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.

Sometimes the development of an idea falters because it is just too expensive to turn the idea into a practical reality. But good ideas are never lost they just get put on the back burner. About 18 months ago I started a business project called storyshare. The basic idea was to help people create stories that were personally meaningful and help them bring their story to life through illustration, sound and animation. I made a business plan and attempted to find some illustrators - one of these became our LWE community illustrator so this part of the process was a success. But at the time I failed to see how I could make it a commercial success as I could not animate the illustrations without a great deal of expense and I knew that the potential market would not buy the service at a price that would cover the costs and make a small profit. So the idea was put on hold - until this week when I discovered the explee animation tool. I can now see how it will be possible to animate the illustrations in an inexpensive way so the cost of the service would be limited to the illustrations themselves. I thought it was a great example of how advances in technology can suddenly liberate and idea.  I offer my story as an illustration of what explee can do.  The illustrator is Kiboko Hachiyon. Thanks again to Chrissi Nerantzi who drew my attention to explee.

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



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

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

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

I am continually thinking about my learning ecology these days. Earlier this week I made a breakthrough in understanding how I can use twitter to promote our work - basically you start following people, you notice what they are doing  and you tweet the people who have a lot of followers. If they like your tweet they re-tweet to their followers. It's taken me a while to work it out for myself but better late than never. But once I started to follow people twitter started putting in front of me the names of other people I might be interested in following. So I checked out a few of these and this morning I began following Alison Link. The first two tweets I clicked on turned out to be fabulous resources for Lifewide Ed - an organisation called Connected Learning which I will talk about in another blog, and a website True Stories of Openness http://stories.cogdogblog.com/ produced by Alan Levine. One of the stories by Shawn White was about  the serendipitous nature of Twitter describing his own story http://stories.cogdogblog.com/twitterdipity/ and coining the term twitterdipity. Well here I was experiencing the same phenomenon. 

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As a committed lifewider I'm a firm believer in the principle that what you gain from an experience is proportional to what you put into it. One of my failings perhaps is, if I'm busy, I don't try things for long enough or put enough effort in to appreciate the value in something. I had made my mind up to put effort into our twitter week long conversation even though I was quite busy. And looking back over the week I can see that I did learn lots of new things. I knew next to nothing about how to use twitter before I started and the practice I had had only confirmed my prejudices so I suppose I was quite sceptical about its value to me. But I can now appreciate some of the value in twitter (thanks to the people who helped me - Nick, David and Jane in particular) and how I can incorporate twitter into my personal learning strategies

1) Knowing next to nothing at the start it is easy to see that I now know something.I am now confident in composing and posting messages and being able to search for people and topics.

2) I gained some new experience in trying to engage people in the twitter conversation and in setting up the invitations on the website.

3) I have to say that I found the form of conversation frustrating and I didn't think I progressed my understanding of LWL beyond what I already knew. In fact I found some of the ideas confusing I think because I was not appreciating the contexts in the minds of those offering the ideas. But I acknowledge that others did seem to get excited by things that I wasn't able to appreciate so there is value in witnessing how others are inspired. 

4) Which takes us into the affective domain. We all look for inspiration and I posted a question on a Linked in forum this week relating to what inspires us. I could clearly see that some of the posts that were made on twitter seemed to inspire people and I did towards the end of the week (see below) experience some inspiring moments. So I can now appreciate that posts made in twitter can be a source of inspiration. * I'm also trying to engage with linked-in so I have been able to make comparisons between twitter and linked in and see how twitter posts are used in linked in.

5) The event introduced me to new people and their work which was important new relational knowledge and off-line I approached one person with a view to trying to engage them as a supporter of and contributor to our work.

6) I took the trouble to search out blogs that provided concise and useful knowledge about twitter so began to use codified knowledge and personal wisdom gained from experienced users. Twitter now began to make more sense to me because I have had the practical experience of trying to use it (see attachment)

7) By Day 5 (thursday) I was beginning to adopt an exploratory approach - forcing myself to go beyond the conversation. I was not so interested in what people were saying in the conversation as the links to video's and blogs that people provided. I started to follow up links e.g #learning that one of the participants was providing. And then did my own searching for messages that looked interesting following up the links in them. I came across David Gerteen who I was aware was a well known thought leader. L clicked on one of his links and it took me to a great website with some excellent video speaker content - now I realised that by following links that looked meaningful I could find resources that were useful to me - my work and expanded my understanding. I began to see for the first time the value of twitter from the perspective of incorporating it into a personal learning strategy. But I had to invest quite a lot of time to get to this stage of enlightenment.

8) Then moving from links to people I identified one or two people who seem to be productive thought leaders in fields that I am interested in and began to follow them so on Friday morning I spent 20mins checking up on links provided and found some interesting resources. So I can see the value of following and hopefully if you post things of interest to others - of being followed.

