Some weeks are so different to anything we have experienced before. This week was one of them. It's been a long time coming but my appointment with the surgeon finally arrived. I've been lucky to only have one operation in my life - when I was 17 I broke my jaw in a football match. But over the years I have become familiar with hospitals as other members of my family have been through illness, emergencies and elective surgery. Nevertheless, this was my first journey as a patient for a long time. My surgeon's goal was to replace half my knee the inner (medial) compartment, which he seems to have done very well. Four days after having the operation I am back home and can look back on my experience at the Royal Surrey County Hospital. Its has been very good. I received excellent professional medical care from all the people involved and I came away feeling extremely grateful for the service and care I had received and proud that our NHS is doing this day in day out.

There has been much talk recently of immigration and the NHS but I was struck by how international the NHS workforce is - even in deepest Surrey!. Over three days I was on the ward I lost count of the different nationalities of the people who worked on the ward which included - British, Chinese, Indian and Italian doctors, British, Chinese and Jamaican nurses, Polish physio, Russian and Nepalese cleaners, Ghanian and Philippino porters to name but a few. The value of this truly international ensemble proved itself when on the last night a sick Slovakian man who spoke no English was admitted and both the Russian speaking cleaner and Polish physiotherapist were able to converse with him and act as interpreters.

Being on a ward with five other (English) men during my recovery was also something of an experience - the friendly humorous but at times irreverent banter, raised our spirits and enabled us to keep cheerful even though we were very sore. I was impressed with the tolerance and humour of nursing and care staff. Sadly, in spite of being surrounded by the benefits of living in a multicultural society the talk was all about leaving the EU and stopping foreign people from coming to live and work in the UK. The views that my fellow patients expressed seemed so at odds with the realities of the situation we were in: while all of us patients were English (white older men) a fair proportion of the people who were caring and looking after us had not been born in the UK. I was also struck by a remark made to me by a young Italian doctor who had chosen to come and work here because he appreciated the values on which the NHS is founded. My experience brought home to me the fantastic social creation that is our NHS.

​Preparing a talk for a conference is always a great incentive to take a fresh perspective on something. Preparing my contribution for the Dublin Institute of Technology conference on Educational Climate Change: Exploring Our Learning Environments got me thinking about the meanings of 'climate' in the context of change in higher education.

The term climate is used in schools, particularly in the USA, where it refers to 'the quality and character of school life'.... School climate reflects the patterns of students', parents' and school personnel's experience of school life and the norms, goals, values, interpersonal relationships, teaching and learning practices, and organizational structures - its an experiential phenomenon (1). This meaning focuses on a particular school environment and I wanted also to consider the climate within which educational institutions exist so I went back to the idea of 'climate' as a phenomenon involving the overall pattern of temperature and precipitation experienced in a particular regions of our planet. These zones are affected primarily by latitude, altitude, wind movements, distance from the sea and major sea currents. From year to year the climatic zones appear stable but on the scale of decades, centuries and millennia we can observe shifts in response to fundamental changes in such things as rises in greenhouse gases and global changes in ocean currents as polar ice melts. If we look at the geological time scale we see climate changes affected by movement of the landmasses through plate tectonics.

They are clearly complex in their origin, influenced by many factors that change over time and clearly influence the societies which inhabit their regions. Humans adapt to live their everyday life in different climatic zones and as change is slow, in general, they are able to cope with the effects of change. Within climate zones we have weather and weather can sometimes be extreme. Weather determines our daily responses to living within a particular climate and often demands an immediate response in our behaviours - for example to avoid getting soaked, frozen or over heated.

Both climate and weather provide us with a complex set of atmospheric conditions that are subject to change and both can be used as metaphors for viewing the conditions for, and responses to, change within a higher education system. The educational climate relates to the fundamental pattern of beliefs and ideas within a society many of which transgress different societies who share the same values about the aims and purposes of higher education, conceptions of learning and the way learning can be encouraged and supported and the ways in which institutions are configured to support higher education. The educational climate is sustained by the global patterns of  thinking and behaviour of the people who teach, develop, administer and govern higher education. Changes in this pattern of thinking and behaviour happen relatively slowly through the sharing and discussion of new ideas as they emerge and are distributed through books, social media, conferences and slowly translated into new beliefs and social practices of the people who teach, develop, administer and govern higher education.

