I took part in an enjoyable and stimulating exercise led by my colleague ‘up the road’, the fabulous Lina Markauskaite, in which she orchestrated a “polylogue” among authors on how we envisioned the capabilities that learners will increasingly need in an AI-infused society. We each responded independently to a common set of prompt questions, and then began to comment on each others’ work, moving to a discussion and synthesis. This produces a different kind of article. See what you think (open access)…
L. Markauskaite, R. Marrone, O. Poquet, S. Knight, R. Martinez-Maldonado, S. Howard, J. Tondeur, M. De Laat, S. Buckingham Shum, D. Gašević, and G. Siemens (2022), Rethinking the entwinement between artificial intelligence and human learning: What capabilities do learners need for a world with AI?Computers and Education: Artificial Intelligence, Vol.3, 100056. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.caeai.2022.100056
The proliferation of AI in many aspects of human life—from personal leisure, to collaborative professional work, to global policy decisions—poses a sharp question about how to prepare people for an interconnected, fast-changing world which is increasingly becoming saturated with technological devices and agentic machines. What kinds of capabilities do people need in a world infused with AI? How can we conceptualise these capabilities? How can we help learners develop them? How can we empirically study and assess their development? With this paper, we open the discussion by adopting a dialogical knowledge-making approach. Our team of 11 co-authors participated in an orchestrated written discussion. Engaging in a semi-independent and semi-joint written polylogue, we assembled a pool of ideas of what these capabilities are and how learners could be helped to develop them. Simultaneously, we discussed conceptual and methodological ideas that would enable us to test and refine our hypothetical views. In synthesising these ideas, we propose that there is a need to move beyond AI-centred views of capabilities and consider the ecology of technology, cognition, social interaction, and values.
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 21st 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.
[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.
There’s been a flurry of interest in mapping within the Open Educational Resources community, catalysed by Susan D’Antoni’s facilitated 3-week online discussion to crowdsource requirements for a participatory “OER World Map”. This has sparked many dreams and visions about what could or should be usefully ‘mapped’.
This discussion triggered memories from back in 2008 when I was developing an account of how “cartography” as both a metaphor, art and discipline could be ‘mapped’ (sorry) to the charting of emergent intellectual landscapes (two examples appended).
In 2010-12, Hewlett Foundation funded the OLnet project to research the evidence base around the impact of OER, and with our colleagues in IET, we developed the Open Education Evidence Hub. This generates a filterable, interactive Google Map as one view (of many) onto the OER movement, complemented by conceptual maps of the evidence base (challenges, issues, claims, solutions, resources), plus social networks of the people and organizations:
In the follow-on work which we’ve driven forward in KMI, we’ve subsequently generified this into Evidence-Hub.net — a customizable shell for any community of enquiry seeking to pool their collective intelligence, bridging across academic and practitioner perspectives:
So, some broader perspectives on knowledge cartography…
Introduction: A “knowledge mapping” approach to managing information, knowledge and decisions places the emphasis on the creation of “cartographic” layers, which like spatial maps, weave different kinds of stories over the “raw data” of documents, deadlines, resources, problems. Just as the map is not the territory, neither is a knowledge map neutral, nor necessarily a consensus worldview, and not to be taken as truth. Continuing the spatial planning metaphor, a good knowledge map is a powerful representation for sensemaking: orientation, shared memory, filtering complexity, and maintaining shared attention for planning and decision making. In software, digital maps of such intellectual landscapes exploit the power of hypermedia, folksonomy, social tools, and (where possible) reasoning over formal ontology. The centrality of social processes in negotiating the meaning of a map is unquestioned. The speakers in today’s session work from these assumptions, and will take you deeper into their particular approaches.
Knowledge Cartography
Preface to Knowledge Cartography: Software Tools and Mapping Techniques. (Eds.) Okada, A., Buckingham Shum, S. and Sherborne, T. Springer: Advanced Information and Knowledge Processing Series. ISBN: 978-1-84800-148-0
The eyes are not responsible when the mind does the seeing.
Publilius Syrus (85-43 BC)
Maps are one of the oldest forms of human communication. Map-making, like painting, pre-dates both number systems and written language. Primitive peoples made maps to orientate themselves in both the living environment and the spiritual worlds. Mapping enabled them to transcend the limitations of private, individual representations of terrain in order to augment group planning, reasoning and memory. Shared, visual representations opened new possibilities for focusing collective attention, re-living the past, envisaging new scenarios, coordinating actions and making decisions.
Maps mediate the inner mental world and outer physical world. They help us make sense of the universe at different scales, from galaxies to DNA, and connect the abstract with the concrete by overlaying meanings onto that world, from astrological deities to signatures for diseases. They help us remember what is important, and explore possible configurations of the unknown. Cartography — the discipline and art of making maps — has of course evolved radically. From stone, wood and animal skins, we now wield software tools that control maps as views generated from live data feeds, with flexible layering and annotation. (Our sister volume in this series, The Geospatial Web, explores the convergence of spatial data, mapping tools and the social web: Scharl and Tochtermann, 2006)
“Foundational concept, fragmented thinking, line of argument, blue skies research, peripheral work”: we spatialise the world of ideas all the time with such expressions. Maps can be used to make such configurations tangible, whether sketched on a napkin or modelled in software. In this book we bring together many of the leading researchers and practitioners who are creating and evaluating such software for mapping intellectual worlds. We see these as new tools for reading and writing in an age of information overload, when we need to extract and construct meaningful configurations, around which we can tell different kinds of narrative.