So all in all I have developed through this experience some useful experience-based insights (some knowing how to), acquired and made use of existing codified knowledge, gained some very valuable relational knowledge, identified and connected to some thought leaders that I'm sure will inspire me, improved my media literacy ( a little), and I can now see how I can incorporate twitter into a personal learning strategy. In other words, through taking the time to engage in activity through which I might learn something new,  I have shifted from being ignorant, sceptical and having no competency in using this technology to a position of relative enlightenment and having some new capability, confidence, interest and belief. And I have overcome my prejudice and scepticism.

Not bad in 5 days!! 


APPLYING MY LEARNING 19/05/12
Learning about something and then enacting what you have learnt are two different things. On Saturday morning I added a twitter button to my blog and made myself spend 20mins checking out #Learning and found a really interesting link to Charles Jennings blogs. Its an area of learning and development I was not aware of and I have read his articles and re-posted one of them on the Lifewide Education website. The proof of the pudding is in the eating then I have eaten twitter and it tastes good. I was also pleased to see this post by David Roberts which showed that someone had taken an interest in my learning.

David C Roberts ‏@DavidCRobertsVery telling blog post by @lifewider1 about a learning exploration on#Twitter http://www.normanjackson.co.uk/scraps-of-life-blog.html#learning #heutagogy #LW1 #PhDchat

Technology is responsible for more than its fair share of giving me new experiences - often not particularly nice experiences. Last night we (the lifewide team) tried, with the help of NB, to run an introductory twitter seminar. I have to say it wasn't a very good experience but I think we learnt quite a lot from it and it cedrtainly made us shift into problem solving mode.

NB provided a useful background paper with lots of prompts and I along with 4 others tried to log on to the twitter page and have a conversation - albeit limited to 140 characters. Most of us managed to get onto the page but one of us was not aboe to see everyone else and we couldn't help him with the problem.

I think we all fumbled beyond the basics of posting a message and we never had a structured discussion. I didn't find the hosting page at all helpful. There should be a way of putting up some basic instructions about the timing and format. I came away with the impression that it has to be essentially for people who are already familiar with twitter rather than for complete novices.

Neverthless we are committed to trying to run a series of events from next week so we have a real need to learn how to do it quickly.

Postscript - not surprisingly there were lots of email exchanges afterwards and JC did a splendid job of highlighting the potential benefits of twitter for 'students'.. the upshot of the discussion was that we agreed that it would be more sensible to host a week long event..

In thinking about my creativity in everyday experience I am struck by how much of it involves other people. Indeed, I guess a good use of one's own creativity is to help someone else be creative. My work with chalk mountain is very much like this. A few months ago I came up with a  business idea which we called storyshare. The idea is that storyshare will enable people to create a real or imaginary story involving themselves and other people who are important and special in their life and bring it to life through pictures, sound or animations that are created by freelance artists working for chalk mountain.

 The product offer includes
1)            Short story in words and pictures printed in colour
2)            Cartoon strip poster (could also be printed on a T-shirt)
3)            On-line digital story and pictures with or without spoken narrative and sound     effects
4)            On-line animation

To demonstrate the idea I wrote a short story called adventure on chalk mountain and included some photos for context. Then I commissioned an artist to have a go at interpreting the story. Ed created a small sound booth in our studio and we recorded a soundtrack and he added some great sound effects. He then set about creating a website. I got a bit frustrated waiting for the illustrations but eventually they came. Some of them didnt fit the story too well but with a bit of feedback and a bit of doctoring by Ed using photoshop we eventually had the images we wanted and Ed put them into a digital story book together with the narrative and sound effects. Take a look and see what you think.

Chalk Mountain Adventure - example digital story with narrative, illustrations and sound effects

When I reflect on the set of experiences I think it involved a lot of creativity. It involved generating an idea which I think was quite novel. An idea that could only have been born in the context of our Chalk Mountain enterprise. It was probably driven by the need to create new ideas for business that were consistent with our mission to enable organisations and people to share their knowledge and values. Then together we brought the idea into existence. Each of us making our own contribution and these were combined by Ed, using technology, in a way that achieved what we had imagined. My role was to create the conditions which enabled it to happen (idea, example story, capable people, relationships, resources and interactions).

But who is to say its creative? Well the example story was a true(ish) story and I wrote it for my grandson's 5th birthday. I sent the link to his mum and they read it together several times. He loved it and I know he did because he told me the story in exquisite detail. So it made me feel good that our efforts had been worthwhile and it made me realise how much my own creativity can be enhanced by combining my ideas and products with the talents of other people. But then I have always known this.