Within this constellation of climatic beliefs and ideas we have the equivalent of weather. In England these are such things as new government policies like the introduction or raising tuition fees in England, or additional funding for certain types of activity - like widening participation, or new forms of regulation like the Quality Framework developed by QAA at the start of 21st century, the National Student Satisfaction Survey, or the introduction of new institutional policies, frameworks strategies and imperatives. Like the weather we experience on a daily basis, such things require us to respond quickly and collectively they combine to produce a climate within which people develop their sense of belonging and attitudes to change. Most individuals respond to the drivers of change only when they have to, but some individuals who develop and lead new practices, strategies and technological developments (innovators, developers and managerial leaders) generate their own 'weather' when they come up with new ideas and invent new social and/or technological practices and these can impact on the wider institutional environment. 

Which brings us back to the idea that organisations create their own climates and micro-climates reflecting the culture, the way people feel about their environment and the way people think and behave within that organisation. Organizational climate generally refers to the degree to which an organization focuses on and emphasizes such things as: concern for employee well-being and their learning and development, encouragement, involvement and empowerment of people working in the organisation, and appreciation and recognition for their efforts and achievements, and support for individuals' creativity and innovation. I've been fortunate in my career to feel that the environments I have worked in have enabled me to feel I could try to do things that required my creativity without fear of being pilloried if I failed. But I also recognise that this feeling is a very personal thing as I worked alongside colleagues who experienced the same organisational environment in a different way because, for example, they had a more difficult relationship with their manager (who could have been the same manager as I had). So 'climate' is both a general set of circumstances that shape our attitudes and beliefs and a particular set of experienced circumstances and relationships that affect us as individuals and enable or inhibit our thinking and actions. This way of thinking brought home to me the importance of the climate that envelops us in our ecologies for learning, developing and achieving (2) in which we use our creativity, and how a positive and optimistic orientation to the climate in which we work, stimulates or inhibits our creativity to produce very different results and performances.   I wonder what other people think of this and I welcome the sharing of personal experiences that illuminate these relationships interdependences.

​A higher education institution is a specialised eco-social system in which the inhabitants relate and interact for the purpose of learning and the development of knowledge and understanding and the recognition of such. Each institution has physical features & cultural characteristics that are particular to itself and the people who inhabit it. The ecosystem is connected and open to the flow of ideas, influences and relationships with the world outside the institution. These continuous interactions result in change as people in the organisation assess and respond to emerging situations to adapt to, and take advantage of changing circumstances. Some of the more important factors that affect the climate for educational change, and encourage people to innovate their practices, are shown in the adjacent diagram.

A few years ago I was invited to study the way a university had tried to change itself through a three year programme of strategic change aimed at encouraging staff to innovate. It was very noticeable that the institution created its own climate for change which enabled staff to want to be involved and make change happen. As I was completing the study I had an insight that a university could be self-actualising by connecting is ambitions to achieve more of its potential to employees who were also trying to actualise themselves through the development of their own educational practices. It seemed to me that this climate for educational and institutional change that enabled and sustained a self-actualising ecosystem, was underpinned by a set of principles that related to leading, managing and creating a climate within which people felt enabled and supported. These factors and conditions are listed below.

Factors and conditions that support, encourage and enable strategic change through bottom-up innovation (Baker, Jackson and Longmore 2014)
Leadership, management & facilitation of strategic change & bottom up innovation
1    Leadership is shared and distributed throughout the organisation
2    A strategic vision that inspires people to create their own visions for change that they will embody
3    A strategy for both planned and emergent change 
4    A strategy that involves the whole socio-cultural environment
5     Involvement of brokers to facilitate change across and between organisational structures, hierarchies and boundaries
6    An effective but flexible approach to managing and accounting for resources
 
Environmental /cultural factors that support, encourage and enable strategic change and  bottom-up innovation
An environment/culture that :

• promotes effective, honest and meaningful communication
• recognises and supports resolution of local contentious practice and facilitates rather than inhibits progress
• encourages/facilitates new relationships and collaborations to foster change
• provides emotional support and celebrates what has been achieved
• values learning and encourages and enables people to share what has been learnt so that it can be used and adapted to other contexts
• encourages people to take risks to put themselves into unfamiliar situations where they need to harness their creativity to  realise their ideas and actualise themselves

