In October 2008, halfway through an online course that seemed to be changing the scale of Keith Lyons’ learning world, he found himself thinking about two people from much earlier in his life as a researcher and educator.
The course was CCK08, Connectivism and Connective Knowledge. Keith was following blogs, alerts, live discussions and links through a network that could move him from one person to another before he had finished making sense of the first encounter. George Siemens had just published a mid-course summary. Keith described it as a powerful catalyst for reflection.
Then he looked backwards.
George’s summary, Keith wrote in CCK08: Coming to Know, “triggered my memories of Olive Banks and Phillida Salmon”. A few lines later he gave them an unusual name:
That sentence is easy to read as a warm acknowledgement and move past.
The rest of the post makes it more interesting.
Keith did not say that Olive and Phillida had given him one theory to follow. He remembered them doing different work in his thinking. Olive had helped him notice how far research could travel from the people, events or sources it claimed to describe. Phillida had helped him think about knowing as something personal and social, and about stories as a way of sharing experience.
In 2008, both of those older orientations suddenly had new terrain to work on.
Olive and the distance from the action
Olive Banks was a sociologist of education. In Clyde Street, Keith did not pause to reconstruct her scholarship or explain their relationship. He told us something narrower: Olive had helped him understand the implications of doing research at first, second, third and fourth hand.
CCK08 made that old problem newly visible.
Keith was learning through people who had read other people, through blog posts that summarised sources, through alerts that pointed towards discussions, and through participants who sent him onwards again. In the same post he began locating himself inside those distances. He noticed when he was encountering Jenny Mackness several removes from an event. He distinguished going back to Locke from reading somebody else’s summary of Locke and then blogging about that summary himself.
The digital network had not abolished source distance. It had multiplied the routes through which distance could become difficult to see.
That is the part of the Olive Banks debt that Keith makes inspectable. He does not simply tell us she mattered. He uses the question she left with him while he is trying to learn in a radically different environment.
There is an important limit here. The Clyde Street corpus gives us Keith’s memory of what Olive helped him understand. The source trail for this case has not identified the exact Banks publication or encounter behind his first-, second-, third- and fourth-hand formulation. Nor does Olive reappear by name in the later Clyde Street sources located for this case.
So this is not a long Banks-to-Keith lineage that we can reconstruct in detail.
It is one unusually clear moment in which Keith tells us that an older intellectual guide is still helping him locate himself in relation to a source.
Phillida and coming to know with other people
Phillida Salmon occupies a different place in the same 2008 post.
Keith remembered her book Coming to Know and the way her work had helped him think about learning and development with other people. He also remembered her use of stories and “storying”. That, he said, had emboldened him to explore narrative as a way of sharing experience.
Again, the memory immediately enters the live problem.
CCK08 was not only giving Keith more information. It was surrounding him with other people’s accounts of trying, misunderstanding, connecting, missing things, revising and continuing. Keith read those accounts as part of his own coming to know. He followed one participant to another. He noticed experiential stories. He thought about the social character of the network and about the gaps in his own practice.
At several points he imagined how Phillida might respond to what he was seeing.
We should be careful with those moments. They tell us about Keith’s internal conversation with a remembered intellectual guide; they do not give us Phillida Salmon’s actual judgement on CCK08, its participants or connectivism.
That distinction matters because it shows how an intellectual debt can remain alive without turning the earlier person into an authority who has somehow pre-approved everything that comes later.
Keith was doing the new work.
Phillida remained visible inside the way he was orienting himself to it.
By the end of the post, the online course had also exposed practical gaps. Keith listed tools and environments he needed to learn more about. His closing acknowledgement is small but striking:
“I think I owe this to Olive and Phillida.”
The sentence does not mean they caused CCK08, his enthusiasm for it, or every direction he took afterwards. The post is crowded with George Siemens, Stephen Downes and many course participants who are visibly doing work in the immediate inquiry.
But Keith chose to leave an older layer of that learning visible too.
The trail before Clyde Street
There is a useful historical check on the Phillida part of this story.
It sits outside Clyde Street, so it should not be confused with the blog evidence itself.
In Keith’s 1989 PhD thesis, written almost twenty years before CCK08, he was explaining his commitment to qualitative research. He introduced a passage from Phillida Salmon and Hilary Claire’s classroom research with four words: “Central to my thinking”. Their concern was with understanding teachers through personal encounter, respecting their individuality and remaining accessible as human beings rather than treating them as distant objects of study.
Immediately afterwards, Keith placed that concern beside other writing about human inquiry and a passage from Joan Barfoot’s novel Gaining Ground about the limits of fully knowing another person’s experience.
The pre-Clyde document does not prove everything Keith later did with learning came from Phillida. It does something more modest and useful. It confirms that the 2008 memory was not simply a convenient story invented by the digital moment. Her work was already inside Keith’s account of how he had learned to conduct research.
And then, in 2015, she appears again.
The same wayfinder, a different professional problem
Seven years after CCK08, Keith was reading a paper by John Stoszkowski and Dave Collins about how coaches acquired and used knowledge.
