In June 2014, Keith Lyons ran into an awkward problem.
Stephen Downes, whose work Keith said had been a compass for him for more than a decade, rejected a word Keith used for his own online practice.
The word was curation.
Downes did not think it described what he was doing. To him it suggested selection, filtration, passivity and preservation. His own work, as Keith reproduced the argument, was active engagement with the people and material he encountered.
Keith did not brush the objection aside.
But he did not simply adopt it either.
“This left me with a quandary,” he wrote.
Then he located his own position. His practice of curation, he said, was based on engagement and active choice. It was fallible, partial, serendipitous and self-consciously subjective. He curated things that resonated with him. His sense of the practice remained reflective and dynamic.
The post is called Curation and Kindness.
It is a useful place to begin a story about intellectual guidance because the guide and the learner did not end up in the same place.
Downes could still be a compass.
Keith could still disagree.
That distinction runs through a surprisingly long stretch of Clyde Street.
Not a follower’s story
Stephen Downes appears almost at the beginning of the Clyde Street record.
On 11 June 2008, in one of the first substantive posts in the chronological sequence, Keith wrote about a Downes presentation on web collaboration and an ABC interview with Jeanette Winterson. He said he began each Australian morning by reading OLDaily over coffee. The ABC arts programme was also becoming part of his week.
The web, in that early post, made two distant people newly available to him.
That first appearance matters partly because of what it does not show.
Keith was attentive. He was appreciative. OLDaily was already a routine.
But the post does not give us a developed intellectual consequence. It would be too easy to look back from everything that followed and turn ordinary attention into a founding moment.
Clyde Street lets the first encounter remain smaller than that.
By January 2011, Keith’s own description had changed.
He was thinking about shared spaces, collective intelligence and participation in open online courses. Near the end of Working Together, he named Stephen Downes and George Siemens together. They had guided his participation in commons spaces for three years, he wrote.
“They act as wonderful compasses for me.”
There are two important restraints inside that sentence.
The first is ownership. Keith named Downes and Siemens together. A case study about Downes should not quietly remove Siemens from Keith’s own wording.
The second is the metaphor itself.
A compass does not make the journey for you.
It helps you orient.
That difference becomes clearer later in 2011, when guidance entered Keith’s current work.
A source becomes useful
In Open Educational Resources: The Writing on the Wall, Keith described OLDaily as a near-daily source of imaginative journeys and new connections. He was reading a Downes post about open educational resources and the practical test Downes used for openness: whether a resource could actually be accessed, used, modified and shared.
Keith then moved into his own setting.
He said that with Downes’s guidance and Leigh Blackall’s help he had been exploring open sharing at the University of Canberra. A project with the Australian Paralympic Committee was giving him a practical place to do that work. Downes’s post, Keith wrote, had helped him clarify the essential characteristics of the project.
This is stronger than admiration.
Downes owned his argument about open educational resources. Leigh Blackall remained part of the practical history Keith named. The project conditions belonged to Keith and his collaborators.
What Keith owned was the local clarification: how he used what he had encountered to decide what openness needed to mean in work he was already doing.
The distinction becomes even easier to see two years later, because Downes was no longer only supplying material to think with.
He was pushing back.
When the compass objects
In March 2013, Keith had been writing about small open online communities. Danny Munnerley had suggested that the C in SOOC might stand for Community rather than Course. Keith liked the suggestion and began thinking about longer-term open-online opportunities.
Then Downes picked up the post in OLDaily.
His objection was sharp: courses have start and end dates; communities do not. Something with a beginning and an end might support a community, but it was not the same thing.
Keith’s response was explicit.
He agreed, and he needed to clarify.
He reworked the account around concentration and dispersal. A course could have a period of focused activity and then end. The resources made during it could remain available afterwards and might help support community development. Continued availability did not make the bounded course itself a continuing community.
The criticism belonged to Downes.
The revised account belonged to Keith.
That sounds obvious when written plainly. It is much easier to blur in an intellectual history. We can erase the person who supplied the objection and make the correction look self-generated. Or we can move too far the other way and attribute the later account to the critic.
Clyde Street preserves enough of the exchange to avoid both errors.
A month later, the same relationship crossed into a very different part of Keith’s work.
He had been publishing weekly observations about football performance against ranking. On 23 April he wrote that the previous week’s post had benefited from Downes’s comments. Downes had made suggestions about visualising performance. Keith said he was working on changes and, in the same post, began monitoring end-of-third-quarter scores in relation to eventual game success.