​These factors go a long way to showing what is important in creating an institutional climate within which people feel encouraged, trusted and empowered to contribute to the strategic change process through their own efforts and inventions. Innovators in higher education institutions are driven by their own visions of a better world and self-belief that they can make their world better and by a deep sense of moral purpose and concern for their students' learning and achievements. They are able to sustain these beliefs through thick and thin. They don't just have ideas they enact and embody their ideas and gain feedback from their actions that continue to reinforce their self-belief or enable them to adjust themselves towards better performances and solutions. But they benefit from being located in an environment in which they feel trusted and supported. The relationships innovators have with their environment (including it's climate) is profound. In the words of Carl Rogers (3) creativity is 'the emergence in action of a novel relational product growing out of the uniqueness of the individual on the one hand, and the materials, events, people, or circumstances of his life'  

There is a strong overlap with the extensive organisational research conducted by Amabile and Kramer (4) on the socio-cultural work environment who identified four categories of nourishers  that have a significant impact on the way people feel about their work environment and on their creativity and productivity in their work namely:
 
1 Respect - managerial actions determine whether people feel respected or disrespected and recognition is the most important of these actions.
 
2 Encouragement -  for example when managers or colleagues are enthusiastic about an individual's work and when managers express confidence in the capabilities of people doing the work increases their sense of self-efficacy. Simply by sharing a belief that someone can do something challenging and trusting them to get on with greatly increases the self-belief of the people who are engaging with the challenge.
 
3 Emotional support - People feel more connected to others at work when their emotions are validated. This goes for events at work, like frustrations when things are not going smoothly and little progress is being made, and for significant events in someone's personal life. Recognition of emotion and empathy can do much to alleviate negative and amplify positive feelings with beneficial results for all concerned.
 
4 Affiliation - people want to feel connected to their colleagues so actions that develop bonds of mutual trust, appreciation and affection are essential in nourishing the spirit of participation. One of the challenges for innovators is that they often feel alone because they are moving into new territory by themselves - where there is no-one they can affiliate with! By connecting innovators to each other and to an overall strategy organisations can help build new affiliations amongst innovators.

Climate is very much part of the institutional ecosystem and any institutional ecosystem that wants to involve people in innovation needs to be mindful of whether its own climate promotes or inhibits change or simply sustains what already exists.
 
So how do I fit into this complex pattern of educational climate change and weather? In my last role within an institution I think I was trying to bring about a change in the institutional climate and through this have a wider impact on the climate of UK higher education. I'm no longer working in an institutional environment so I try to feed my ideas into conversations and discussions that help nurture the climate for change across higher education.  This way of thinking connects to the topic of my talk at DIT namely learning ecologies and institutional ecosystems as higher education institutions are connected and subject to influences and forces analogous to climate and weather.

What do you think are the important global and local factors influencing the climate for change in your institution?

ADDENDUM - after writing this post I came across a very good example of how a change in Government policy - proposed introduction of Teaching Excellence Framework in England can have an impact on the climate for change in Scottish higher education.  https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/blog/tef-view-scotland-professor-frank-coton-university-glasgow

​Sources
1) https://schoolclimate.org/climate/
2) Jackson, N.J. (2016) Exploring Learning Ecologies, Available from Lulu https://www.lulu.com/
3) Baker, P., Jackson, N.J. and Longmore, J. (2014) Tackling the Wicked Challenge of Strategic Change: The story of how a university changed itself Authorhouse.
4) Rogers, C.R., (1961) On becoming a person. Boston: Houghton Mifflin
5) Amabile, T. M. and Kramer, S. J. (2012) The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work. Boston: Harvard Business Review Press.

Image credits:
climatic zones http://www.geography.learnontheinternet.co.uk/topics/climatezones.html
organisational climates - my own

Our learning, development and achievement constitute the most important ongoing project in our life. They are continuous (lifelong), diverse in their forms and pervasive in the multiplicity of everyday contexts and situations we inhabit (lifewide). In adult life, beyond formal education, our learning, development and achievement emerge from the circumstances of our lives often in an unpredictable and unplanned way. Over the last few years I have become deeply interested in the way in which we inhabit and interact with the world and the way our learning, development and achievement emerges through these interactions. I have come to see this process as ecological in nature and I have become so attached to the idea that I have spent the last six months working on a book called 'Exploring Learning Ecologies'(1) and I now need to gain feedback on whether the way I have come to see an ecology for learning, developing and achieving has value to people who are involved in helping people learn.

