In February 2014, Keith Lyons wrote something unusually precise about Alexis Lebedew.
He had known Alexis and his brother Mark for fifteen years. Their paths, Keith said, crossed every now and then. He enjoyed Alexis's travel writing and his discussions about coaching.
Then came the sentence that changes what kind of story this can be.
Alexis, Keith wrote, “has inducted me into a very distinctive approach to observation.”
That is stronger than saying Keith liked his work.
It is also more specific than saying Alexis influenced him.
Keith attached the relationship to an intellectual practice: observation. Somebody he had known over a long period had helped him see in a particular way.
The interesting question is what that sentence means when we follow Alexis back through Clyde Street.
There is no single doctrine to recover.
No great Alexis Lebedew idea appears once and then governs Keith's work for a decade.
Instead, Alexis keeps appearing at points where the angle changes.
A presentation reframes technology around its use.
A different treatment of the same text changes what becomes visible.
A link opens another source.
A coaching blog sends Keith back into his own practice.
A travel journal turns into a question about time and learning.
Years later, a thesis Alexis shares opens another close look at coaching.
The relationship is less like a handover of answers than a recurring invitation to look again.
Before the relationship had a name
Alexis is already present near the beginning of this sequence.
At the IASI Congress in Canberra in March 2009, Keith reported a presentation by Alexis on hyperconnectivity.
Alexis was thinking about the growing number of connected devices and what technologies such as wireless networks, geotagging, semantic systems and cloud computing might mean for supporting coaches in the field.
But the conclusion Keith recorded was not a celebration of technological abundance.
Alexis emphasised ecological validity, changing habits and personalisation.
His maxim was:
“Usability is more important than functionality.”
The technology had to become usable in the setting in which somebody actually needed it.
Six months later, Alexis was presenting again, this time at the International Association of Computer Science in Sport symposium.
His paper reconceptualised traditional volleyball statistics to provide a coaching tool for setting.
Keith chaired the session.
Alexis was one of three presenters, alongside Gerard Sierksma and Natalie Ruiz. Keith described the whole session, together with Martin Lames's keynote earlier in the day, as leaving him with a sleepless night thinking about complexity, simplicity and how sporting performance might be understood.
That ownership matters.
Clyde Street does not let us say that Alexis alone caused the sleepless night.
What it does show is Alexis working in a professional territory where data and technology were being asked to serve coaching.
At this stage, however, Keith did not say Alexis had changed how he observed.
That description came later.
It would be a mistake to write it backwards into 2009.
Working on the same thing
By April 2010, the relationship had moved beyond Keith attending Alexis's presentations.
Keith Lyons, Arnold Baca and Alexis Lebedew were the editors of the published proceedings of the Seventh Symposium of Computer Science in Sport.
The collection contained twenty-seven papers. It was released electronically and made available through Box.Net and the Internet Archive as part of the symposium's commitment to open access.
A day later, Keith wrote about what the open form made possible.
An additional Alexis Lebedew paper could be added to the proceedings after publication.
Keith connected that apparently small act with a much larger question he was carrying about how a connected Australian high-performance-sport network might accumulate and share knowledge.
This was collaboration.
But another small 2010 episode may tell us more about the later observation remark.
Word clouds gave greater prominence to words that occurred more frequently. Keith made several from different sections of the document.
Then Alexis revisited one of them.
He removed the dominant words Australia, Australia's, Sport and Sporting and generated another visualisation.
Nothing in the surviving post says that Alexis's version was better.
That is what makes the episode useful.
The same source could be looked at differently simply by changing what was allowed to dominate the picture.
Alexis did not have to provide a new dataset.
He changed the filter.
Another view became available.
The colleague who sends the link
Sometimes the change was much smaller.
In September 2011, Keith was collecting updates about QR codes and augmented reality.
Alexis drew his attention to a report about QRPedia, a system that could use QR codes to direct mobile users towards Wikipedia material in the language configured on their device.
Keith followed from there.
The post moved through QRPedia, augmented-reality work at the University of Canberra, another curated source on augmented reality and Greg Tran's work. Keith ended by saying that he had begun linking QR codes and augmented reality in his own practice.
Alexis did not own that whole route.
He supplied an alert.
Keith followed it into other people's work and then into something he was trying himself.
That distinction becomes important in this case because Alexis often appears as someone who opens the first door rather than someone who owns everything found beyond it.
Being sent back
One of the richest examples came in August 2012.
