My new experience this week was to be instigator of the 43rd LTHEchat Learning and Teaching in Higher Education Twitter channel ( #LTHEchat  http://lthechat.com/) so this post is my way of reflecting on my experience as a self-development process in order to explore how my creativity featured in it.

I recently came across Tom Senningers simple but useful learning zome model (1) it made a lot of sense to me. It pointed out that in order to develop we need to stretch ourselves. Just chugging along doing what we always do will not do it neither will being pushed into a situation where we are at 6's and 7's. With the benefit of hindsight I can see that by agreeing to act as instigator of a Twitter conversation I was putting myself into my stretch zone as I had not done this before. The stretch zone is outside our comfort zone. It involves some risk, for example making a fool of yourself in public.  Its unfamiliar and we find it challenging and have to work hard to understand and perform in it. But it's also exciting and rich in affordance for exploring something new and for creative action, and having experienced it we will almost certainly have developed some aspect of ourselves. It's the zone which holds the greatest potential for our personal and professional development so it's worth accepting the risk.

Creativity is seeing affordance and development is
the process that enables affordance to be realised
 
When Chrissi Nerantzi, one of the organisers, invited me to act as an 'instigator' I did my usual trick of trying to imagine what 'it' (the twitter conversation) might look like. I have a habit of trying to connect things, which I suppose is where I think much of my own invention lies,  as only I am interested in the things I'm interested in and therefore take the trouble to try to connect them. In this way I can invent stuff that stands a good chance of being original, because I'm the only one trying to do it!
 
One of the ways I have come to understand personal creativity is the ability to see the affordance(s) in something and development then being the means to enable you to access and make the most of the affordance. I could see the affordance in connecting the #lthechat with my interests in creativity and my current projects - producing the April issue of Creative Academic Magazine and contributing to World Creativity and Innovation Week. I reasoned that if we stuck to the same general theme 'exploring creativity in development and innovation' then they would inevitably be connected in a synergistic way. So I sat down and thought about some questions which  provided the framework for the #LTHEchat. I also designed a simple on-line questionnaire to gather more systematically information on the creative beliefs of participants.

#LTHEchat 
The chat has been storified by Chris Jobling. Two hours before we started the conversation I posted this image and invited people to share their perspectives on the sorts of journeys that development took them on: because development always involves a journey. I didn't get many responses but I like to think that it prepared the ground for conversation and hopefully planted the idea that there is no single right answer where developmental journeys are concerned - only lots of possibility.  In fact the answer to this question is development takes you where you need to go - you may not know exactly where you want to go when you start but generally you end up at, or near, the right destination.

#LTHEchat is an interesting phenomenon because it is a co-operative co-created process that produces a tangible product - the ideas, perspectives, experiences, insights and visualisations that are shared and curated on Twitter, and intangible outcomes - the learning and development of participants. The conversational part of this journey is co-created by participants within which many ideas, perspectives and resources are shared. These things emerge in response to the questions and to what other participants post including their visualisations. It is an energetic and  highly emergent process.  Neither the instigator or the participants know in advance what will come out of the process so the idea of exploration is very relevant to this type of developmental process.
​
an explorer can never know what he is
exploring until it has been explored' (2) 

However, with over 500 posts in 60mins the information flow is quite overwhelming. I was definitely in my stretch zone it felt exciting and there was a sense of anticipation that something new would emerge every second of the process. But at times I felt I was in my panic zone wondering how to respond and not surprisingly I felt distinctly uncreative in responding to the odd post and making my pre-prepared contributions aimed at promoting further conversation.  ​But I was able to enjoy the chaotic way in which ideas collided and emerged through the process.

The final product of this fairly chaotic conversational process is preserved in the #LTHEchat page and storified. It's also synthesised by individuals who share their reflections on what came out of the process for them. But the effects of the process are much more than what is preserved in the web space. The effects reside in the way that individuals now think about the things that were discussed, in the new tools/mediating artefacts they acquired and will use again to think about these things and in new relationships that were formed. Thanks to the event I have 18 new connections on twitter. I also have a new collaborative relationship and access to a lot of new resources and to an experience on which I can reflect and develop further my understanding of the relationship between my creativity and my development. Its often the intangibles, like new relationships, that hold most potential for future learning, achievement and creativity. In this way development for the present is also developing new potential for the future.

Development is fundamentally a search for new  meaning aided by our creativity

But the developmental journey relating to the chat is longer than the twitter conversation. For me it included the preparation and design, participation and the enjoyable experience of reading posts the day after the event and responding to those posts I found particularly interesting. It also involved this reflective process through which I looked back on the whole experience to make more sense of it.

One of the thoughts I had during the #LTHEchat conversation was that development was a process through which we searched for, discovered and attributed new meaning to what we are doing or what we have done. Whether we invent new process, perform something or make/produce something we are investing meaning in what we are doing and what we achieve. In this case I am interested in how my own creativity featured in my development process and this was my focus for reflection. In my synthesis of my own developmental process formed around the #LTHEchat I can recognise a number of steps within which I can appreciate how my creativity was involved in my development.

