complexity – Simon.BuckinghamShum.net

BCII Visualizing Complexity

Resources from today’s session with students on the UTS Bachelor of Creative Intelligence & Innovation, who are on a 2-week intensive Creativity & Complexity summer school.

BCII 2016 – Visualizing Complexity from Simon Buckingham Shum [PDF]

Readings and multimedia to go deeper…

Human-Centred Informatics (HCI) & Complexity

Making Thinking Visible in Complex Times: This is a video replay of how the 1960s pioneering work of Doug Engelbart foresaw our current need to “augment human intellect” to tackle the “urgent complex problems” facing society, and how this traces through to mapping dialogue and debate.

Collective Intelligence for OER Sustainability: This article considers the implications for Collective Intelligence tools, of some of complex systems concepts introduced in the summer school.

Knowledge Cartography Software Tools and Mapping Techniques [Lib][Pub]

Constructing Knowledge Art: An Experiential Perspective on Crafting Participatory Representations [Lib][Pub][Fbk].

How work and organisations are changing how knowledge flows

Hagel III, J., Seely Brown, J. & Davison, L. (2010). The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion. Basic Books

CfP: Learning Analytics for C21 Competencies

CfP: Learning Analytics for 21st Century Competencies

Special Issue Editors: Simon Buckingham Shum & Ruth Crick (University of Technology Sydney)

Full call for Special Issue submissions: http://bit.ly/jlac21

A strategic educational response to a world of constant change is to focus explicitly on nurturing the skills and dispositions which equip learners to cope with novel, complex situations, assessed under authentic conditions. Thus, even if we do not know what the future holds, we can be better equipped for the only thing we can be sure of — change. The qualities that learners need have thus been dubbed “21st Century” in nature — not because these were of no use before (although they may take forms today which are novel) — but because of their critical importance in jobs involving sensemaking and creativity.

This sets the challenging context for understanding the potential of Learning Analytics approaches for the formative (and possibly summative) assessment of 21st century competencies, which are important precisely because they need to be displayed in interpersonal, societally and culturally valid contexts. By definition, the concept of assessing qualities that are lifelong and spanning the ‘arc of life’ inside and beyond formal learning demands new kinds of evidence. Computational support for tracking, feeding back, and reflecting learning processes holds the promise that these qualities can be evidenced, at scale, in ways that have been impractical until now.

Framed thus, the goal is to forge new links from the body of educational/learning sciences research — which typically clarifies the nature of the phenomena under question using representations and language for researchers — to documenting how data, algorithms, code and user interfaces come together through coherent design in order to automate such analyses — providing actionable insight for the educators, students and other stakeholders who constitute the learning system in question.

Quantifying these deeply personal qualities in order to feed back and strengthen them, without in the process reducing them to meaningless statistics, is the heart of the learning analytics challenge. How does one gather data from a diversity of life contexts, as potential evidence of these new competencies? How do we translate theoretical constructs with integrity into algorithms? How can they be rendered for human interpretation, by whom, and with what training? Should such analytics be used primarily for formative assessment, or should we be aiming for summative grades? Who gets to design the analytics, and who gets to validate them? Do analytics of this sort raise new ethical dilemmas?

Contributions are invited to this special issue to document and advance theory, design methodology, technology implementation or evidence of impact, including but not limited to:

Analytics for higher order competencies such as critical thinking, curiosity, resilience, creativity, collaboration, sensemaking, self-regulation, reflection/meta-cognition, transdisciplinary thinking, or skilful improvisation
Theoretical arguments around the opportunities, or indeed the limits, for analytics in illuminating particular competencies
Principles and methodologies for combining complementary analytical approaches, including reflections on conventional educational assessment instruments, and computational approaches
Methodologies for validating analytics
Analytics for learning dispositions/mindsets/“non-cognitive” factors known to shape readiness to engage in learning
Analytics for different kinds of authentic assessment and inquiry-based learning
Technological challenges and opportunities for lifelong, life-wide learning analytics extending beyond formal educational contexts
Arguments regarding whether analytics could effect a shift in the assessment regimes, and associated pedagogies and epistemologies, promoted by conventional education policy
Analysis of the systemic organisational adoption issues for such analytics
Visualisation design for different user groups, in particular, to promote increasing learner self-awareness and capacity to take responsibility for one’s learning

Constructing Knowledge Art: new book

A new book has just come out as part of the Synthesis Lectures on Human-Centered Informatics series (originally Morgan Claypool, now SpringerNature), edited by Jack Carroll.