The paper sent him back to Coming to Know.
Keith wrote that Phillida’s 1980 collection had “encouraged me all those years ago” to think about personal learning environments. He also returned to the classroom research Salmon had conducted with Hilary Claire.
But #coachlearninginsport: coming to know is not a post about preserving an old educational-psychology text in amber.
Keith puts the older source into new company.
Stoszkowski and Collins bring contemporary evidence about coaches’ formal and informal knowledge sources. Robert French brings a later interpretation of Salmon’s work and an image of teaching, learning and research pressing against each other. Martin Buber contributes the narrow ridge. Alfred Wainwright enters through Keith’s fascination with maps and field notebooks. Joan Barfoot’s Gaining Ground reappears from the earlier research world.
Keith then makes his own move.
He starts imagining coach educators as cartographers, guides and fellow travellers. He becomes interested in problem-finding rather than only problem-solving. He wants support for learning to become more personal and to remain open to different ways of coming to know.
Those are not simply Phillida Salmon’s ideas transferred into coaching.
They are Keith’s 2015 synthesis, made from several sources in response to a present professional problem.
That is why the return matters.
The intellectual debt survives, but it does not remain unchanged or solitary. It becomes one resource among others that Keith can bring into a new landscape.
Two wayfinders, but not two identical stories
It would make the article neater if Olive and Phillida travelled through Clyde Street together from 2008 onwards.
They do not.
Olive is named in the one exceptionally rich CCK08 post. Her remembered question about distance from sources does visible work there, but the whole-corpus search for this case did not find a later named return.
Phillida has the deeper documented trail. She is present in Keith’s pre-Clyde research account, appears beside Olive in 2008, and returns explicitly in 2015 when coach learning creates another “coming to know” problem.
That asymmetry is not a flaw to repair.
It is part of what Clyde Street actually leaves us.
Nor were either woman the only person helping Keith find his bearings. Even in the first weeks of CCK08 he was returning to Lawrence Stenhouse, Donald Schön and Eliot Eisner as important antecedents. The course itself was alive with Siemens, Downes and other participants. The 2015 coach-learning post depends on a similarly crowded intellectual landscape.
Keith’s own sentence gives the word a useful boundary. Olive and Phillida helped him make sense of emerging thoughts; they did not supply a route for him to follow. In this case, “wayfinder” names a form of orientation: another person leaves you better able to locate yourself through questions, distinctions or ways of seeing that can remain useful when the terrain changes. That is different from ranking influences, claiming mentorship or treating the wayfinder as the author of what comes next.
Olive helped him remember to ask how far he stood from the action or source.
Phillida helped him keep knowing connected to people, experience and story.
Keith carried those orientations into a learning environment neither woman needed to have anticipated for their earlier work to become useful there.
And, in Phillida’s case, he carried something forward again into the very different problem of coach learning.
What travels when the landscape changes?
There is a tempting way to make this into a lesson about finding mentors.
Clyde Street does not give us that story.
The sources do not establish that Olive Banks or Phillida Salmon were Keith’s formal mentors, supervisors or collaborators. They do not let us calculate how much of a later idea came from them. They certainly do not let us treat Keith’s imagined conversations with Phillida as her own endorsement of what he was doing.
What the sources give us is more precise.
Keith could name some of the intellectual equipment he had carried forward.
When a networked course made source routes extraordinarily complicated, an older question about research at several removes became useful again.
When digital and later professional learning raised questions about how people come to know, an older insistence on the personal, social and storied character of learning remained available to think with.
The terrain changed.
The wayfinders did not become a map.
They helped Keith notice where he was.
That may be the most useful meaning to carry from the case.
The idea also turns the case back towards Keith. Clyde Street preserves questions, links, named people, revisitations and unfinished trails. Keith did not describe the blog as an attempt to become a wayfinder for future readers; in 2020 he said he had not anticipated an audience. Any such role is therefore ours to recognise, not his to claim retrospectively.
For a later reader, though, Keith can function in that way. He can point towards things worth noticing, show where some of his own bearings came from, and leave enough of the trail visible for someone else to continue making sense of the terrain.
That leaves a question worth carrying beyond this case:
Question to carry
When we enter new intellectual territory, which older ways of seeing are still travelling with us—and can we name what we inherited without confusing it with what we later made from it?
Source and ownership note
Olive Banks and Phillida Salmon retain ownership of their scholarship. Keith owns his description of them as wayfinders, his remembered intellectual debts and the uses he made of those orientations in Clyde Street. The surviving record does not establish a formal mentorship or a symmetrical two-person lineage.
Sources followed
Keith Lyons, “CCK08: Week 1 (Part 2)” — 08/09/09
Keith Lyons, “Cck08 Coming To Know” — 08/10/23
Keith Lyons, “Of Personal Experience And Research Questions” — 11/04/20
Keith Lyons, “Coachlearninginsport Coming To Know” — 15/08/21
Keith Lyons, “Blogging 3” — 20/01/24