It's been a very enjoyable and emotional weekend as our son and daughter came home from university to celebrate their mum's big birthday and Mothers Day. Having all the family together these days is a rarity so we all savoured it and had a lot of fun and lots of catch up conversations.. We were a complete family again each fulfilling our role within it and it felt good.

It was fascinating to see how our son and daughter are growing up and becoming/being independent and this manifested itself on numerous occasions. In one conversation my daughter was discussing the possibility of travelling to Cambodia to work with an NGO.. her mum was not too keen but she suddenly said..'look you can advise me but I'm going to make the final decision on whether I go', I'd never heard that sort of thing before. 

I am just starting to think of wellbeing as a dimension of lifewide learning. My daughter has just started writing for her university newspaper so I have commissioned her to write an article for Lifewide Magazine (which she can also use for her newspaper) on how students understand their own wellbeing. I developed a simple questionnaire and interviewed her and her brother to pilot it. It worked a treat and we had good meaningful conversations. Both, in their individual ways, made the point that their wellbeing was not just about happiness or feeling good, but was much more about discovering, pursuing and achieving your purposes. Both indicated that trying to find your purpose and that they try to do this by taking on new things.. not at random, but guided by their interests, values and relationships.  

When I added my tags to the post I realised that this was the first time I'd had categorised a post using 'wellbeing' so it not a concept that comes in to my head very much. Perhaps the things I do and the relationships I have are so integrated into my wellbeing that I take it for granted. As a generalisation I do feel fulfilled and happy with my life. I am a valued member of a family that I am supporting and gaining much love in return. I enjoy my work which gives me challenge, interest and opportunity and a belief that  what I'm doing is worthwhile.

I latter completed the questionnaire myself and realised in doing so how much of my own sense of wellbeing was bound up with my family. Seeing them find and achieve their purposes, and playing a part in helping them do this, was perhaps the main source of my wellbeing.

WELLBEING QUESTIONNAIRE

1 What does 'wellbeing' mean to you?
I am very fortunate to have more than the basics in life including a lovely home and income to support my needs, time to do things I want to do and I am reasonably healthy and fit. These things all contribute to my sense of wellbeing. But ultimately wellbeing is about understanding and fulfilling my purposes - or at least the ones that I think are most important in my life.

My wellbeing is founded on the relationships I have with the people who matter most to me. My immediate family which includes my three children by my first marriage and my wife and three children and grandchildren from my second marriage. My greatest sense of achievement and fulfillment comes from the love and attention they give me and my involvement in their lives. Seeing and helping them grow up and find their own ways in life has given me my main purpose in life. A second set of purposes which cause me to get up in the morning is my work in promoting lifewide education. Here fulfillment comes from a sense of making progress in achieving the educational goals I believe in.

2 Is wellbeing linked to happiness? Are they the same thing?
Yes. I believe I am contented and happy with my circumstances and although things do crop up in life that make me anxious, sad and unhappy -  the big picture is one of happiness. But wellbeing is not only about happiness it is much more about discovering and pursuing purposes and doing things that you believe are worthwhile, meaningful and valuable and deep and meaningful forming relationships.

3 Which aspects of you does your wellbeing involve or affect?
Given what I have said it must affect me physically. Although I can no longer run because of my knee I am generally in good health and physically I can do most things that I need or want to do day to day. It affects me psychologically and emotionally - I generally feel positive and rarely suffer from negative feelings, and sadness can usually be offset with joy. Aspects of my daily life keep my mind active so it affects me intellectually. And spiritually, I am comfortable with my understanding of who I am, why I am here and what will happen to me when I die.

4  What sorts of things do you do that enable you to cultivate a sense of wellbeing?
I am surrounded by my family and I am involved in their lives, some more than others. At the moment I am helping my daughter a couple of days a week with childcare - looking after her 8 month old twins. Its hard work but very rewarding and it gives me a lot of pleasure to feel I am giving her practical help and time to do other things in her life. Beyond this my wife and I do lots of things with and for the family both immediate and more extended and these experiences ground me in the life of others.

I enjoy my work, and my writing it stimulates me intellectually and gives me the satisfaction of creating new things. I play in a band and  have weekly rehearsals and that also gives me enjoyment and challenge. When time and weather permit I like to get out into my garden and do things in it.

5 Is your sense of wellbeing something that comes from doing one thing or many things?
It comes from different things in different parts of my life - indeed having things happen and making things happen in different parts of my life enriches my sense of fulfillment and achievement.