Constructing Knowledge Art:
An Experiential Perspective on Crafting Participatory Representations

As many of you will know, Al Selvin is a close colleague and friend in New York, whose PhD research with me is the heart of the book’s story. Al is passionate about understanding the ability that some people have (including himself), of being able to add value to a group’s deliberations, by evolving the right representation at the right time, in a way that those present can then ‘own’ as a picture of their dilemma, and co-develop further.

This book is essentially about Sensemaking, arguably the No.1 capability needed for the future workforce. While a companion book Knowledge Cartography surveys the affordances of many forms of visualisation for sensemaking, in this new book, we go deep into the proposition that the ability to craft visual representations in this way is a new kind of literacy, central to the practice of Participatory Design. What we document as the constituent elements of Participatory Representational Practice can, on occasion, rise to the level of Knowledge Art:

Little work examines PD facilitation at the move-by-move level or provides close analysis of the interactions of participants and practitioners with representations. Many PD researchers have called for increased emphasis on PD facilitation as a professional practice, requiring reflective and experiential approaches, as we’ll explore in more depth in the following chapter. It is here we propose that Knowledge Art, as a normative ideal, gives us a unique viewpoint by which to understand and evaluate instances of participatory rep- resentational practice. Rather than treating such practice as the rational application of tools and methods, we look at it as the attempt of people to create meaningful representations of the ways they have connected ideas together. The experience of doing this in groups is better treated from an experiential than a techno-rational perspective. At its best, such practice can result in highly evocative representations of designs, processes, and strategies, that serve not only as references, but also as touchstones of meaning. We use that ideal as a way to look at instances of practice and see where they do, or don’t, rise to that level of meaning and integration. (p. 10)

In a UTS context, it is a form of Creative Intelligence, a strategic focus here. The language we developed to describe the experience, skills and dispositions of such Knowledge Artists is reflected in the transdisciplinarity of the framework developed to describe Knowledge Art:

The core of the work was through detailed video analysis at several scales, of the use of the Compendium visual hypermedia software developed by Al and my team at the Knowledge Media Institute, Open University [1]. Detailed analysis, at several levels, of video data from expert mappers in the heat of real meetings, and less experienced mappers in simulated but stressful practice sessions, led to the construction of a framework to describe the experience of a mapper. However, this book is not about Compendium per se, but about the ways in which a knowledge medium is used in collective sensemaking, whether software, pen+paper, or as one example shows, badges on the kitchen table…

This book doesn’t go into depth on complex systems or educational theory and practice — but in the introduction we set this work in the context of the need for people to grapple with unprecedented complexity:

As we navigate the second decade of the 21st century, humanity confronts the challenge of man- aging complexity at many scales, from the personal, to community, regional, national, and global. Finance, health, energy, education, urbanization, terrorism, etc. are the dilemmas we face that stretch us to the very limit of our cognitive and interpersonal capacities. The challenge, then, is to grow our collective capacity for sensemaking: to make sense of overwhelming amounts of data; to assess conflicting judgments about its trustworthiness; to resolve polarized interpretations about the implications; and to negotiate effective courses of action that all parties can commit to.

Better data and information/communication technologies (ICT) are not only drivers of these challenges, but also have key roles to play in managing them. However:

more data + more processing technology ≠ more insight or wisdom.