  In my synthesis picture of my own developmental process I recognise a number of steps within which I can appreciate my own creativity.
​
Step 1 involved me using my imagination to see the affordance in my life: affordance that enabled me to connect my involvement in the #LTHEchat with two other projects - production of the April issue of Creative Academic Magazine and the other work I'm doing for World Creativity and Innovation Week. My creativity was used to visualise a future and connect up things that I wanted to be related.
 
In Step 2 I explored ideas and made a design for the conversation based on 6 questions (and some supplementary questions / statement) and some visual aids I wanted to share. Creativity again involved imagination but this was also combined with reasoning in order to create a design that I hoped would work. I also prepared some visual aids drawing on and adapting materials I had used before and creating some new material.
 
Step 3 was to actively engage in the conversational process and try to respond to the wealth of ideas that populated the #LTHEchat  space. This was the hardest part for me - responding in real time is challenging when you are trying to read the material that is being posted, respond to posts that grab your attention and add the contributions you want to make. I did not feel creative at all in this part of the process. My one creative moment was when I saw the affordance in the artistic talent of one of the participants and invited him to contribute to Creative Academic Magazine.
 
Step 4 After the event I had time to look at the posts and assimilate some of the ideas. I had the time to compose a response and also to connect to people. I also undertook my own analysis to draw out the key ideas (when completed this will be posted as a pdf attachment) and I wrote this reflective piece and produced my narrative picture to capture the essence of my developmental process. This is my way of learning and creating personal meaning from the experience and it involves thinking in an integrative way combining imagination, analysis, reasoning and feelings and it most definitely feels like I am thinking creatively and producing something new. Its not in any way innovative but I am bringing things into existence that were not there before.

This final step in the development process enables us to see the whole rather than only the parts. It enables us to appreciate how well we have realised the affordance or potential we believed these particular circumstances offered and we can used this knowledge in future. Perhaps this subtle change in our understanding is where much of our creativity lies and yet this often goes unrecognised as a dimension of our creativity. Having reflected on my development process I was struck by how similar the overal pattern was to Zimmerman's (3) model of self-regulation - forethought, action and reflection - which of course is the normal pathway for how we learn in situations that are new to us.
 
I have always thought that I am creative in finding and persuading people to work with me and on this occasion, I am delighted to say, I found a new collaborator - Simon Rae @simonrae whose creative illustrations added humour and insight to the conversational process.

Thank you to everyone who participated and made this such an enjoyable experience.
  
Invitation
If you would like to contribute to the April issue of  Creative Academic Magazine on the theme of Creativity in Development please visit http://www.creativeacademic.uk/magazine.html

Sources
1  Senninger, T. (2000). Abenteuer leiten – in Abenteuern lernen. Münster/Germany: Ökotopia. Learning Zone Model. http://www.thempra.org.uk/social-pedagogy/key-concepts-in-social-pedagogy/the-learning-zone-model/
2 Bateson, G. (2000 reprint. First published 1972). Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology. Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press
3 Zimmerman B J (2000) Self-regulatory cycles of learning. In G A Straka (ed) Conceptions of self-directed learning, theoretical and conceptual considerations. New York, Waxman 221-234

​My Narrative of #LTHEchat43

Chris Joblings Storify

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

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

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

Using my experience to think about co-creation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When we launched LWE two years ago one of our goals was to support the people working in HE who are helping learners develop themselves through all their experiences. Our ambition was to try to bring people together to share their experiences and perspectives. Last week we ran our first ever conference  in at Birkbeck College London - so our Learning Lives conference  enabled us to achieve an important goal that we set out at the start of our existence.

Overall I felt the conference was a success - we attracted 65 people, we broke even on the costs, the contributors created an attractive programme and participants seemed to enjoy the day. They engaged and interacted well and their feedback to me was positive.

But in achieving the goal you realise that a conference is a process not an event. For the organisers it requires planning, designing, organising and promoting over a long period of time. It requires relationships to be made with people who are contributing and conversations about the nature of the contributions. It requires new infrastructures to be developed like the conference website.

For the contributors it requires them to invest time and effort in preparing their talks so that their personal knowledge can be shared in the most engaging way in the short time that is available.

For those who attend it involves engaging in the unfolding narrative and contributing their own stories to the narrative. In this modern age participants also play an important role in broadcasting through twitter the things that they find interesting so that others might learn.

So a conference is much more than an event. It is a tremendous collaborative, collegial, value-based effort that benefits not only the participants who are involved in the event but many people who we will never know who will access and make use of the resources we have created in future. 

A flavour of the conference can be gained from the conference tweets 
@lifewider
#lifewideeducation

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.