 6  What sort of things erode your sense of wellbeing? Please give examples
Concerns and anxieties within the family have a big impact on my sense of wellbeing. For the most part these are small things that are all part and parcel of family living. But sometimes they are big. We have concerns that one of my daughter's premature twins might have brain damage because he stopped breathing when he was in the incubator. We watch intently for any developmental signs and it remains a concern that affects me emotionally. I also know that illness or injury has a negative impact. I damaged my knee playing badminton and discovered I also had arthritis and this has been painful, slows me down and inhibits me from doing anything really active like playing sport, jogging or long walks. Feeling overweight and slothful also makes me feel less good about myself. In the working side of my life feelings of not making progress or not achieving anything worthwhile erode my sense of wellbeing.

7 If you are unhappy about your state of wellbeing how do you change it? Can you give an example to illustrate?
Improving wellbeing always involves recognising what is causing the problem and doing something about it. A few months ago I felt overweight and this combined with my knee problem was making me feel not so good. I found a diet and stuck to it and began to lose my bulging stomach. But some of the really big things in life.. like the loss of a partner.. are hard to do much about.. grief and sadness are always with you no matter what you do. In my case I found someone else to share my life with her and her family, and my children,  helped me enormously to rebuild my life.

8  Is there a relationship between learning and developing and your sense of well being? Can you give an example to illustrate

Yes. I am conscious that so much of day to day living involves learning and developing in order to accomplish something or help someone else. This LWE project aimed at exploring the idea of wellbeing and how it relates to lifewide learning is involving me in finding out what others think wellbeing involves through on-line searches, in devising an interview protocol (this set of questions) and using it to have structured conversations with people (beginning with family). I will also use the opportunity to develop new relationships with people. I am learning through this process, and this is one example of a continuous process of learning and developing.

 9 Is there a relationship between wellbeing and achieving things that matter to you? If yes can you give an example?
Yes. Trying to achieve something I have decided to do becomes a significant focus for me and engages me on all fronts. If I do not make progress or the outcomes from what I am doing are not so good it makes me dissatisfied and that usually involves me in trying harder or trying something else. 

In the context of trying to help members of my family - just getting feedback that shows that what I have done has been valued is sufficient to make me feel that what I have done has been useful and worthwhile. Example - it was my wife's big birthday recently and she did not want any fuss being made. My wife is Iranian and in her culture birthdays are not celebrated as an adult and she is quite anti-birthdays. But I thought it was important to mark the occasion and planned/plotted a family celebration with the children and the two older ones came home from university for the weekend. I searched for and found a Persian restaurant with music and dancing and invited other close members of the family. We had a lovely evening and my wife really enjoyed it and the whole weekend. The best moment was when she said she would have to revise her view of birthdays! On such occasions you can tell when what you have tried to do has proved worthwhile.

10 On a scale of 1-10 where 1 is least and 10 is most important.. How important are these things in creating your sense of wellbeing.

1 Connecting with and having good relationships with people I come into contact with everyday 10
2 Being healthy and fit....physically active - walking, sport, dancing etc   9
3 Being involved in the world - being curious and aware of the world around me - looking and finding new opportunities 9
4 Feeling creative - doing things that give me a chance to be creative, inventive or resourceful 8
5 Continually learning and developing myself 9
6 Doing new things that interest me 9
7 Making progress in the things I am doing  10
8 Doing things with and for other people 10
9 Having a close relationship with someone I trust and can discuss anything with 10
10 Feeling that I am valued by the people that matter to me 10
11 Being able to do the things I want or need to do 10
12 Achieving something that I think is worthwhile 10

11 Why are the things that you rate most highly very important to your wellbeing?
All these things are important to my sense of wellbeing. Most of the things I rate highly are to do with relationships and affiliations. Perhaps I would add feeling loved as well as valued as being important, and feeling I am acting responsibly in fulfilling my role as a parent or friend.

Perhaps implicit, but could be made explicit, is the need to belong to something - to be part of a family and by extension to be part of a community (lifewide education).

The other feature about my sense of wellbeing is my need to achieve the things I value - the purposes that I have defined for myself. In this way it is intimately related to my lifewide learning and ongoing development as a person.

12 Is there anything that is important to you missing from the list?
My sense of wellbeing is an integral to the way I feel about myself and the life I live. It is not a static thing.. It is continuously evolving and has to be sustained through the things I chose to do and the way I try to do them. Because it is influenced by many things it has to be viewed holistically and evolving. I did not mention spirituality but perhaps our sense of wellbeing is what nurtures our spirit that carries and sustains us on our journey through life.

