I have a really interesting assignment on Wednesday to work with a group of staff and students at Sheffield Hallam University and facilitate a workshop aimed at exploring and re-imagining personal development  planning  (PDP) in the Social Age. 


To say I have a soft spot for PDP would be an understatement. Back in 1998-99 while working at QAA I facilitated the process of developing the policy framework for PDP. What I learnt through practitioners and my subsequent research convinced me of the value of linking a set of interconnected activities and experiences that included:

• thinking ahead and deciding what to do – analysing tasks, identifying  goals, creating strategies to achieve objectives; using reflection –  drawing on past experiences and imagining a different future 

• doing / producing things broadly in line with planned intentions but  being responsive to the effects of actions and changing plans if appropriate; learning through the experience of doing with greater self-awareness

• self-observing and recording - thoughts, ideas, experiences, actions and their effects, experiences, to develop a record of learning and to evidence the process and results of learning and support the enterprise of ‘learning  about learning

• thinking about what was done and what was achieved in order to learn  (reflecting, reviewing and evaluating; making sense of experience;  making judgements about self and the effects of personal action and  determining what needs to be done to develop/improve/move on; the enterprise also supports the process of learning about learning).

In my research, after the policy framework had been created, I discovered that this set of activities underlies the theory of self-regulation and this theory and PDP have influenced my thinking about learning and developing ever since. Lifewide education and lifewide learning are founded on the principles of self-regulation and the way of revealing learning and development is through PDP-type processes.

So it's with great pleasure that I am returning to thinking about PDP. What has changed in the last 15 years since PDP was introduced into UK HE is that we have now moved into the Social Age of collaborative learning and sharing. The Social Age is defined by the massive use of social media platforms that are changing behaviours and habits in respect of how we find, use, develop and distribute information and knowledge and create new meaning and understanding for ourselves and with others. It is being brought into existence as a result of the web 2.0 and web-enabling communication technologies and ever faster broadband, wifi, 3G + 4G technology that  enable connectivity almost anywhere at anytime with infinite information resources, and personal knowledge residing within the personal learning networks we create for ourselves. Enhanced connectivity is at the heart of the Social Age might be defined in terms of  'the creation of value (knowledge, understanding [or learning] and relationships) by connecting individuals who want to share their interests, knowledge, passions who form a relationship  to co-create new understandings. 

I've not been a particularly fast adopter of these technologies but slowly and surely over the last few years I have tried out website building tools and various social media and gradually adopted, in a selective manner, the technologies that help me do what I need to do. In the process I have also decided against using some technologies, or using them in a selective way.

So how has my PDP practice changed?
I like to think I have always been reflective and this has helped me learn from my experiences. I also think I've been reasonably good at imagining what I need to do in different contexts and developing strategies for achieving stuff. And I have worked out through experience that plans need to be fairly fluid to accommodate all the unexpected stuff that emerges through life. All this is internalised and for most things I don't need to sit down and make a plan on paper or formally write up a reflective report.

Throughout my career in many different professional my roles I have had to keep good records of what I have doing and plans of what I intended to do, and in the last 20 years of my career I went through annual appraisals of various sorts - many of which involved creating a narrative and filling out forms which asked the questions that managers wanted answered and did not necessarily tell the story in the way I wanted to.

I don't have to worry about this anymore, the only appraisal I go through is my own, and my wife's from time to time! Neither do I have to worry about building my cv anymore. But I am interested in developing my ideas and sharing them with others to see if they have value.  As an educationalist I am trying to model my ideas and practices for lifewide learning and creativity so I do devote quite a lot of time exploring how my ideas relate to my own life believing that if I can't apply them in my own circumstances they can't be much good.

One thing that hasn't changed is that I prefer to write in word and upload to other technologies. I find the familiarity of word gives me the freedom and flexibility to express myself in ways that writing on-line does not.

The characteristics of my PDP are documented below

1 My PDP is all informal. It's what I choose to do, when I want to do it and how I want to do it. I have to make up the rules and frameworks I use they are not given to me. The fact that I don't have to jump through any hoops and the products are not being used to appraise or assess me, is quite liberating.

2  Its contextual. My PDP reflects the circumstances of my life and it being created in the context of my interest in lifewide learning and creativity - which is my work.