Concept
In the natural world, every organism inhabits an ecosystem which comprises the complex set of relationships and interactions among the resources, energies, habitats, and residents of an area for the purpose of living. Each organism within an ecosystem has its own ecology within the ecosystem interacting in its own unique way with its environment and the other inhabitants, seeking and using particular resources and forming  particular relationships with the materials and events in its world. 

Human beings are no different. We inhabit our own ecological (ecosocial) system which comprises the set of relationships and interactions among the people, resources, energies, habitats, and other residents of the particular environments we inhabit for the purpose of living. Where we are different to all other organisims on this planet is in our ability to learn and develop through this learning and to pass on this learning to other members of our species. Learning is therefore one of the most important dimensions of our ecology for sustaining and enhancing our life and the concept of a learning ecology provides us with the means to visualise the dynamics of complex self-determined and self-organised learning process and appreciate how the different elements of the ecology - contexts, process, will and agency, relationships and resources, fit together in a particular set of circumstances.

The concept of a learning ecology provides a more comprehensive and holistic perspective on learning, development and achievement than is normally considered in higher education. The value of an ecological perspective is that it encourages us to see our learning and development as a process that connects us in a holistic and profound way to other people, to the material resources in our environment and the events and circumstances of our lives, and to the things we want or need to do and achieve.

The proposition I'm developing is that an individual's self-created learning ecologies grow from the circumstances (contexts and affordances) of their life and they are established for a purpose that is directed to accomplishing short term (proximal) goals connected to more distant (distal) goals or life purposes. Their learning ecologies include their processes, activities and practises, their relationships and networks, and the tools and technologies they use, and they provide them with the opportunities, experiences, information, knowledge and other resources for learning, developing and achieving something that they value (Figure 1 & 2).
​
Figure 1 Components of a learning ecology (1)

Our learning ecologies are the means by which we connect and integrate our past and current experiences and learning. They embrace all the physical and virtual places and spaces we inhabit and the learning and the meaning we gain from the contexts and situations that constitute our lives. Our learning ecologies are the product of both imagination and reason and they are the vehicle for our creative thoughts and actions. They are one of our most important sites for creativity and they enable us to develop ourselves personally and professionally in all aspects of our lives.

The perpetual challenge of development
The perpetual challenge facing all human beings is fundamentally adevelopmental challenge focused on problems like 'learning to deal with and make the most of the situations, resources and opportunities in our lives' and 'solving the problems and challenges we encounter day to day'. There is also a developmental challenge emanating from within, 'how can I be and become a better human being.' These two forces, one intrinsic the other extrinsic drive our motivations which lead to us creating ecologies for learning, developing and achieving. These forces involve us in the continual process of becoming different which invariably means learning new things by adding to existing knowledge or skill, or replacing something which we already have. In this way development is integral to our daily project of perpetually becoming.

Figure 2 Simple conceptual tool for evaluating the components of an ecology for learning and development (1) .

Example of an ecology for learning, developing and achieving
Our ecologies for learning, developing and achieving are revealed in the narratives we tell about our significant learning and development projects and events. Our projects come in all shapes and sizes, and in all contexts. We might illustrate the idea of an ecology for personal development through the scenario of learning to drive a car (Figure 3) an important learning project for most young adults. The scenario involves the learner in a comprehensive and mainly informal way interacting physically and emotionally with his environment in order to develop the knowledge, awareness and practical skills to drive competently and safely.

The process begins when the learner decides they want to learn to drive(motivation/will) and take the test to demonstrate proficiency (proximal goal). Consciously or unconsciously their desire to drive will be embedded in the idea of a better and more productive life (distal goal). The individual has created a need and they must perceive and find the affordances available to them in their environment in order to meet this need. The  individual, often with parental guidance and support, creates processdrawing on the affordances in their existing ecosocial system, to learn and develop themselves in line with their objective. The ecosystem they create includes context, resources, relationships and an unfolding (emergent) process over a significant period of time.

