Teaching Diagramming at a Distance: Seeing the Human Wood Through the Technological Trees

The Systems Group at the Open University has always seen diagramming as an essential skill for students to learn and use properly if they are to become effective systems practitioners. However, teaching students at a distance to use diagramming effectively has posed challenges to both Lecturers and Students alike. While we have tried to provide some face-to-face opportunities to help teach this skill we have had to rely heavily on technological means most of the time. This paper reviews the role of diagramming in systems studies generally and specifically in Open University courses and assesses the advantages and disadvantages of the various technological methods used to teach diagramming over 30 years by the Systems Group. In so doing we try to determine how much the technology hinders or helps budding systems practitioners.     

Community Service Learning and the Emergence of Systems Thinking: A Teacher Education Project in an Urban Setting in Turkey

This study explores how community service learning experiences are reflected in the cognition of prospective teachers. Initial thoughts related to the experience are analyzed in relation the emerging thoughts throughout and after the experience. The study explored the thoughts of 15 prospective foreign language teachers related to their participation in a community project. The participants tutored students with visual disabilities at a learning center in an urban setting in Turkey. As part of the community-based field experience, participants worked with the learners with visual disabilities over a 16-week period. For this study, multiple reflective narratives of experience were collected from each individual. The goal for the collection and analysis of these narratives was explore the participants’ thinking patterns throughout the project and encourage them to reflect on their experience. The analysis of participants’ discourse relied on analysis of co-occurring lexemes in sample utterances text with descending hierarchical classification and correspondence analysis. The main themes that reflected the thoughts of the participants were related to (a) visions for community service, (b) teaching students with visual disabilities, (c) reflections in action, (d) awareness through interactions with difference, (e) interactions with people during community service, and (f) efforts to contribute to the project site. These themes were discussed in relation to the contribution of community service learning and the emergence of systems thinking among program participants.     

Sustainability,Systems Thinking and Professional Practice

This article explores the impact of the new sustainability agenda on the occupational and professional needs of those who have taken educational and training programmes in the environmental field either at undergraduate or postgraduate level or through relevant professional institutions’ continuing professional development programmes. It also describes a one-day workshop for the professionals on sustainable development, based on systems thinking and practice. The workshop provides a model for developing greater understanding and effective action in professional practice, by using dialogue and interprofessional learning to explore approaches to sustainability in a variety of business and professional contexts. It introduces the principles underpinning the concept of sustainability and provides tools to support the integration of sustainable development into professional practice and organisational change.     

You are Seldom Born with a Drum Kit in Your Hands: Music Teachers’ Conceptualizations of Knowledge and Learning Within Music Education as an Assessment Practice

Due to an increased demand for evaluation and accountability, the focus on assessment in public education has become stronger. Already leading to teachers’ deprofessionalization, another risk is assessment leading to criteria compliance and becoming a tool for measuring teaching quality. Those whose learning is affected are thereby not only students, but also teachers. One major factor to restore professionalism and focus assessment on learning is to change practitioners’ ways of thinking and not only their behaviour. Therefore, a group of seven music teachers and a researcher in music education have carried out a research and development project using participatory action research as approach as well as method. This article explores and presents these upper secondary school music teachers’ conceptualizations of musical knowledge, learning and educational communication working with peers. Using Deweyan pragmatism as a lens to interpret the qualitative data, the results show that while a professional language does exist, the music teachers’ conceptualizations of musical knowledge and learning and educational approaches differ. A key aspect for the teachers to develop their professional language, concepts and assessment practices is the teachers’ opportunities to communicate—both factual as well as perceived.     

Systemic praxis in the education of the agricultural systems practitioner

This paper describes the context and the systemic experiential theories that have informed the praxis of educating agricultural systems practitioners. The praxis has involved a process of action research with students and with clients in farming and other rural community organizations. The praxis encourages learners to bring a range of methodologies of inquiry to bear upon problematic issues, contingent upon the nature of such issues. Informed by a number of different theories, and by reflecting on our own work, an earlier model of a nested hierarchy of systems of inquiry has been reconstructed to become a more useful guide to educational strategies: Each contingent methodology can now be seen to have its own learning, meta-learning, and epistemic learning dimensions. A key to enriched learning for responsible changes in agriculture and rural development lies in the facilitation of the consciousness of, and competency at, such a systemic pluralism of methodologies.     