For a visual generation of children who have never known a world without ubiquitous information networks, we might hypothesise that knowledge maps could have particular attraction as portals into the world of ideas. Moreover, the network is not only dominant when we think about our social and technical infrastructures, but almost an ontological stance in postmodernity, where we hold our viewpoints to be precisely that: always partial and contextualised. Weaving connections between nodes in the network is the most flexible way to bring ideas and information into locally coherent relationships with each other, knowing that there is always another viewpoint on the validity of these patterns. Modelled in software, the vision is that intellectual continents, islands and borders can be invoked and dissolved at different scales, as required.
Knowledge Cartography can be defined as:
the art, craft, science, design and engineering of different genres of map to describe intellectual landscapes — answering the question how can we create knowledge maps?
and the study of cartographic practices in both beginners and experts as they make and use such maps — answering the question how effective are knowledge maps for different kinds of user?
The particular focus of the authors in this volume is on sensemaking: the process by which externalising one’s understanding clarifies one’s own grasp of the situation, as well as communicates it to others — literally, the making of sense (Weick, 1995: p.4). While “sense” can be expressed in many ways (non-verbally in gesture, facial expression and dance, and in prose, speech, statistics, film…), knowledge cartography as construed here places particular emphasis on digital representations of connected ideas, specifically designed to:
I. Clarify the intellectual moves and commitments at different levels.
(e.g. Which concepts are seen as more abstract? What relationships are legitimate? What are the key issues? What evidence is being appealed to?)
II. Incorporate further contributions from others, whether in agreement or not.
The map is not closed, but rather, has affordances designed to make it easy for others to extend and restructure it.
III. Provoke, mediate, capture and improve constructive discourse. This is central to sensemaking in unfamiliar or contested domains, in which the primary challenge is to construct plausible narratives about how the world was, is, or might be, often in the absence of complete, unambiguous data.
Our intention with this book is to provide a report on the state of the art from leaders in their respective fields, identify the important challenges as they are currently seen in this relatively young field, and inspire readers to test and extend the techniques described — hopefully, to think more critically and creatively. Many of the tools described are not sitting in research labs, but are finding application in diverse walks of life, with active communities of practice. These communities represent the readership we hope for: learners, educators, and researchers in all fields, policy analysts, scenario planners, knowledge managers and team facilitators. We hope that practitioners will find new perspectives and tools to expand their repertoire, while researchers will find rich enough conceptual grounding for further scholarship.
Genres of knowledge map
A range of mapping techniques and support tools has evolved, shaped by the problems being tackled, the skill of mappers, and the sophistication of software available. We briefly characterise below the main genres of map. The appendix summarises at a glance which mapping approaches and software tools are presented in each chapter.
Followers of our work will know we’ve worked closely with Jeff Conklin, building on his foundational work on the craft of Dialogue Mapping for capturing key aspects of a team’s deliberations in a visual map. In Al Selvin’s and Maarten Sierhuis’s extension called Conversational Modelling, this has been extended to support visual modelling driven by more constrained templates.
Based on the doctoral work by Anna De Liddo, we’ve just published a KM case study, in the context of managing the diverse, hybrid forms of information and interpretation that surround participatory urban planning, in which shared ownership of outcomes is critical. This uses the above approaches, supported by the open source Compendium visual hypermedia tool, but extended through the systematic use of custom views and tagging to index contributions against five key dimensions of KM in this context — but relevant to many others:
De Liddo, A. and Buckingham Shum, S. (2010). Capturing and Representing Deliberation in Participatory Planning Practices. In: De Cindio F., Macintosh A. & Peraboni C., (Eds.) From e-Participation to Online Deliberation, Proceedings OD2010: Fourth International Conference on Online Deliberation, Leeds, UK, 30 June – 2 July, 2010. ISBN 0-96678-186-4. Proceedings accessible online: http://www.od2010.dico.unimi.it/docs/proceedings/Proceedings_OD2010.pdf. Article ePrint: http://oro.open.ac.uk/22279
There are some comments on Bill’s site pertaining to the content of the analysis, which I’m not concerned with. But from a purely structural perspective, it’s easy to poke fun at systems diagrams such as this because:
(1) we may not like the politics
(2) they’re impenetrable for an outsider
(3) rendering a tragic human dilemma as nodes and arcs seems to invite ridicule
But if we believe that these really are complex systems, then modelling them is surely one way to get a grip, and a map is simply an intentional way to simplify the world in order to discern important connections.
