Clyde Street was an address before it was a blog.
In June 2014, on the sixth anniversary of the site, Keith Lyons explained that Clyde Street had been the address of his home in Mongarlowe. By then the name had travelled a long way from that physical place. It had become a public record of reading, coaching, teaching, data, sport, open learning, people, questions and whatever happened to send Keith somewhere next.
But the address still matters.
One reason is easy to miss if Clyde Street is read only as a network of scholars, coaches, writers and professional colleagues. Some of the people opening routes into Keith’s thinking were much closer to home.
His wife Sue sent him things she had found, introduced him to people and places, and shared a much longer educational history with him.
His daughter Beth wrote publicly about family, community, play and learning, and spent weekly car journeys talking with him about sociology and pedagogy.
His son Sam sent links, built analytical resources, redesigned the blog, maintained its back office and later became someone whose own study of systems and networks Keith read with what he called both paternal and epistemological delight.
The surviving posts do not turn the Lyons family into one intellectual unit. They do something more interesting.
They let us see learning moving across family relationships in different directions.
The person who points to what you would not find alone
In April 2011, Keith was thinking about reading, digital habits and balance.
The post began with two items from the British press. One of them had reached him through Sue.
“My wife Sue shared Jemima Kiss’s post with me,” Keith wrote. Then he explained why this was not an isolated occurrence. Sue had what he called a remarkable list of RSS feeds that she scanned every morning and she pointed him towards articles he “would not find alone”.
It is a small sentence with a large implication.
Keith wrote often about networks, feeds, openness and the abundance of information available online. Yet here the route through that abundance was human and very close. The value was not only that a source existed. Someone else had noticed it.
The pattern recurs.
In early 2012, another of Sue’s Guardian RSS discoveries became the last link in one of Keith’s weekly Cirrus collections. He followed it into a possible story joining science, art and baseball across a century.
In Bath in 2013, Sue introduced him to Colonna and Small’s speciality coffee shop. Keith met Maxwell Colonna-Dashwood, encountered a language of recipes, flavour, sensory judgement and variation, and began wondering what coaching might learn from coffee making.
Sue did not own the ideas Keith found in those places. The Guardian writers owned their work. Maxwell owned his. Keith owned the connections he subsequently made.
What Sue made visible, repeatedly, was the first turn in the route.
But reducing her to someone who forwarded interesting links would badly flatten the record.
In 2016, while celebrating the doctorate of coach Ron Smith, Keith went back to the educational environment in which both he and Sue had completed their PhDs. Sue graduated at the University of Surrey in 1985, four years before Keith. Her action-research thesis concerned the teaching of dance in secondary schools; his later thesis studied the teaching of physical education.
They were part of a group of experienced educators who had entered doctoral study by non-traditional routes. Keith remembered the Institute for Educational Development as a caring environment in which people were able to flourish. He connected that experience with his later determination to champion non-traditional entry himself.
Sue was therefore already part of an educational story before Clyde Street existed.
And in the 2011 post about digital habits, Keith supplied another boundary to the story. He wondered whether country life had helped him become a more peripheral participant online, then wrote that he was certain his wife’s support for a balanced life was “the tipping factor”.
That is Keith’s judgement, not a licence to reconstruct their private life.
It is enough to show that when he wrote publicly about how he read, connected and lived with digital abundance, Sue was part of the account he chose to make visible.
The Tuesday journey
Beth enters Clyde Street differently.
In January 2011, Keith wrote about his daughter’s first blog post. Beth Ross had written about treasure baskets and heuristic play. Keith followed her post into questions about guided discovery and personalisation, then onward into early-years education, Elinor Goldschmied’s work, the idea of a key person and, eventually, two open online courses.
The destination was not contained in Beth’s original post.
That is precisely the point.
Her writing opened the first door; Keith kept walking.
Two months later, he wrote about blogging itself. He said he read Beth’s posts avidly and admired her desire to share information and experience. In April, the movement went the other way. Keith found two items he thought would interest Beth because of her writing about family, community and motherhood. He connected them with his own interest in play, then ended the post by saying he was going to discuss the ideas with her.