Travel certainly broadens the mind by opening your eyes to worlds that are very different to your own. I am in Riyadh attending the International Forum of Innovative University Teachers being held at the Imam Muhammad Ibn Saud Islamic University. I lived in Saudi Arabia over 30 years ago and I was keen to see how it might have changed. I realised very quickly that some things never change as I sat clutching the seat (no seat belts), as my taxi driver remonstrated with an overtaking car at 50mph..on the drive from the airport!!!! The second thing that hadn't changed was the generosity and hospitality of my Saudi hosts who looked after me very well. The photo shows some of the many people, including students, who helped make the conference a success.

I had been invited to give a talk on my study of change in a university (see below). I was worried that what I had to say about change and innovation in an English university would not translate into what seemed to me to be a very different culture of higher education. But when I asked this question I was told by the Dean of Development and a number of university teachers that they recognised the factors and conditions that were relevant to change and innovation in their universities. I was greatly relieved and also pleased that what I had discovered were some universal principles that might be applied to universities in any higher education system so that was important learning for me.

I learnt that Saudi Arabia is growing its university system very quickly (someone said 26% of GDP was going into higher education). What was clear was that university teachers are grappling with the same issues in developing more engaging and relevant forms of learning as university teachers in the UK and elsewhere.  The same sorts of topics were being covered - e-learning, e-portfolios and social networking, project based learning and problem based learning and many other progressive forms of learning activity. Amongst the many excellent contributions was a presentation given by a medical educator Dr Ammar Attar Umm al-Qura , who is pioneering a lifewide approach in the medical curriculum. (Students undertake a project of their choice that must relate to their personal interests and passions and then put on an exhibition for the benefit of staff and students. Students were motivated to produce books, films, poems and many different artefacts and through their creativity they connected their products to the medical disciplinary field. A great example of LWE in action. Dr Attar kindly agreed to join our community and represent LWE in the Kingdom.

The one thing that felt very strange was the fact that men and women sat in different conference theatres that were linked through sound and projection.. Interestingly, the women could see us but we could not see them. It was my first experience of this form of segregation and it felt very strange though of course I respect that this is deeply cultural. 

I take home with me many happy memories and several new friendships that I hope will be continued.

My presentation

There are some special events in everyday life which throw up more unusual experiences. Christmas is one of them. It's the 27th December and my son has just gone back to uni so it feels like the event is over.  So why is this event special in my everyday life? First and foremost in our family Christmas is the one event we all share as being significant for the whole family. The coming together and connecting of different parts of the family - all ages from my parents in Australia who are nearly 90 to the newest editions of the family 6 months old twins and even the about to be born grandchild who we know will be born some time this week. And although we know there is stress around the occasion in terms of meeting expectations and preparing the house for visitors, preparing the Christmas meal, buying presents and a hundred other things.. there is also a deliberate attempt to create space for spending time with family and benefiting from the experience of giving and sharing memories and stories. More than anything else Christmas in my family is about renewing and maintaining family bonds - it's a relationship thing. Interestingly technology helps us connect... Christmas would not be Christmas without a skype conversation with my mum and dad in Australia. 

But the best Christmas present ever was the birth of my fourth grandson - the first child of my eldest son and his wife. It took me right back to his birth nearly 34 years ago and completed one of the cycles of life of which I am a part. I could see we shared the same emotions about the birth of our first child.

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.

My activities this week have been mainly focused on three areas of my life - my family, my work (ChalkMountain book project) and LifewideEducation (launching our Award). 

1 Chalk Mountain - Last week I talked about how difficult it is sometimes to make a start. The chapter I have been writing has been a struggle over a long period of time. I put it off and put it off. I did bits here and there and generally hated doing it which is very unusual for me when the task involves writing. But eventually, when I couldn't put it off any longer, and having missed my own deadline twice, I did knuckle down and did it and the result was okay. At least it got us to the stage where we can see where to go next with it. This was in complete contrast to the experience I had writing another chapter the week before which was a joy and just flowed from my mind... I am not sure I learnt much from this struggle but I did get valuable feedback on both chapters which means I can now shape them to make a better fit with what the institution wants.. So the learning is reinforcing what I already know about the need for feedback in order to produce work that is useful.

 2 Lifewide Education - My biggest achievement this week was to launch the Lifewide Development Award on the 28/09. I spent time preparing a slide show for the introductory talk and gave the talk to students on the MA Human Resources Management course at Southampton Solent University. I have worked for a long time to reach this moment and done much work to create the guidance and the website infrastructure. It gave me a real sense of satisfaction in talking about what we are doing and explaining the strong positive ideas that underpin the practice.

 'Making' the slide show was enjoyable and I felt creative. It  resulted in some useful materials to help me explain the background, purposes,  structure, process and tools underlying the scheme. I realise that this slideshow is an important tool and I can see how I might produce a podcast for the  website from the materials. I think this was an example of 'learning by making  a tool'. It's always hard to judge what participants are thinking but my sense is that they found it interesting and I am hoping they will want to participate.