Figure 3  Personal learning ecology created in order to learn to drive a car and pass the driving test. Includes my context, affordances  and process for learning to drive, the contexts in which I learn to drive, and a set of relationships and resources that enable me to learn.

Typically, the process involves:

• several months of dedicated activity reading, practising, discussing, observing,
• access to a car so they can practise
• access to information about driving and the rules of the road - either as a book/booklet, DVD or on-line resources
• a range of driving instructors including a trained professional instructor and untrained family members and friends

• physical environment - safe areas for practising - like empty car parks and quiet roads - then public highways with various traffic conditions

This example of an ecology for learning shows the learner seeing and using the affordances they have to learn to drive in their particular context - their social, physical and virtual environment. They formulate a specific goals - to learn to drive and pass the test to become a qualified driver. Their self-determined learning process may well be aided by a professional instructor but the learner also draws on resources available for learning in their own environment - the knowledge and experience of people they know (relationships) - family and friends. As they practise driving they are immersing themselves in situations that are relevant to their learning and developing their own case examples of situations they encounter on different sorts of roads in different sorts of driving conditions. The experience is rich in emotion (I experienced some today as I accompanied my daughter who is learning!!) which helps anchor their learning in memorable moments and incidents. Over time experience is accumulated in a range of contexts - road, traffic, day time/night time and weather. As they participate in this process they can tap into the experiential knowledge (resources) of the people who accompany them on journeys as both drivers and passengers and their new awareness also encourages them to be more observant as a passenger so that they begin to think like a driver, reading and anticipating situations even when they are not driving. The conversations they have about their experiences will also encourage them to reflect and learn through this process. This ecology aimed at becoming a competent driver - may last several months and perhaps involve 10's or 100s hours of time and effort in which learning and its embodiment in their driving practise is the primary goal. If they are not successful in their test they will experience and feel failure and have to overcome this as well.

Through their learning ecology a person will gradually master a body of procedural and experiential knowledge and practical skill and embody this knowledge in their driving and eventually reach the standard to pass the test. Their learning, development and achievement have emerged from their interactions with their everyday environment and the circumstances of their life and the idea of a learning ecology embodies all these things.

What's the point?
The point of any idea is in its value. Does the idea convey meaning that is useful, that helps us understand, appreciate  or explain something. If it does can we use the idea to help us design/create better practices. In developing an idea like a learning ecology I'm trying to give the ecological metaphor new meanings that are relevant to learning, education personal development. But its one thing to persuade myself that an idea has meaning and quite another to persuade other people. Its my belief that the idea of a learning ecology holds different value for different audiences.

Firstly it has conceptual value: as a  means to visualise the dynamics of a complex self-determined and self-organised learning process and to appreciate how the different elements of the ecology fit together to achieve a goal.
a means of enabling people to develop themselves for ever more complex relational and connected ways of thinking and behaving
For learners: The concept encourages them to see learning as a process and appreciate the ways in which they create processes that utilise and develop relationships and resources in order to do what they have to do in order to accomplish things they value.
For teachers: The concept may open up new possibilities for contexts, relationships and interactions as they appreciate that the learning ecologies of their learners' extend beyond the ecology they have created for their learning.
For universities:  The idea offers great affordance for universities to visualise themselves as ecological entities enabling learners to create their own ecologies for learning, development and achievement.  
 
Invitation
I welcome feedback on the ideas I have set out in my book Exploring Learning Ecologies. You can email me at [email protected]

Sources                                                                                                  
1)  Jackson N J (2016) Exploring Learning Ecologies Chalk Mountain  https://www.lulu.com/                                                  2)Lifewide Magazine. Several issues on learning ecologies. Free to download    at http://www.lifewideeducation.uk/magazine.html

This week I am participating in the #creativeHE 5 day course. Its day three and Chrissi has posted the daily activity​

Storymaker: Read an interesting article and re-create the story using 3 photographs/cartoons/doodles, with captions and share here in the community. Comment on stories contributed by others. Reflect on this experience at the end of the day. Where could this experience take you?

I decided to read and create a story around the posts made for the Jam Jar activity on day 1. A summary is provided at the end of the post.