3 I have to motivate myself to do it because no-one else will make me. So my motivation is intrinsic, driven by my purposes which is to model the practices I would expect of a lifewide learner and my interest in developing and sharing ideas that emerge through this process. For PDP to be successful it has to serve a useful purpose and fulfil a need which might be defined in terms of interest in myself and how I relate to others, and an interest in the educational ideas that emerge through the process.

4 It requires discipline. There are times when I'm so busy that time for writing about my experiences and learning is squeezed out, but somehow you have to squeeze it back in again. This means I have to value the process and what emerges from it.

5 it's about building a narrative of the events in my life and how I respond to them. The overall value to me is in the development of my narrative over time and it matters to me and probably no-one else. It is I suppose a vehicle for creative self-expression in a medium (writing) that I enjoy. I also see that my writings can serve a number of purposes which is another source of motivation.

6 It is about learning about myself. To develop my ideas I have to keep thinking about things I have not previously given much thought to. What often causes these triggered reflections is the stuff I read in other people's blogs which provide a prompt that I can't resist. How do I find these? Well I spend a lot of time on google searching for things that interest me but also I discover much through the Personal Learning Network I have constructed using Twitter. I usually check my feeds daily, although I can go days sometimes without doing this, and if a tweet looks interesting I follow the link to see where it takes me. I have learnt so much through this process.

7 I have to admit that I have the time or rather I can make the time because by doing it I'm not able to do something else. But not having to go to work every day

8 I am using quite a lot of technology to help me record my experiences and musings. Thanks to the Web 2.0 Weebly website building tool I have my own website which hosts my blog and a suite of other websites to support my educational work. My basic approach is to write a blog usually about something that has happened or something I have come across that has caused me to evaluate myself. I try to write something every week. If I think the ideas and perspectives in my blog might be of interest to others I share them either through my two educational websites (lifewide education and creative academic) or Linked in or for work that actually becomes publishable - academia.ed. When my ideas have been developed sufficiently I might publish them in our on-line Lifewide Magazine. I share my blogs through my three twitter accounts which serve different purposes and audiences.

Making sense of it 
Two friends who are in my PLN - Chrissi Nerantzi and Sue Beckingham, have developed a framework to help us understand how social media can be used. Its called the 5C framework - communicating, connecting, collaborating, creating and curating. Descriptions of how I'm using social media to support my PDP  I can see that I am engaged with all 5 of the C's. Firstly, my blog is all about communicating in words and images, my personal knowledge and insights to myself and to others who are interested. Connecting - I use my blog to connect ideas, link to resources and to connect to interested others. By posting on multiple sites and with forums like the special interest groups on LinkedIn, I expand the potential for people to connect to my ideas. Similarly I benefit from the connections I make in my PLN's and quite a few of my reflections have been triggered by the posts of others. Collaborating - this is probably the weakest aspect of my PDP practices although the topics of my reflections often make reference to the collaborations I'm involved in (such as my involvement with Hallam in this post). PDP for me is mainly a solitary practice although I could present a case that every idea I assimilate that triggers a reflection is a sort of collaboration and therefore many of my blogs are in fact co-created with the resources and ideas of others. Creating - my blog brings ideas and thoughts into existence that are new and original to me and I change my understanding through the writing process. The digital medium allows me to play with ideas and images in ways that I could never do before this technology was available.  Curating - I am curating my narrative and my ideas for myself and because I am always trying to be resourceful I make use of my writing for multiple purposes. For example I intend to use an edited version of this article in the next issue of Lifewide Magazine. By posting in my thematic websites I am adding content to other curated collections. The one thing I would add is another C - commitment. All this does require sustained  commitment and effort.

Why do I do it?
I left the big question until the end. I commit to engaging in PDP because I believe in its intrinsic worth. I also engage in PDP because of my professional interest in exploring and growing ideas from my everyday life and because it helps me to understand myself. I also do it because to be an active participant in the Social Age, sharing my personal knowledge and insights with anyone who is interested.

My PDP is an integral part of my learning ecology. For example this post is a personal inquiry, prompted by the forthcoming Hallam workshop, in order to gain a better understanding of what PDP practice means to me. My intention is to share this post with participants as part of the knowledge development process around the workshop. 

Last but not least, the PDP practices I describe above is one of my outlets for creative self-expression.  Furthermore, the new insight I have gained from this examination of my own PDP practices is to conclude that I use my PDP process not only to reflect on what I have done and make sense of my experiences, I use it to actively explore new ideas and things I haven't thought about before. That is why it is such an important part of my ecology for learning and developing.