In the conclusion, we reflect on how the concept of Knowledge Art relates to the growing impetus to nurture 21^st century skills and dispositions in schools and higher education:

What we are proposing, therefore, is a convergence between two important strands. We have on the one hand this growing body of work into 21st century competencies, and specifically into learning dispositions—not just from academic researchers, but many practitioners in the trenches— arguing that young people (and indeed citizens at large, and specifically workforces) need a new transferable set of qualities that equips them for the novel challenges and complexity of society. These qualities can be seen to come together in what we have called Knowledge Art in this book. Knowledge Art is quite an advanced mix of dispositions and skills, which we have sought to artic- ulate here for the first time. The resonances between the two strands are, we suggest, striking. The educational work on 21st century competencies already shows that these can be nurtured intention- ally by schools in primary age children. Just as this book has sought to provide a missing language for an important professional practice, a language for dispositions such as “learning power” provides a vocabulary which was missing for students and teachers to talk about dispositions (Claxton, 1999; Deakin Crick, 2006, 2007). (p. 76)

The final connection to the work that CIC will be driving forward is that the appendix details a range of Knowledge Art Analytics: the methods by which we are able to describe qualitatively and quantitatively, the ways in which representations were used in a meeting. This seeds the further development of approaches to develop analytics for higher order competencies, which could enable us to track and coach such abilities in a more rigorous way.

Buy the e-book from the publisher’s page, and find us on Facebook.

[1] The Compendium Institute is the virtual hub we created to support our global Compendium user community. When our research interests at the Open University shifted to the web and larger scale collective intelligence, we passed ownership of Compendium to the user+developer community — who couldn’t bear to lose it. The creation of CompendiumNG (Next Generation!) is the strongest possible evidence a research team could hope for that we had created something of lasting value.

Complexity & Pedagogy: Shanghai workshop

iPhotoScreenSnapz013

I have just spent an extraordinary week in Shanghai in an intensive workshop designed by and for complex systems thinkers, to reimagine educational systems (research and practice) as complex adaptive systems. I was feeding into future scenarios a complex systems perspective on current developments in learning analytics and collective intelligence technologies.

FinderScreenSnapz004 The event was hosted graciously by East China Normal University (Institute of Schooling Reform & Development), a Key Research Institute in the University of National Educational Ministry. ECNU’s ground-breaking work is led by Prof. Ye Lan (CCTV interview), who is shaping national policy on reforming the school system to create more creative students with the qualities needed to thrive in the 21st century ‘age of complexity’. Shanghai schools leapt to fame when they topped the last PISA league tables, and part of this workshop was to examine our assumptions about what ‘good’ looks like, and how to assess educational quality for our complex times.

FinderScreenSnapz005 The workshop was expertly facilitated by Rob Kay from Incept Labs (Sydney), a team who specialise in the applications of complexity science to wicked problems such as organizational change and resilience. The event was originally conceived by Ruth Deakin Crick (Univ. Bristol) and Chris Goldspink (Incept Labs), with whom I co-founded the Learning Emergence network, and recently ran the Dispositional Learning Analytics workshop at LASI13, Stanford. We partnered with Prof. Li Jiacheng at ECNU as it became clear that our visions and values for systemic learning systems design are closely aligned. With further backing from University of Auckland, participants were invited from New Zealand, Australia, China and UK.

We expect a rich strand of collaborations to flow from this exciting meeting, so watch this space.

See below for more details of Prof. Ye’s influential work.

Professor Ye Lan was born in Shanghai in December 1941. She is currently Tenure Professor and a doctoral supervisor at East China Normal University (ECNU). Professor Ye is also Director of the Contemporary Chinese Basic Education Development and Innovation Base under the overall “985 Project” of ECNU; Director of the New Basic Education Research Centre; Honorary Director of the Institute of Schooling Reform and Development (ISRD), ECNU, which is a key research base of the Ministry of Education in China; and Counselor of the People’s Government of Shanghai Province. She is concurrently appointed as a member of the National Educational Science Planning Leading Group. Prof. Ye has formerly served as Convener of the Education Appraisal Panel of the 4th and 5th Academic Degrees Committee of the State Council; Vice Chairman of The Chinese Society of Education; Vice Chairman of the Shanghai Municipal Council of Social Services; Head of Education Department, Dean of the Faculty of Educational Science, founding Director of ISRD, and Vice-President at ECNU. Prof. Ye is an eminent scholar in the following key research areas: theories of education study, theories of education research methods, contemporary basic education of China, teacher education reform etc. Her major publications include Jiao yu gai lun (Principles of Education), Jiaoyu yanjiu fanfalun chutan (An Exploration of Education Research Methods) and Xin ji chu jiao yu lun (On New Basic Education). She has also edited and written a number of research series, and has published over 90 research articles. She has been responsible for various state key studies, and received many national academic awards.