IF:
* you are involved in the process of their construction
* or are walked through them slowly with an interactive tool (or set of filtered visualizations as in these slides) that focus attention on specific regions/paths,
THEN:
I would say these can be useful.
We would all bridle if a colleague marched into the middle of a meeting and poked fun at how messy the whiteboard was, not appreciating that this was a collective working memory with intensely meaningful scribbles for those present. If there was longer term value in those scribbles, we’d re-render them in some way for an outside audience, through some combination of cleaned up graphics/animations, prose narrative, and verbal presentation.
By analogy, if we want conceptual maps to be more than working memory for those present in constructing it, or longer term memory for that group to reconstruct their conversation, then we have to supplement the raw map with scaffolding to help outsiders in.
Four thoughts…
Cartographic narrative
One of the big challenges around mapping of any sort (and my concern is specifically about mapping dialogue and debate), is the loss of narrative flow that prose does so well, but often at the price of obscuring conceptual clarity. How do we make up for that, if we can’t be there in person to jump around in front of them to ground the terse symbols in the richness of the problem at hand?
The emergence of out-of-the-box screencast tools is in my view a significant development: now we can provide engaging introductions to maps that in a few minutes give newcomers a guided tour, and springboard to interrogate and build on the map’s analysis. In other words, bring it alive and connect it to the life stories that viewers bring…
“Inside this green map you’ll find a summary of the last 2 months’ work. We spent a LONG time on THIS issue, which shows the connections between Jim’s analysis of the new Govnt Funding Policy that’s dominated all our lives since Sept., with Ann’s keynote slides on Creative Thinking that went down so well at the away day…”
Interactive maps
If we can design user interfaces onto maps that are sufficiently intuitive, they may invite and guide the newcomer by indicating where to start, and offering controls to highlight significant features/paths/connections/regions. But it may be that the work to create a self-standing artifact requires additional effort — that may be easy to justify if the map supports a high-stakes presentation, but that’s not always the case. Experience with capturing design rationale shows that maintaining such maps will drop off the radar when schedules are tight: the map has to be justifying its existence and value all the time.
The holy grail is a software environment that automatically provides navigational scaffolding for outsiders to read the map in a coherent way.
Shared convention
We don’t need either of the above to read many kinds of everyday spatial map: we know how to read them through convention, embedded in our education and culture. In time, conceptual maps such as systems diagrams, dialogue and argument maps may come to be embedded and transmitted in this way. An increasing number of us are working on inventing that future!
When narrative meets critical thinking
Finally, the above story is about how we supply narrative to fill in the gaps left by terse, structural representations. But as we ponder this dance between narrative and critical thinking, we can also flip this, and ask what it means to attempt to formalize rich narratives, something I’m reminded of from the recently completed work of two students.
Floris Bex recently sent me a copy of his PhD which seeks to model stories (criminal cases) in an analytical fashion, using argumentation theory. Meanwhile, one of my students Joanna Kwiat developed and validated a story annotation scheme grounded in narratology, for professional knowledge sharing. Jack Park is also developing concepts around storytelling, dialogue/argument mapping and knowledge federation in his PhD.
There are connections — and tensions — between the richness of narrative/story for knowledge sharing, and the rigour of critical thinking/argumentation. This may also connect to tensions between the way in which we can use the semantic and the social web for collective sensemaking.
Narrative has a personal quality, and its power rests in a story’s ability to engage many people at different levels. The freeform folksonomic tagging promoted by the social web seeks to add the power of linked data without straitjacketing the freedom of individuals to tell and interpret stories. But this breaks down when we want to promote learning, critical thinking, sensemaking. We’ve failed as communicators, analysts or educators if our audience leaves with merely a cloud of terms in their minds. Sensemaking resides in the ability to make and critique coherent connections, and from there, to describe the shape of an idea.
The formalization schemes that Floris and Joanna developed, and the representational schemes of issue, dialogue and argument mapping tools, seek to provoke more reflection on the part of the analyst. This moves them from the realm of social media for leisure, where you don’t want to be made to think very hard, but no apologies for that.
But now let’s flip it again, and note that it is often through narrative that we are able to inhabit a dilemma, and from there, step back to gain critical distance and articulate abstractions. Enquiry-based learning, personalisation, creative curriculum, new forms of assessment, learning to learn and scenario planning, place narrative at the centre of sensemaking. I liked the way Joanna opened her thesis:
[We] dream in narrative, daydream in narrative, remember, anticipate, hope, despair, believe, doubt, plan, revise, criticize, construct, gossip, learn, hate, and love by narrative.
Barbara Hardy, 1977. Towards a poetics of fiction: an approach through narrative. The Cool Web: The Pattern of Children’s Reading. M. Meek, A. Warlow, G. Barton (Eds.), The Bodley Head, pp. 12-23.
Knowledge Mapping Research Fellow Ale Okada has been rather prolific this year. Not only has she managed much of the editorial process for Knowledge Cartography, she has also been reaching out to the Portuguese speaking world with her other new book Cartografia Cognitiva.