If you would like to share your ideas and practices relating to PDP please leave a comment.


Sources
Nerrantzi, C. and Beckingham, S. (2014)  Our Magical Open Box to Enhance Individuals' Learning Ecologies. Chapter 2 In N.J.Jackson and J. Willis (eds) Lifewide Education in Universities and Colleges
http://www.learninglives.co.uk/uploads/1/0/8/4/10842717/chapter_c2_revised.pdf
QAA (2009) Personal development planning: guidance for institutional policy and practice in higher education Available on-line at: http://www.qaa.ac.uk/en/Publications/Documents/Personal-development-planning-guidance-for-institutional-policy-and-practice-in-higher-education.pdf
Stodd,J. (ed) (2014) Exploring the Social Age and the New Culture of Learning. Lifewide Magazine Issue 11 Available on line at http://www.lifewidemagazine.co.uk/

Inspiring story
You can find inspiring stories about lifewide learning everywhere. I am visiting my mother in Australia this week who lives in a small coastal town over 200km south of Sydney. I love coming to her home which she has lived in for 28 years. It's very peaceful apart from the ticking clocks and the colourful and noisy parakeets, lorikeets and rosella's that fly around continuously. The time I spend here is always good for reflection especially when I take long walks along the local beaches. The place triggers memories of different visits we have made over twenty years as my children grew up and eventually visited their grandparents by themselves.  In many respects this has been the family home for the third and now the fourth generation of the Jackson clan, for we are many.

 Whenever I visit Australia I'm always on the lookout for interesting ideas that I can relate to Lifewide Education's interests. I am never disappointed. On my last visit I discovered a local charity called the Dunn Lewis Foundation(1) that had been set up in memory of young people who had been killed in the Bali nightclub bombing doing a lot of good work to support young people and help them develop skills to gain employment but more generally to develop themselves as confident people. This week I discovered 'Men's Sheds' because just across the road from my mother's house in Narrawallee sits the Ulladulla Men's Shed.

Last week we published the latest edition of Lifewide Magazine on the theme of Exploring the Social Age. I was commissioning editor and I worked closely with the Guest Editor Julian Stodd. In many respects the way this collaboration came about was symptomatic of the Social Age. I was doing some research for the last issue of the Magazine when I came across Julian's blog. I liked some of what he had written and emailed him for permission to use one of his blogs. Not only did he say yes but he invited me to a workshop he was running. I accepted his invitation and in this way we formed a relationship which led to me inviting him to guest edit the issue. Essentially, the collaboration has come about because Julian shared his thinking in a very public and accessible way through his blog and I discovered his thinking through purposeful searches driven by interests and curiosity. We both saw the value in each other's ideas, formed a relationship and through that relationship joined each other's communities and networks. In this way each of us is able to progress our own thinking and practice and connect with and influence people we would not have been able to connect with before. This is an example of learning and developing in the Social Age.

In putting the Magazine together I came across a number of articles that provided a perspective on the Social Age. I was pleased with the result.

BUT that is not the end of the story for I have proved to myself yet again that to appropriate the ideas of others I have to connect them to my own current understandings and then use the ideas of others to extend or change my understandings. It is most definitely a constructivist approach.

Over the last few days I have been preparing my lectures for a visit to BNU in Beijing next week.  I have been developing a new presentation on the theme of the Social Age and the new culture of learning. Inspite of my work on the Magazine when it comes to presenting ideas I had to start again in organising my thoughts and connecting them to other people's ideas. I have had to engage with the ideas at a deeper level to make sense of them in ways that I can relate to my own life and experiences.

I've always known that when you have to teach something you engage at a deeper level not only to understand ideas but to create the supporting visual representations, documentary and video resources that will enable you to explain in ways that you hope your audience will understand and be able to connect to their own understandings.  I approach this as a new learning project which I know will extend into the interactions with my students. In fact I see it as an ecology containing a number of processes and extending over several weeks. I have begun to sketch out the main components of this ecology below and I will refine this over the coming weeks. After listening to John Seeley Brown on Yotube I came to see myself as INDWELLING in my own learning ecology.  Indwelling feels like the right sort of state of being for an ecology.

To be continued perhaps next week