Prototyping a systemic school learning methodology

I’m just back from an amazing workshop at Bristol. This is a step along the path of an unfolding story about how we are using the groundbreaking work of Tony Bryk‘s team on Design, Educational Engineering and Development (DEED), as a methodology for systemic school change. This is combined with the University of Bristol’s Effective Lifelong Learning Inventory (ELLI), which forms part of a process of Authentic Inquiry (AI) for students, teachers and leaders.

My part of this systemic approach is that the insights from these prototypes are then shared via our Collective Intelligence Evidence Hub. My introduction to this is below, but see the full story on Learning Emergence to understand how this fits into the whole approach, and the demos I then give after teachers’ presentations.

Oasis Academies intend to use the Hub as a key way to distill and share staff learning across the region’s academies. This is an exciting convergence, with the academy piloting this reports that it has catalysed a profound shift in how they think about professional development.

Complexity Science, Learning Analytics & Collective Intelligence

The European FET Flagships competition has the following mission:

FET Flagships are ambitious large-scale, science-driven, research initiatives that aim to achieve a visionary goal. The scientific advance should provide a strong and broad basis for future technological innovation and economic exploitation in a variety of areas, as well as novel benefits for society.

As part of the FuturICT submission from a year-long pilot, we recently submitted our proposal for the first 30months of a 10 year research programme (PDF).

FuturlCT is a FET Flagship project using collective, participatory research, integrated across the fields of ICT, the social sciences and complexity science, to design socio-‐inspired technology and develop a science of global, socially interactive systems. The project will bring together, on a global level, Big Data, new modelling techniques and new forms of interaction, leading to a new understanding of society and its co-‐ evolution with technology. It will place Europe at the forefront of a major scientific drive to understand, explore and manage our complex, connected world in a more sustainable and resilient manner.

Working with FuturICT is the closest that someone in my field may get to “Big Science” a la Human Genome project or Large Hadron Collider. We don’t tend to have projects of that scale in human-centred computing! But the over-arching theme of Complexity Science as a way of making sense of societal big data provides that scale of vision. The European Physical Journal does not spring to mind as the first place to look for work on ICT for learning analytics or collective intelligence – my particular interests – but it has an explicit focus on advances in Complex Systems, including socio-technical-economic systems, not just physical or biological. So it’s very satisfying to point to a more detailed account of the thinking behind the proposal, which we’ve just published as an open access special issue of EPJST.

Within the special issue, you’ll find a fascinating set of contributions from European scientists who set out a 10 year research agenda within their fields: what are the really tough problems? There are also visionary position papers outlining the kind of socio-technical infrastructure that FuturICT will investigate, and a foregrounding of the ethical dimensions that human Big Data and Analytics always raise.

For those interested in Human-Centred Computing, CSCW, Collective Intelligence and Learning, these run implicitly through many of the articles, but I contributed on these themes to two of them:

Buckingham Shum, S., Aberer, K., Schmidt, A., Bishop, S., Lukowicz, P., Anderson, S., Charalabidis, Y., Domingue, D., de Freitas, S., Dunwell, I., Edmonds, B., Grey, F., Haklay, M., Jelasity, M., Karpištšenko, A., Kohlhammer, J., Lewis, J., Pitt, J., Sumner, R. and Helbing, D. (2012). Towards a Global Participatory Platform: Democratising Open Data, Complexity Science and Collective Intelligence. Eur. Phys. J. Special Topics, 214, pp.109-152. http://dx.doi.org/10.1140/epjst/e2012-01690-3