 Ariel Diaz talking at TEDxCambridge 2013 tells the story of how, as a 10 year old boy, he became fascinated by Formula One racing cars and it inspired him to study engineering. As an undergraduate studying Engineering at Dartmouth College  he found himself leading a team to build a race car and immersed in equations that enabled him to understand the dynamics of the vehicle. He spent night after night getting deep into these formulas but it was exciting and the purpose of this deep involvement was realised in the making and the creation of the race car. He argues that he would never have wanted to learn and master the equations if he had been made to memorise them without appreciating their purpose and significance and then goes on to draw the analogy with education. 

In his view 'we are forcing students to memorize seemingly irrelevant and mundane and boring details before allowing them to see the beauty and excitement intrinsic in every subject that they're about to study'. He maintains that 'education is created by experts and because they have so much knowledge about their subject they try to teach the detail before they share their understanding of the the beauty of the subject that got them excited in that subject in the first place'. His solution is to invert the curriculum - begin with the big inspiring ideas that give the context and purpose for studying something... then take students along a pathway which allows them to discover things for themselves before immersing them in the detail that reveals the inner workings of the subject. The wisdom in this story is that this is the way we learn in life outside the abstracted world of formal education. We find things we are interested in or need to know about and then work out how to gain a deeper understanding. Our interests, passions and needs provide us with the purpose that makes us want to learn more. We begin with the problem, the opportunity or the vision, we work out some ways of finding out more before we get into the detail of problem working or solution finding.

Diaz's solution to making formal education more relevant, exciting and meaningful is to flip the entire curriculum  'we need to start with the big ideas because when you start with big ideas you give students a great context and relevance for the subject they're about to study and also create inspiration and motivation. Then when you have this context and motivation you're able to create a natural and not forced learning pathway because that excitement that motivation leads to questions - how and why and then by answering those questions you get to organically build a deep [and personally significant] knowledge and a deep expertise.'

I picked this up through a twitter link.

In following up a twitter link I came across the US based organisation called Connected Learning which seems to share much of the ideology, educational orientations, passions and interests of Lifewide Education.

Connected Learning describes itself as an educational approach designed for our ever-changing world. It makes learning relevant to all populations, to real life and real work, and to the realities of the digital age, where the demand for learning never stops.
·  Learners are the focus: Specifically, developing lifelong learners with higher-order skills.
·  We build on the basics: The basics are important, but not enough for youth to thrive in our rapidly-changing world.
·  We connect three critical spheres of learning: academics, a learner’s interests, inspiring mentors and peers.
·  We harness the advances and innovations of our connected age to serve learning: Just as earlier generations
    tapped  the tools of their time to improve learning, we must do the same in the digital age.
·   Making, creating and producing are powerful paths to deeper learning and understanding: Connected learning 
    asks learners to experiment, to be hands-on, and to be active and entrepreneurial in their learning, recognizing that this
     is what is now needed to be successful in work and in life.

There is a lot of information on the website including a significant research report that I have yet to read. The website also hosts Connected Learning TV with regular programmes that feature different aspects of connected learning. For example the current series of programmes deals with Open badges and discovering pathways through connected learning. The video archives provide a fantastic resource for educators who are interested in encouraging and supporting lifewide learning. Connected Learning is a significant organisation and movement that Lifewide Education needs to connect with and learn from. I wrote to the CEO who kindly gave us permission to reproduce an edited version of one of their reports in Lifewide Magazine. 

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. 

I have been experimenting with twitter and discovered that the 140 characters were very restrictive. In the past I linked any substantial and personal thoughts to my blog but I decided that this was inappropriate. So I set up a scrapbook which allows me to record my thoughts on specific topics. It is effectively an extension of this blog. The first topic I used it for was the Olympics.   http://lifewidescrapbook.weebly.com/

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

I travelled to Southampton to do two more interviews. Both were very informative and individuals passed on to me stories about their innovation work and how they accomplished change. I recorded the conversations for later transcription and analysis, with lots of other transcripts, to identify common themes. I also chatted to PB and we had a conversation about the ownership of new processes/activity which cross cut functional areas of the university. I hadn't thoughts about this but she had given it a lot of thought.

I also tried to maintain a presence in twitter. Pulling my thoughts together I found it an interesting experience and I feel I now have some understanding about how it works - so that is my most important learning to date. I'm still not sure whether I'm learning very much through this form of communication (although I am glad I'm trying). I find the brevity frustrating and sometimes its hard to decipher other people's contributions and if no one responds to your question you are left feeling unfulfilled. I have also found it distracting to keep monitoring and contributing to discussion and frustrating that - people are good at avoiding the focusing question.

I want to know how the new people who have joined us have found us. I have posted invites in the RSA social network, linked in future of learning and PDP & Imaginative 

Curriculum networks... and Jenny posted to the community (Thats a lot of invites).... Two people I invited personally and both have made contributions.. I know these things depend on building a following but I am left thinking that there are very few people who want to engage in twitter conversations.....compared to example some of the email mail list discussions I have facilitated or witnessed. So I guess this is new knowledge gained through experience.

Its 10.30 I've watched 15 mins of news, switching to Jools Holland - to be exposed to new musical talent and then newsnight for my daily fix of political analysis.