Toward Fostering Systems Learning in Organizational Contexts

This article explores the ways in which the process of systems learning can be nurtured in organizational contexts. I posit that in order to mobilize systems learning at the individual, group, and organizational levels, an integrated, holistic approach must be pursued. It is suggested that the challenge of not only teaching the systems thinking concepts but also using their actual applications in practice is more than just an issue of pedagogical improvement. The cultural and material issues integral to the use of systems thinking must be taken into consideration as well. I argue that our efforts to improve our pedagogical practices to foster systems learning in organizational contexts can benefit from the social constructivist perspective, which represents a system of ideas about learning. The qualities of systems pedagogy resided in social constructivism are proposed as a framework to think with in designing the meaningful systems learning activities. This article also discusses how to create the cultural and material environments in which the process of systems learning can be nurtured.     

Systems Thinking and Systems Practice: Working in the Fifth Dimension

This paper describes how a messy organizational problem was tackled using a systems approach which led to a resolution of the problem and to an improvement in the working relationships of the people involved. The example also shows how people who are not familiar with systems thinking, as such, can quickly be helped to develop a shared systemic view of a complex situation using activity modeling. At a deeper level, the paper also shows how the underlying dynamics of the problem situation was altered as a result of using a cooperative, dialogical working method, leading to an improvement in the quality of service provided by that part of the organization. The paper uses Peter Senge's five disciplines of a learning organization, together with various systems concepts, as a framework for describing how the process of change was brought about through the simultaneous management of task and social processes, leading to both individual and organizational learning.     

The Pragmatics of Educational Systems Design: A Critical Examination

The author critically examines educational systems design (ESD) through the lens of pragmatism. Examining ESD through a lens of pragmatism draws to the foreground issues related to Banathy's (1991, 1996, 2001) idealized systems design for social and societal systems. The author addresses the complex and dynamic nature of systems design, focusing on the systemic processes in which user-designers are continually challenged to inquire, communicate, and consider choices, and make design decisions concerning the nature of the system being designed. The power of social systems design (SSD) lies in the ability to consider the ideal image of a social and/or societal system, critically and pragmatically in relation to creating a new system that will contribute to the evolutionary betterment of society and a sustainable future for humankind. Following an introduction, the author examines pragmatism. Then the author applies a lens of pragmatism, critically, to examine educational systems design in relation to generating change and creating the ideal educational system. The author then argues the pragmatics of educational systems design, concluding the paper with final reflections on ESD as a process.     

From Teaching to Learning: Technological Potential and Sustainable, Supported Open Learning

The central theme of this paper is the current interest in most educational institutions in moving from teaching to learning as their main system model and the implications which technology media have for unravelling the debate and influencing the resulting practice (for example see Active Learning: Using the Internet for Teaching, Number 2, July, 1995), Our chosen strategy for dealing with the central theme is to consider how we use language, metaphor and models to describe systems for teaching and learning and what is the role of technology in these systems. In particular we describe how the Open University is moving from an analysis of individual technologies to a synthesis of the educational ideas into a sustainable system that conforms to the University's policy of supported open learning. This includes focusing on open and equal access to courses, considerable attention to staff development and training (specifically in core teaching areas such as face to face tuition, correspondence tuition, student support, telephone and other media supported communication) as well as the necessity and value of reflection on practice (e.g. see Baker, Tomlinson et al,, 1996). In this first section, taking as our starting point the traditional linear view of educational structures, we build upon the notion of the learning system and describe this as an approach with a somewhat long and surprising history originating in the Socratic method. An eductive, cyclic learning model is introduced, and the historical impact of technology on this model is briefly reviewed in a global context by addressing the specific issue of access from the developing countries. Following from this, in sections two and three two types of teaching are described, under the labels of conventional and distance. It is argued that each has strengths and tendencies towards the eductive learning system introduced in section one. However, it is also argued that each has flaws which provide problems for the development of a learning system which can be sustained at distance. An analysis based upon metaphor is applied. In section four, it is then argued that in the conventional model there is a system with excellent learning potential but with an organisational structure which often does not encourage it whereas in the distance model there is the potential organisation for providing feedback but often little effective use made of it. That lack of use includes the new technologies which are now being focused on by the Open University, both in terms of the INSTILL initiative (Integrate New Systems and Technologies Into Lifelong Learning) and the Technology Strategy for Academic Advantage (Laurillard, Christmas et al., 1996). These technologies are argued, in section five, to be capable of being tactically effective in stimulating and supporting the strategic aim of learning. Technology mediation is discussed both in terms of course-based teaching and in terms of research opportunities. In section six a range of problem/opportunity areas of immediate concern for the extension of this technologically mediated system to the developing countries are discussed, while policy implications for the extension of supported open learning are drawn out in section seven. These include policies toward co-learning, access to learning, quality standards and the authorship of educational material.     