The FuturICT project seeks to use the power of big data, analytic models grounded in complexity science, and the collective intelligence they yield for societal benefit. Accordingly, this paper argues that these new tools should not remain the preserve of restricted government, scientific or corporate élites, but be opened up for societal engagement and critique. To democratise such assets as a public good, requires a sustainable ecosystem enabling different kinds of stakeholder in society, including but not limited to, citizens and advocacy groups, school and university students, policy analysts, scientists, software developers, journalists and politicians. Our working name for envisioning a sociotechnical infrastructure capable of engaging such a wide constituency is the Global Participatory Platform (GPP). We consider what it means to develop a GPP at the different levels of data, models and deliberation, motivating a framework for different stakeholders to find their ecological niches at different levels within the system, serving the functions of (i) sensing the environment in order to pool data, (ii) mining the resulting data for patterns in order to model the past/present/future, and (iii) sharing and contesting possible interpretations of what those models might mean, and in a policy context, possible decisions. A research objective is also to apply the concepts and tools of complexity science and social science to the project’s own work. We therefore conceive the global participatory platform as a resilient, epistemic ecosystem, whose design will make it capable of self-organization and adaptation to a dynamic environment, and whose structure and contributions are themselves networks of stakeholders, challenges, issues, ideas and arguments whose structure and dynamics can be modelled and analysed.

Johnson, J., Buckingham Shum, S., Bishop, S., Zamenopoulos, T., Swithenby, S., MacKay, R., Merali, Y., Lorincz, A., Costea, C., Bourgine, P., Louçã, J., Kapenieks, A., Kelley, P., Caird, S., Bromley, J., Deakin Crick, R., Goldspink, C., Collet, P., Carbone, A. and Helbing, D. (2012). The FuturICT Education Accelerator. Eur. Phys. J. Special Topics, 214, pp.215-243. http://dx.doi.org/10.1140/epjst/e2012-01693-0

Education is a major force for economic and social wellbeing. Despite high aspirations, education at all levels can be expensive and ineffective. Three Grand Challenges are identified: (1) enable people to learn orders of magnitude more effectively, (2) enable people to learn at orders of magnitude less cost, and (3) demonstrate success by exemplary interdisciplinary education in complex systems science. A ten year ‘man-on-the-moon’ project is proposed in which FuturICT’s unique combination of Complexity, Social and Computing Sciences could provide an urgently needed transdisciplinary language for making sense of educational systems. In close dialogue with educational theory and practice, and grounded in the emerging data science and learning analytics paradigms, this will translate into practical tools (both analytical and computational) for researchers, practitioners and leaders; generative principles for resilient educational ecosystems; and innovation for radically scalable, yet personalised, learner engagement and assessment. The proposed Education Accelerator will serve as a ‘wind tunnel’ for testing these ideas in the context of real educational programmes, with an international virtual campus delivering complex systems education exploiting the new understanding of complex, social, computationally enhanced organisational structure developed within FuturICT.

In the above paper, my collaboration around LearningEmergence.net with Ruth Deakin Crick (Univ. Bristol) and Chris Goldspink (Incept Labs) opens up for us an intriguing landscape around complexity thinking and learning:

“As in many other fields, there is now active interest in the possibility that the concepts and tools of complexity science hold the promse of providing a new, more rigorous language and suites of computational tools for systemic thinking within educational research. These could enable possible futures to be mapped, modelled, simulated, and rendered in appropriate forms to help both researchers and practitioners to understand and, where appropriate, choose to act differently to achieve their intended outcomes. A central claim to be investigated in this research programme is that complexity science provides a language for transdisciplinary learning-centred discourse between system stakeholders, serving as reference points for modelling and, suitably communicated and embodied in tools, for educational leaders, and learners.

For instance, autopoiesis is relevant to the emergence of learner identity in co-constructed domains of meaning, and hence for the way we approach learning as well as school change. Dissonance, defined as conflict between agents and processes, creates a space for deep learning when agents have the capacity to hold conflicting ideas in tension. Emergence focuses attention on the quality of relationships for creative learning and leadership in complex organisations. Resilience has been identified as key to learning to learn, and has been operationalised as a formally modellable quality in individual learners, not just socio-technical collectives [9].

To take another example, the evidence is that efforts to manage educational systems (whether at national or institutional level) which do not take into account complex systems dynamics, do not result in sustained school improvement: standards in schools across the developed world are plateauing, as measured by student outcomes [23]. There is a pressing need for management and self evaluation processes [24] which can account for such complexity in order to facilitate, value and enhance the breadth and range of student outcomes. The evidence emerging from these new approaches is that systemic transformation is indeed possible (e.g. [25–28]).