This is a small source, but an important one.
Downes was not only present in Keith’s writing when Keith was discussing connectivism, open education or blogging. Downes’s suggestions entered a live sport-analysis series, and Keith explicitly recorded that the previous post had benefited from them and that he was working on changes.
The suggestion did not become proof that the new measure was a good one. Clyde Street does not give us that evaluation.
What it gives us is the route.
Someone comments.
Keith changes something he is doing.
The person remains in the history of the change.
And then, in 2014, the same person says something Keith does not adopt.
That is why Curation and Kindness matters so much.
Guidance without convergence
If we wanted a neat story of influence, we might gather the moments where Keith agreed with Downes and ignore the one where he did not.
The archive resists that.
In Curation and Kindness, Keith did not treat disagreement as evidence that the compass had stopped mattering. He did something more interesting: he used the disagreement to make the boundary of his own practice clearer.
Downes rejected curation as a description of what he did.
Keith retained the term for what he did.
The difference became part of the public record.
In the same post, Keith wrote that Downes’s work had been a compass for him for more than a decade.
That statement reaches back further than Clyde Street itself. The archive cannot independently reconstruct the pre-2008 history, so the duration has to remain what it is: Keith’s retrospective self-description in 2014.
But the source does something more valuable than supplying a long number.
It shows what Keith meant by a guide at a moment when agreement was unavailable.
A guide could matter without settling the judgement.
The long return
Downes remained present after that disagreement.
In October 2016, Keith wrote about a Downes presentation on personal professional development. The ideas about changing what one already knows, perceiving patterns, aggregating, remixing, repurposing and feeding forward resonated strongly with his own learning journey.
Then Keith made the consequence explicit:
Downes’s work, he wrote, “has helped and encouraged me to change what I know and to explore patterns.”
Even here, the source does not collapse everything into Downes.
Keith immediately brought in Peter Dowrick’s much older work on feedforward and self-modelling, a line of thought he traced back to the early 1980s. He said Downes was using feedforward differently.
That qualification matters.
A new source entered a long-standing intellectual history, but it did not overwrite it.
Downes remained one route among others.
The mundane infrastructure of that route becomes visible six weeks later.
Keith dropped off the OLDaily mailing list for two weeks.
“My personal learning environment changed,” he wrote.
When the newsletter returned, one of its links sent him back to an earlier Downes presentation and then outward again: into self-organisation, networked knowledge, the local service he experienced in Braidwood cafés and Ivan Illich’s idea of convivial access to shared tools.
There is a useful corrective here to any romantic picture of intellectual guidance.
Part of this relationship was infrastructural.
A newsletter arrived. A routine formed. A routine briefly broke. The absence was noticeable.
The intellectual route depended partly on something as ordinary as an email distribution list and a cup of coffee.
That does not make the relationship less real.
It makes it less mystical.
A few days later, Keith was writing about coach learning. He said his own journey had been to let go of “coach development” and focus more on “coach learning”, and to move from “personalised learning” towards “personal learning”. He used a Downes formulation to distinguish learner-controlled personal learning from an educational system that claims to provide the learning itself.
But Downes was not the only person active in the post. Rachel Hooper’s account of an open-space learning event, Keith’s own coaching history and a current unmeeting proposal all mattered.
That is characteristic of the stronger sources in this case.
They do not show ideas moving cleanly from one person into another.
They show Keith combining a recurring guide with other people, earlier experience and present problems, then making his own decision about what to carry forward.
A decade later
In February 2017, Keith described another morning in Braidwood with a stable ADSL connection and a personal learning network that reached across the world.
He returned explicitly to CCK08 as part of Clyde Street’s history. He also said he was delighted to be following a new Downes course, Connectivism and Learning. OLDaily still started the day, sending him from Casselman, Ontario, through Braidwood and then wherever the hyperlinks led.
The new course should not be treated as a revival of CCK08. Keith himself was writing from changed technological and professional conditions. The useful continuity is the person/source relationship, not the identity of the course.
That distinction becomes explicit in October 2018.
Downes’s E-Learning 3.0 was about to begin. Keith wrote that he was looking forward to taking part in another of Downes’s courses “a decade after CCK08”. In the same post he was thinking about Leadership 4.0 and his own work with Tony Charge on an idea they called qualitative analytics 5.0.
Again, Downes supplied one current intellectual environment.
Keith’s own work did not become an extension of Downes’s course.
The two sat beside one another in a larger act of making connections.
By May 2019, Keith supplied perhaps the simplest retrospective description of the relationship.