 In putting the materials together I came across the old African proverb - it takes a village to raise a child and recognised the wisdom in this and its value to LWE as a concept. It is a great metaphor for thecommunity-based enterprise that will have to underlie the Award if it is to be successful.  I'm delighted that the on-line Community Forum I established two weeks ago is working really well and I hope that we can draw in the learners to share their experiences.
 
3 My third area of activity relates to my family.. At the weekend my wife and I took our daughter to university. Not surprisingly she was  apprehensive and anxious moving away from home for the first time.  We had prepared her as best we could and she had prepared herself by spending three weeks in France - her first independent holiday. After an emotional farewell we left her to get on with it. A week later she tells us how hard it's been - surprisingly she is 'having to juggle loads of things' and
'it's been so frustrating spending three days trying to get logged on to the university system' and 'everywhere is so big and it's easy to get lost' and 'the buses don't come and I spent an hour waiting for one in the rain'. This is why
going to university is good for you - it's a nice (protected) wake up call to the real world after years of timetabled familiarity..

My oldest daughter is very much in the real world with one child of 5 and two month old twins and a husband in America.. So I spent some time trying to help.. I was even left for 2 hours by myself with them - that was quite an experience and only filled me even more with admiration.  But at least I can feed them both at the same time now and I am growing in confidence and experience of how to look after them.. Incidentally, she is also two thirds through on OU degree trying to
fit in the assignments around babies and no sleep.. Its quite humbling...

 So an interesting week in which I think I have achieved in three areas of my development plan..

Learning in passing -I clicked a Linked-In Learning without Frontiers  link to a blog by Gaurav Gupta http://agoodschool.blogspot.co.uk and discovered a lovely little blog site called the Good School site..In it I
found the it takes a village to raise a child proverb and I contacted the writer (an Indian) with an invitation to write a short piece for Lifewide Magazine which he is doing.. I feel its a good example of useful knowledge and relationships emerging by just following links.

Sunday June 24
Every parent knows that the thing that they most want for their unborn child is to be healthy and when you are told that your newly born child may not be - it is an unbearable burden. Over the weekend my daughter learnt that when one of her new born twins stopped breathing a week or so after he was born, he might have suffered some damage to his brain. I cannot pretend to comprehend how she must have felt all I know is how I felt and she and my grandson have not been far from my mind ever since. At such times we realise that life is not just about development in a positivistic sense. It's about coping with things that fundamentally turn your world upside down, that require love and empathy in a profound way and I ultimately providing practical help and support wherever and whenever it is needed in ways that you never imagined before. This is profound mental and emotional adjustment within a set of relationships that lie at the centre of your life. As a parent it has hard to discover anything that is good in such a situation until you see the way your daughter starts to cope with the worst situation she can imagine and becomes positive and hopeful again. It is a lesson in the resilience of the human spirit and the profound love a mother has for her child or as she calls him - her little angel.

The concept of everyday creativity Ruth Richards suggests(1) that we are forever creative but sometimes its very hard to recognise any sort of creative thinking or activity in a single day. Yesterday was like that. I spent most of it in the garden trying to get it back to some sort of order after being away for a few weeks. The combination of rain and sunshine had made the grass grow to the point where it looked more like a cultivated crop than a garden. It was very physical and I was very tiered at the end. But I suppose that churning in my head were all sorts of thoughts and feelings about my recent visit to China and the people I had met and how I might continue to develop my relationships with some of them. If there was any creativity in my life that day it was in thinking how to build on my existing relationships. I had planned to set up and launch a Tweet Exchange on the theme of personal creativity and I had done this on Saturday so my focus today was in trying to engage people. So I invited all the speakers who had participated in the Chengdu conference and by the end of the day several had replied. It doesn't seem much but it meant a lot to me that people I had met only a few days before where making contributions to our topic and drawing other people in from their own network. At the end of the day I felt we had made some progress and as Teresa Amabile says - the sense of making progress provides the best conditions for nurturing our creativity (see video below ).

So perhaps I will be creative today?

1) Far from being a minor or specialised part of our lives, our everyday creativity - our originality of everyday life- is first of all, a survival capability. It is also a universal capability. But,........our everyday creativity offers us more: It offers a dynamic process and a powerful way of living. When developed, it can open all of us to new depths, richness and presence  (Richards 2007:3).

Richards, R., (2007) Introduction, in R. Richards (ed) Everyday Creativity and New Views of Human Nature. Washington: American Psychological Association. 1-22.

Teresa Amabile - Progress Principle

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.