Photo by Steve Wheeler (Duck by Denise Hudson)

If I didn’t know any better I would believe in synchronicity. Let me elaborate….

We enjoyed an animated and challenging keynote speech from Graham Brown-Martin at the LPI’s Learning Live conference in London earlier today. At the same time, up in Edinburgh ALT-C was wrapping up with a keynote from Lego’s Ollie Bray.

At one point in his London keynote, Graham touched on creativity and individualism. To illustrate his key points, he asked us to create a duck using just six pieces of Lego which were distributed to the audience. We all did our best, and our creations were then shared with each other on social media. It was interesting (and probably inevitable) that without a clear plan, each of us created ducks that were slightly different, from the same six Lego building bricks.

As we began to share the photos of our creations on Twitter, we began to notice that several of our colleagues who were attending ALT-C were doing exactly the same. It seems that Ollie Bray, in his keynote had simultaneously facilitated the same exercise (with the same number of Lego bricks) with his Edinburgh audience. Our timelines were saturated with images of Lego ducks. So, either great minds think alike, or …. synchronicity is actually a thing.

As a side note, it’s ironic that although the exercises were designed to demonstrate that we all think differently and create accordingly and the importance of playful learning, the same exercise was being done (without any co-ordination) by two different keynote speakers at two separate events. It’s also interesting to note that both Ollie and Graham chose to speak about learning innovation and change in their keynotes. A splendid time was had by all both in London and Edinburgh, and we also learnt from the exercise. I’m just sorry as usual, that I couldn’t be in two places at once, but for once, it probably didn’t matter.

NB: Search on Twitter for ‘LEGO duck’ to see the baffling array of possible duck configurations that people created from the same 6 Lego bricks at the two events.

What the duck? by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.