He was reflecting on Clyde Street itself: the move from earlier blogs and Geocities into WordPress, the encouragement of CCK08, the delight of thinking out loud, the accumulation of open cloud resources, and his continuing interest in how knowledge was socially formed.
He then named two guides.
The R community was his new guide.
Stephen Downes was “my old guide”.
The phrase is useful because it comes from Keith rather than from a later attempt to classify his intellectual relationships.
And the “old guide” could still generate small, practical movement.
In August, Downes mentioned Citationsy in his newsletter. Keith was looking at road-racing references and tried the tool immediately. He created and shared a project, while also recording that he had not yet explored all of its options.
The consequence here is modest.
A prompt became a trial.
There is no evidence in the source that Citationsy became a durable part of Keith’s practice. The limit is part of the case.
The guide as route, not owner
One of the last substantive Downes appearances in Clyde Street makes the ownership boundary especially clear.
In February 2020, Downes’s newsletter provided a link to a presentation by Dominic Wyse about education as a discipline and the relationship among academic, practical and integrated knowledge traditions.
Keith followed the link and began thinking about the same tension in sport analytics.
Downes opened the route.
Wyse owned the argument Keith was reading.
Keith owned the move into his own question about sport analytics.
That is a useful final configuration for this relationship because it prevents “guide” becoming a claim to intellectual ownership.
Sometimes Downes supplied the argument.
Sometimes he supplied the objection.
Sometimes he supplied the course.
Sometimes he supplied the link.
Sometimes the link led to somebody else entirely.
What Clyde Street does not show
The long recurrence of Stephen Downes in Clyde Street can tempt us into saying too much.
The archive does not show that every Downes mention changed Keith’s thinking.
Many do not.
It does not show that CCK08’s importance belonged to Downes alone. George Siemens and a large network of participants remain part of that history, as do the technologies and conditions through which Keith participated.
It does not show that every idea Keith connected to Downes was adopted. Curation is the clearest counterexample.
It does not show how a private relationship worked behind the posts, or whether one existed in the form a biographer might wish to reconstruct.
And it does not let us convert Keith’s 2014 description of more than a decade of guidance into a verified pre-Clyde Street chronology.
What it does show is already enough.
Across changing subjects and platforms, Keith repeatedly kept Downes visible at moments where something entered his work: a distinction, an objection, a source, a course, a practical suggestion.
He also kept visible what he did with it.
Sometimes he agreed.
Sometimes he revised.
Sometimes he translated the idea into a different setting.
Sometimes he tried the thing immediately.
And sometimes he said, in effect: that description is not mine.
That is a more demanding form of intellectual acknowledgement than simply placing a name in a reference list.
It preserves both sides of the relation.
The guide remains visible.
So does the judgement.
Question to carry
Most of us can name people whose work we return to.
The harder question is what kind of return we are making.
Are they authorities whose vocabulary quietly becomes ours?
Are they sources we happen to read often?
Are they people who can change our minds?
Can they also be people with whom we disagree and still keep learning?
Clyde Street does not turn Stephen Downes and Keith Lyons into a model for how an intellectual relationship should work.
It gives us a more modest possibility to inspect.
A person can help orient our work without owning its destination.
We can acknowledge the objection without surrendering the judgement.
We can leave the route visible without pretending the route made the decision for us.
So the useful question is not simply: who influenced me?
It is:
Who acts as a compass in my work — and can I show what I did with the direction they offered?
Sources followed
Keith Lyons, “Stephen Downes and Jeanette Winterson” — 08/06/11
Keith Lyons, “Working Together” — 11/01/03
Keith Lyons, “Open Educational Resources: The Writing on the Wall” — 11/07/19
Keith Lyons, “A Course, A Community” — 13/03/21
Keith Lyons, “Performance Against Ranking 2013 Football Season” — 13/04/23
Keith Lyons, “Curation and Kindness” — 14/06/18
Keith Lyons, “On-going Learning: Seeing Patterns, Changing What We Know” — 16/10/28
Keith Lyons, “Personal Learning” — 16/12/09
Keith Lyons, “Coach Learning in Sport: Smelling the Coffee” — 16/12/15
Keith Lyons, “Connecting with Sport at the Crossroads of the World” — 17/02/07
Keith Lyons, “3.0, 4.0, 5.0” — 18/10/09
Keith Lyons, “My Project” — 19/05/20
Keith Lyons, “Citationsy” — 19/08/06
Keith Lyons, “Analytics: Theory and Practice” — 20/02/12