The relationship visible in Clyde Street was not simply a daughter supplying material to her father.
They were reading, finding and returning things to one another.
The clearest scene comes a year later.
“One of the joys of my week,” Keith wrote in May 2012, “is my Tuesday car journey to and from Canberra with my daughter Beth.”
Beth was tutoring Introduction to Sociology at the Australian National University. Keith was teaching Sport Coaching Pedagogy at the University of Canberra. During the drive they talked about what was happening in both courses.
On this particular journey the conversation moved towards exceptional students and exceptional performance. Keith wrote that Beth spoke eloquently about a friend she regarded as remarkable. He was struck by the way Beth understood exceptional performance. She then pointed him towards two sources that might help him reflect further.
Nothing dramatic happened.
No formal collaboration was announced. No theory changed hands. There was a car journey, a conversation between two teachers working in different settings, and a couple of sources to follow.
That ordinary quality may be what makes the post so useful.
Clyde Street often shows Keith’s learning arriving through conferences, papers, newsletters, colleagues and online networks. Here it arrives during the weekly journey to work.
The public inquiry and family life are not the same thing. But neither are they sealed away from one another.
Building the station
Sam’s presence is more extensive, and it changes form over time.
At first, he often appears as the person who sends something interesting. In April 2012, a link from Sam to work on free online courses capped a day in which Keith had already been following Stephen Downes and Alan Levine. In June, Sam alerted him to the story of a Civilization II game that had been running for ten years. Keith read it and started wondering about parallels with investment in high-performance sport.
A month later they were doing something together. Before the London Olympics, Keith and Sam examined William Hill’s betting odds across the Games. Sam built a searchable resource covering national prospects in 300 events. Keith used the resulting material to look at predicted medal performance.
Then, over the Christmas holidays, Sam changed Clyde Street itself.
Keith introduced the January 2013 redesign with an unusually strong statement: Sam had been working in web design for five years and had “transformed my understanding of how to share ideas and information”. The redesign account largely belongs to Sam. He described three goals — Simple, Modern and Reflect — made reading central to the design, and used a station and transport-map metaphor to give visible form to a “journey of learning”.
Those design choices matter in the larger story of what Clyde Street became. In this family story, the important change is narrower. Sam was no longer only supplying links or building a resource. He was helping shape the public object through which Keith shared ideas.
That contribution continued. In 2014, when Keith explained that Clyde Street had been his home address, he also reported that he and Sam had added a Forum and an Assessment Bank. In 2015, Keith handed Clyde Street over to Sam’s voice again for a guest post about improving its speed. Sam documented benchmarks, caching, image optimisation, unsuccessful experiments and the practical work required to make the site easier to use.
This is a different kind of contribution from supplying an idea.
Sam was helping make and maintain the place in which the ideas were encountered.
Learning in both directions
It would still be misleading to describe Sue, Beth and Sam as a support system surrounding Keith.
The posts keep giving them their own directions of travel.
Beth had her own blog, her own political voice and her own work in sociology. Keith sometimes followed her. Sometimes he found things for her. Their Tuesday journeys connected two teaching settings without turning one into the extension of the other.
Sue’s doctoral work preceded Keith’s and belonged to her own history in dance education. Her professional relationships also had lives that did not begin with Keith. In one post, for example, Keith noted that Sue had known lacrosse player and coach Vivien Jones long before he did and had organised a Centre of Excellence in which Vivien took part.
Sam’s 2013 redesign contains perhaps the neatest expression of reciprocity. While explaining choices about the site, Sam wrote that he had been lucky enough to absorb some of Keith’s teaching about Performance Analysis. He used one of those lessons — that new equipment is pointless if you cannot use it or it adds nothing — as a test for the redesign.
Keith had taught something Sam carried into web work.
Sam’s web work, in turn, had changed Keith’s understanding of sharing.
Six years later, the direction shifted again.