Alexis sent Keith a link to a post by his brother Mark about chaotic behaviour in volleyball.
The substantive argument Keith encountered there belonged to Mark Lebedew, drawing in turn on writing by Sanyin Siang.
Keith said that, as with much of Mark's and Alexis's writing, the encounter “set off” a journey for him.
And he went backwards before he went forwards.
He remembered coaching young canoe-slalom athletes on the Tryweryn in North Wales.
He had moved gates between runs.
He had experimented with difficult technique early in sessions rather than always building towards it.
Then the route widened.
Keith remembered his longstanding interest in chaos and perturbation; his 1996 Chaos Pitch work; Clive Ashworth and figurational thinking; conversations during the 1990s with colleagues about perturbations; and his interest in dynamical-systems approaches.
Only after that return through his own history did the post come back to the present.
Keith started thinking about how he might share these approaches with young coaches and how earlier experiments with students at the University of Canberra might inform his teaching in 2013.
It would be very easy to tell that story badly.
Alexis did not give Keith his ideas about chaos.
Mark did not originate Keith's earlier canoe-slalom practice.
Keith's thinking about perturbation and dynamical systems already had a history containing many other people.
What Alexis supplied was a route into material that reactivated that history.
The movement is easier to describe as a route than as a transfer of ideas.
Alexis sent the link. Mark's work prompted a return. Older practice and theory became active again. Keith then asked what they might mean for teaching coaches.
The relationship, in this episode, is visible in the route rather than in ownership of the idea.
Inside the learning environment
Alexis was not only sending things from elsewhere.
Later in 2012 he also appeared inside work Keith was making with other people.
When Keith was preparing the Observing and Analysing Performance in Sport small open online course, Alexis was one of a sizeable group of course administrators who would help develop and support it.
The proposed course moved through connecting and sharing, observing performance, visualising data, knowledge discovery and augmented reality.
Keith explicitly expected the administrators to help him make decisions about the course.
A month after the course began, Keith described a day in his working life.
He moved through conversations about digital futures, coach development, performance analysis, open-source resources, learning and teaching.
During that day he introduced Alexis to a university performance-analysis group.
Alexis, in turn, pointed Keith and the group towards other volleyball resources, including Mark Lebedew's At Home on the Court.
The source does not let us assign the design of the course to Alexis.
Nor does it tell us what the students learned from meeting him.
What it does show is that the relationship had moved comfortably between professional conversation, online sources and Keith's learning environment.
The person who sent links could also enter the room.
A different kind of journey
Keith had been receiving news from Alexis's visit to Nauru, where he was delivering a coaching course.
Alexis produced a six-part journal.
Keith called it compelling reading.
One part contained an anecdote Alexis had been told about different experiences of time.
Keith connected the account with a distinction he was already considering between chronological and kairological time and with Jay Griffiths's writing about time.
Then he moved the question into his own work:
he began contemplating how a different sense of timing might help him develop his approach to open and shared learning.
The boundary around this source needs to remain firm.
Alexis was reporting his own experience and an explanation given to him by another Australian he encountered in Nauru.
Keith used that account as a prompt.
Neither the original post nor this case study can responsibly turn it into a general account of Nauruan people or culture.
What matters here is the movement in Keith's inquiry.
A colleague's coaching travel journal became a route into time.
Time became a question about learning.
Alexis did not need to be writing about educational theory for Keith to find an educational question in the encounter.
Then Keith tells us what the relationship was
Nine months later, the earlier episodes become easier to understand.
Keith wrote a post called The Lebedew Brothers.
Much of it concerned Mark's writing on coaching, biography and volleyball history.
Keith then turned separately to Alexis.
He enjoyed Alexis's travel writing.
He looked forward to his discussions about coaching.
He was still smiling about the Nauru accounts a year later.
And then:
“He has inducted me into a very distinctive approach to observation.”
Keith also supplied a useful restraint.
He had known Mark and Alexis for fifteen years, he wrote, but their paths crossed only “every now and then.”
This was not a description of constant contact.
It was not a mentor–student story.
It was not evidence that Alexis sat behind every observational choice Keith made.
The intermittent quality may actually help us see the relationship more clearly.
Someone does not have to be continually present to remain intellectually consequential.
Sometimes a person returns.
Something is sent.
A conversation resumes.
A different filter appears.
The view shifts.
Then the people go back to their own work.