JAM JAR STORY
 
One day a group of people who shared an interest in creativity in higher education teaching and learning were invited to share the contents of their jam jars.  Several people looked around in their immediate environment and found jam jars that they used. They described their contents creating and sharing meaning in the process.
 
Their stories revealed that jam jars are used to accumulate and store resources. These include materials, like screws, bolts and tea-bags, and tools like scissors, glue sticks and digital tools, that have potential to be used, in the right context, to enable us, or others, to use our creativity.  It seems that creativity is more likely to emerge if certain resources are readily available in our immediate environment and we have the desire or need to design, make or fix things. In other words, jam jars (both physically and metaphorically) are important in the ecologies we create to learn, develop and achieve- including our creative enterprises and achievements.

Participants noted the affordance in a jam jar: the potential to act creatively through the objects we store in our jam jar. Even the most mundane objects like a tea bag can be used in the right context if the user has the imagination, skills and desire to do so. Linked to this is the idea that we involve ourselves in certain mediums to express ourselves creatively and our desire to express ourselves can be triggered by anything eg a typing error!! The creative mind can play with any idea or combination of ideas and create new meaning and value.
 
Talking about how we use our jam jars triggered many interesting questions, enabled people to share their perspectives, the resources they used, their beliefs and values, feelings and experiences but ultimately the process enabled participants to share and co-create meanings in the shared context of the conversation.
 
​From a higher education teaching perspective, perhaps the wisdom in the story is that the role of the teacher is not only to create jam jars containing resources for themselves and their students to use, but also to encourage and enable students to create their own jam jars full of things that they will need to tackle the problems and challenges they will encounter in their life.

Life is a jam jar its full of affordances for living a fulfilling and meaningful life if we can only see and realise it.

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

There is something really invigorating and uplifting about being amongst enthusiastic people who care about students, and teaching and learning. We all need to experience this from time to time to reinforce our beliefs that what we are doing is worthwhile. I know that I don't do enough of this so my resolution this year is to do it more often, so yesterday  I participated in the MELSIG Digital Narratives conference in Nottingham where I was exposed to some very interesting examples of how social media might be used to enhance learning. My practical takeaway was being introduced to storify by Sue Beckingham and then in the workshop to begin making my own story based on my recent experience of the #creativeHE course, using the storify platform. I can see that this will be a useful tool in my work.
 
Everyone's narrative of an experience will be unique and selective - like my narrative. Through the presentations and the conversations I had, and my general knowledge of what is happening in higher education I can see that there is much interest and experimentation in the use of social media and many universities are developing frameworks, strategies and capabilities for supporting the use of digital technologies influenced by many of the people who were at the MELSIG event.  These are the key to systematically incorporating social media into teachers' and learners' ecologies for learning and achieving.

My sense is that a creative teacher who is confident with the technology and willing to experiment, can find many ways of using social media to enhance their students’ experience of learning but that, for some contexts it might seem artificial to do so. So choosing the right context and having a clear understanding of why social media are being used within a pedagogic strategy, and communicating this to students and securing their involvement, are all essential.  Using social media highlights the importance of the process of learning and using technology to assist in generating, selecting and making sense of knowledge. This means that attention has to be paid to the process and experience of learning (HOW & WHY), as well as the content (WHAT) of learning. Something that higher education is generally not very good at.
 
James Walker, in his excellent presentation of his 'Dawn of the Unread' project, quoted someone as saying 'if the 20th century is about knowledge the 21st century is about experience', and the way we convey our experience and the personal knowledge and wisdom we have gained from it, is through the stories we tell about it. It seems to me that we don't do nearly enough in higher education to encourage our students to tell their stories of how they have learnt and why they have learnt what they have learnt.  Narratives are not just annotated content they are the story of the how we developed our understanding of this subject or situation. I felt that James, and other presenters, offered insights into how this might be achieved but we need to adapt the outcomes of a student learning experience accordingly if narratives of learning and achievement are to be recognised and valued.
 
#melsigntu was a most enjoyable experience with lots of interesting perspectives, useful ideas and practical examples offered in a warm and friendly spirit of collegiality demonstrated by participants' willingness to share their own resources. Well done to the NTU digital practice team, Andrew Middleton  and all the contributors for providing such a good experience.

Image credit - great cartoon posted by Simon Rae ​https://twitter.com/simonrae_