me an indication of the interest in the field. If further invitations to speak arise from this work that will be another indication that the ideas have value to people who are practising in the field.

But there is another very important dimension to the field and that is the way people in the field  contribute to the creative work. In my learning ecology two people stand out in the extent to which they contributed materially to the creative product through the insightful feedback they provided, the way they challenged ideas or perspectives, and the encouragement they gave me to persist. In the world of sharing and shaping academic ideas it is the unseen hand of collegiality that shapes the creative work and makes it more acceptable to the field.

Csikszentmihalyi's cultural domain-field model has much relevance to my learning ecology and the creative work that emerged from the ecological process.

Over the last few weeks I have been working on my background paper for the SEDA conference in mid November. Last week I realised (insight) that I had enough material to move from a single paper to a mini-e-book of six or seven chapters. This would allow me to explore the idea of creativity in development so much more than I could through a single article. 

This week I reached 20 respondents to my email survey of creativity in educational development. This was the target I had originally set myself so I was of course delighted. The results will form one of the chapters in the e-book. I felt it was time to try to engage the wider community so with JW's help we put our creativity questionnaire on-line and invited SEDA members to participate in the survey. We needed an image for the survey so I adapted a picture by Julian Burton to suit the purpose (above). I also used this image to encourage Kiboko to develop his version of the narrative that is conveyed in this picture as its an important one.


REFLECTIONS ON MY ECOLOGY FOR CREATIVITY
One of my tactics to grow my own understanding of what creativity means to me is to create a narrative of what I have done to develop the knowledge for the talks I am giving in the next few weeks - what I now see as an ecological process for knowledge development and self-development. I can use this narrative to examine my own creativity. One of the ways I am doing this is to use a number of tools I have found to help me think and reflect on my own developmental narrative. In the next few weeks I will share my reflections through my blog.

In my internet wanderings I came across a blog by Darlene Chrissley on the theme of The Ecology of a Creative Life. In it she says,  'It has taken me fifty years to understand my own personal ecology; the conditions that best support me as a creative being. My ideal ecology balances four distinct quadrants: Introspection, Expedition, Integration and Exhibition. Over time I have adopted a set of creative practices that support me in each quadrant. When I make space for each one and move between them in an easy flow I am happy and productive and my work is original and meaningful.' Darlene Chrissley (2012).

I liked the implication in this ecological view of creativity that the four elements work together rather than sequentially as in so many other models of creative processes. .  I have mapped below her four quadrants and my reflections on my own process in respect of each of these four dimensions of her creative ecology.Broadly speaking the model seems to work for my creative ecology although I do not see exhibition as an entirely final stage process and my introspection is far more contextualised than hers.

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