In August 2019, Sam wrote about systems and networks while studying for a Master of Education in Knowledge Networks and Digital Innovation. Keith said the post delighted him in two senses: paternally, because he was reading his son’s observations and reflections; epistemologically, because Sam’s discussion touched Keith’s longstanding interest in self-organising networks.
Keith immediately wanted to point Sam towards Stephen Downes, Alan Levine and further material on self-organisation. He also acknowledged the systemic constraints of Sam’s working environment.
The son who had once been sending links and rebuilding a website was now producing work Keith wanted to read and respond to.
The father who said Sam had transformed his understanding was also trying to open another learning route for Sam.
There is no reason to decide which direction mattered more.
What family does not prove
A family story is unusually easy to over-write.
Closeness can be mistaken for causality. Affection can be mistaken for intellectual consequence. A few public glimpses can be made to stand in for a private relationship the archive cannot possibly contain.
Clyde Street does not let us do that.
It does not show Sue, Beth and Sam acting as one coherent intellectual group.
It does not show that they caused Keith’s commitments to openness, learning, performance analysis, networks or public writing.
It does not tell us who mattered most.
It does not justify giving each person an equal third of the story simply because a neat structure would look balanced.
And it does not turn family members’ work into Keith’s work.
Beth owns the writing Keith followed. Sue owns her professional and educational history. Sam owns the design decisions and guest posts he contributed. The writers, researchers, coaches and developers found beyond the family links own their work too.
Keith’s part is visible in what he did next: reading, connecting, building, wondering, trying something, returning, or sometimes simply saying that another person had helped him see or find something.
There is one more boundary.
After Keith’s death, Sam and other family/editorial activity becomes part of the Clyde Street archive. That later work matters enormously to the survival of the record, but it is a different source layer. It should not be folded backwards to tell us what Keith’s family relationships meant while he was writing.
This article stops with what Keith himself made public during the contemporary Clyde Street record.
Close to home
Clyde Street reached across the world.
A morning could begin with Stephen Downes in Canada, move through a paper found online, pass into a conversation with a coach and end somewhere Keith could not have predicted when he started.
But not every route was long-distance.
Some began with Sue noticing an article in an RSS feed.
Some began in a car with Beth on the way to Canberra.
Some began with Sam sending a link, building a spreadsheet, writing code or deciding that Clyde Street ought to look like a station on a journey.
That does not make the Lyons family the hidden explanation for Clyde Street.
It makes the archive more human and more specific.
Keith’s public learning was connected to distant people, institutions and networks, but it was also porous to the people nearest to him. Ideas could arrive through family. They could be discussed, returned, remade and sent out again.
Clyde Street was a home address before it was the name of a public learning space.
The surviving posts suggest that the distance between those two meanings was sometimes very small.
Question to carry
Which ideas in my work arrived through the people closest to me — and have I kept their contribution visible without claiming more than the record can support?
Sources followed
Keith Lyons, “Blogging With Wordpress” — 14/06/04
Keith Lyons, “Networks” — 19/08/17
Keith Lyons, “Reading Life Paths And Balance” — 11/04/26
Keith Lyons, “Cirrus 120108” — 12/01/09
Keith Lyons, “Coffee And Coaching” — 13/06/10
Keith Lyons, “Coaches Voices” — 16/07/11
Keith Lyons, “Treasure Trove” — 11/01/17
Keith Lyons, “Blogging Sharing Sociabilty” — 11/03/14
Keith Lyons, “Seeing Clearly” — 11/04/20
Keith Lyons, “Without Borders” — 12/05/02
Keith Lyons, “Scp12 Oracy And Creativity” — 12/04/14
Keith Lyons, “The End Of The World Is Not Nigh” — 12/06/14
Keith Lyons, “Olympic Favourites 2012” — 12/07/27
Keith Lyons, “A New Look For 2013” — 13/01/02
Keith Lyons, “Improving The Speed Of Clyde Street” — 15/01/31
Keith Lyons, “Vivien Jones” — 11/01/03