A research community is now emerging at the intersection of Complexity Science, Educational Theory and Practice [24, 28, 30–33]. Through our visiting scholars programme, and international workshop and webinar series, we anticipate a very productive dialogue with these networks. FuturICT will make available unprecedented computational infrastructure for tracking and modelling complex systems — the question is how does this contribute to current theoretical discourse, and how can intensely practical challenges around the design and management of resilient learning ecosystems be tackled in fresh ways when traditional theory is combined with simulation and visualisation tools that can render complex systems in new ways, for both researchers and practitioners?”

Working with the FuturICT consortium has been a fascinating experience so far, and if we are successful, the start of what should be a remarkable intellectual journey. For great introductions to the field, we’re working with Philip Ball, an award-winning science journalist. He’s written a brilliant historical contextualisation of the notion of a “physics of society”, controversial as this is — check out Critical Mass – and is helping us explain Why Society is a Complex Matter.

LearningEmergence.net launches!

Hurrah!

Following Howard Green’s superb inaugural seminar for the Systems Centre: Learning and Leadership on Rethinking Learning & Leadership, we officially broke open the bubbly and launched LearningEmergence.net 🙂

This is a new collaborative venture with Ruth Deakin Crick at University of Bristol, in which we’re joining forces to drive forward our mutual interest in the future of learning in schools, universities and the workplace.

Modest ambitions… How do we weave coherently the research, practices, policies, technologies and enterprise needed to build the learning skills, habits of mind and dispositions needed for the 21st Century? We see the need for a critical convergence between deep learning | complex systems | transformative leadership | knowledge media.

Complexity, Computing, Contemplation, Learning?

Just posted on the new Learning Emergence network blog, a set of reflections on how we may need to bring in a whole new mindset if we are to truly tackle the complexities now confronting us…

“All of my work has been around harnessing the digital world to get us to go beyond the surface and think more deeply. Up till now this has been largely focused on rational modes of thinking, inquiry and sensemaking — hence all the stuff on argumentation, dialogue/debate mapping and hypermedia.

However, we are more than rational beings, and we know an increasing amount about the central role of the unconscious in dealing creatively with complex dilemmas that seem not to yield to conscious effort. I’ve touched on this a bit but it’s certainly been second fiddle adding harmonies to the primary melody.”

[…]

“2008 was clearly something of a watershed for me, since I also began to think about bringing in research on completely different modes of being and engagement — namely the contemplative and the spiritual — and wrote a series of posts on the intersection of learning, creativity, computing — and critically — the contemplative mind.A lot has happened in the intervening years, and sparked by some recent tweets and ensuing links around sensemaking and complexity, I’ve been drawn back to this work, and can sense a new matrix of connections beckoning.”

Baby steps into complexity science

I spent a yesterday at Imperial College, immersing myself in a new community, which is always an interesting experience. New personalities, new language, new networks…

These were Complexity Science people, coming together for a workshop convened by my Open U. colleague Jeff Johnson. Convened under the EU ASSYST Project, the workshop Towards a Science of Socially Intelligent ICT was the first in a series of events for people in the complex systems community to wrestle with what they called yesterday “social intelligence”, which turns out to be what others might call collective intelligence, sensemaking, social learning… Some of the participants also had interests in modelling complex adaptive systems tied to social phenomena, and coupling these with social media platforms and sensor networks. Speaker videos should appear on the workshop website shortly.

I outlined some preliminary thoughts on the three very big questions set by Jeff, to which there are clearly only emerging responses:

What is ICT-enabled ‘Social Intelligence’?
What theory(s) exists on Socially Intelligent ICT?
Engineering principles for SocialIy Intelligent ICT?

The three tables on slides 3-5 extend my longer EDUCAUSE talk, introducing complexity and resilience into the swirl of ideas in my head right now, around learning to learn, sensemaking and collective intelligence.

Social Intelligence Systems for Wicked Problems

How to organise a children’s party – Dave Snowden

I first heard Dave Snowden tell this in 2000 at a “Knowledge Management” conference (remember those days?). It’s still a scream, and delighted to find it online now at his Cognitive Edge site, which I recommend for its depth of thinking. Am unpacking some of it in relation to how we think about social learning and collective sensemaking in the future of schools and university.