Still opening things years later
Five years after Keith wrote about Alexis's approach to observation, the relationship was still generating routes.
Keith did not simply record the recommendation.
He read the thesis closely.
His Clyde Street post moves through Dunphy's historical method, Wooden's career, player roles, discipline, practice planning, assistant coaches, coaching philosophy and the formation of Wooden's coaching process.
The detail is substantial.
But what particularly interested Keith was the relationship between the author and his subject.
Dunphy was himself a volleyball player and coach.
Keith was fascinated by the possibility of a coach looking so closely at another coach.
At the end of the post, he returned to where the journey had begun:
he was delighted Alexis had shared the thesis with him.
Again, Alexis did not own Dunphy's research.
Dunphy's interpretation remained Dunphy's.
Wooden's practice and testimony remained Wooden's historical material.
Alexis owned the act of sharing the source.
Keith owned the close reading and the questions that became interesting to him through it.
Just over two weeks later, Keith was writing about Alexis again.
This time Alexis was conducting his own inquiry into how people defined high-performance behaviour and planned to use responses to create a word cloud.
Keith hoped the survey received a strong response and said he looked forward to the outcome.
And there the surviving Clyde Street source stops.
There is no result in this sequence.
No consequence should be invented.
The incomplete episode belongs in the case precisely because not every Alexis appearance has to become a profound intellectual event.
Sometimes Keith was simply interested in what his colleague was doing next.
What Clyde Street does not show
A decade of sources can make a relationship look tidier than it was.
The record does not show that Alexis supplied Keith with one coherent body of thought, or that he caused Keith's interests in observation, complexity, open learning, chaos, visualisation or coaching. Those interests had other histories.
Nor do the strongest encounters isolate Alexis from the people around him. The IACSS session contained several speakers. The 2012 chaos journey depends materially on Mark Lebedew's writing and on intellectual histories Keith already carried. The open course was built with a group. The Nauru post also draws on Jay Griffiths and Dennis Bryant. The Wooden post is built around Marv Dunphy and John Wooden.
Those are not distractions from the case. They are its safeguard.
Alexis repeatedly mattered without having to own the destination. Across the sources he appears as presenter, collaborator, someone who changes a filter, sends a link, shares a journal or opens a source. Once, Keith supplied unusually direct language for what he believed he had learned through the relationship: a distinctive approach to observation.
Changing the view
Perhaps that is the thread worth retaining.
The strongest Alexis Lebedew sources are not united by one subject.
They move across volleyball statistics, hyperconnectivity, open publishing, word clouds, QR codes, chaos, coach education, online learning, travel writing, time and coaching history.
The continuity lies somewhere else.
Again and again, Keith encounters something through Alexis and the field of view changes.
What happens if usefulness matters more than technological capacity?
What becomes visible when the obvious words are removed?
Where does this link lead?
What old coaching experience does this new argument reactivate?
What does an account of time make possible for thinking about learning?
What can one coach learn by looking carefully at another?
Those questions belong to Keith's traversal, not to a doctrine Alexis prescribed.
And Alexis remains visible at enough of the handoffs for us to see that the route was relational.
That may be the distinctive value of this case.
Clyde Street contains many people.
Some are cited.
Some are thanked.
Some are admired.
Some appear once, open a link and disappear.
Alexis Lebedew leaves a different trace.
Across changing contexts and long intervals, he keeps reappearing close to a change of angle.
Keith eventually supplied his own name for part of what had happened.
Observation.
Perhaps the useful question to carry beyond Clyde Street is therefore not simply:
Who has influenced the way I think?
It is more precise:
Question to carry
Who changes what I am able to notice — and have I left enough of that relationship visible for someone else to see how the view changed?
Sources followed
IASI Canberra 2009: Days 1 and 2 — 09/03/13
Three Papers, Day Two at IACSS09 — 09/09/23
IACSS09 Proceedings — 10/04/29
Open Access and Sharing — 10/04/30
The Australian Government's Response to the Crawford Report: Some Additional Information — 10/06/05
QR Codes and AR Update: September 2011 — 11/09/30
Chaos, Perturbation, Configuration, Dynamical Systems — 12/08/17
Writing a SOOC — 12/10/03
#OAPS101: A Day in the Life of a Performance Analyst — 12/11/15
Time Lauds — 13/05/16
The Lebedew Brothers — 14/02/19
John Robert Wooden: the coaching process — 19/11/12
Alexis on coaching — 19/11/28