Storying Systems: Managing Everyday Flux Using Mode 2 Soft Systems Methodology

This paper examines work with managers who used a narrative approach to systemic thinking. Storytelling is incorporated within Mode 2 SSM involving a flexible approach to the analysis of complex or "messy" situations at work. Mode 2 SSM is presented as a thinking mode by those within the problem situation, involving the use of various devices of rich pictures, relevant systems, and root definitions, whereby managers and others may make sense of their experiences from within the flux of everyday life. The focus of the approach is learning through reflection on events and activities to consider potential actions and improvements in difficult situations. The findings show the initial difficulty and disappointment of learning to deal with complexity and the unexpected but how quickly the "gain outweighs the pain," as managers learned to attune themselves to the flux of situations, to identify how to work with flows and energies more creatively, and to become conscious of what was happening on the edge of awareness.     

Dealing with Human Relations in Chinese Systems Practice

This paper is about the Wuli, Shili, Renli (WSR) systems methodology. An important concept within this, Renli, has been developed from Confucian philosophy to clarify to Chinese researchers the necessity of dealing with human relations in systems practice. At present, the only formal means of operationalizing Renli that people are exploring in China is to import from the West methods for organizing debate. However, the concept of Renli suggests that more is needed than methods alone. In particular, facilitation skills are required. It is argued that the development of facilitation skills can be enhanced if researchers can gain both theoretical and practical knowledge of group dynamics, and engage in activities of self-reflection to look at, and alter, their own roles in these dynamics and the wider sociopolitical system. There are therefore three aspects to Renli: the use of systems methods for organizing debate, the acquisition of facilitation skills, and self-reflection geared toward the development of facilitation skills and enhanced critical awareness of the politics of intervention.     

Oral and Written Reflection in Practice Management: An Action Research Approach

Reflection in Practice Management (PM) favoured the integrated approach where learners had to critically reflect on the study material, assessments and tasks throughout the year and to integrate their experiences in a meaningful manner that would demonstrate their development and learning over the year. Reflection in the form of portfolios focused on personal development and individual learning rather than on achieving a general set of course outcomes. But assessment of these portfolios revealed no real evidence of reflection or critical thinking. This study suggested that learners be assessed orally so that their reflections could come alive and so that the educator could learn from the assessment to restructure or re-curriculate where necessary. This study found that although the orals were not a preferred form of assessment, they contributed successfully to informing the written critical and reflective thinking in the portfolios. Using an action research approach, enabled us to not only address a fundamental problem that the educators and learners were battling with—how to encourage and indeed teach learners to think critically and to reflect, but it also showed the educators how to solve problems or seek solutions to didactic problems in their own classrooms. The recommendations in this paper may therefore inform courses other than PM that use reflective practice, critical thinking or portfolio assessments.     

Film Use to Promote Understanding in Change and Diffusion of Innovation

The paper explores cinematic films as a pedagogical tool to promote critical thinking and student discussions in a doctoral-level learning, design, and technology seminar course at a major U.S. research university. These discussions focused on systemic change and systemic thinking concepts. The authors offer evidence from the literature that supports films’ power as a visual metaphor and neurocognitive stimulator to promote development of new perspectives in graduate students on case studies through articulation, reflection, and explanation of their thought processes on change and diffusion of innovation. There are theoretical, political, social, and technological issues that create tensions during any systemic change effort. The goal of using film in this seminar is to equip students with the requisite skills, theoretical frameworks, and interpersonal experiences needed to address these issues within organizations and communities. The change expected from systemic thinking is for students to think more deeply about the interconnectedness of systems and the importance of bottom-up change efforts that consider the perspective of all stakeholders.     

网络控制系统中的时延分析

在控制网络中使用数据网络已经引起了广泛关注。如何处理网络诱导时延对网络控制系统的影响已经成为了网络控制系统的主要挑战。介绍了网络控制系统的概念,分析了网络控制系统的优缺点,探讨了网络诱导时延的组成、特点以及对网络控制系统的影响并给出了仿真结果,最后提出了未来可能的研究方向。     

Transforming Adult Learning Through Critical Design Inquiry

Marching toward the 21st century, there are not only drastic changes in global economic and political development, but also in technological advancement and ecological evolution. All of these are intertwined with one another to shape national and societal development in various areas. In the milieu of education, these changes exert great influence on the way we perceive learning and instruction, this in turn calls for a paradigm shift in the way we design learning and instruction. Consequently, calls to critically examine the way we have been designing our learning and instruction have gained more and more attention in the past decade. Since design could help in realizing our visionary ideals, and transforming these ideals into innumerable learning and working contexts, we need to probe into how our learning and instruction could be more creatively and powerfully designed. The author contends that most learners, through the process of critical envision and enaction, could learn to design their own learning, either independently or collectively, through the cultivation of design capacities. In this paper, the author first presents the historical analysis of the theoretical foundations of instructional design, and then takes a critical approach to examining the alternative possibilities of instructional design. Based on the critical perspectives of design, she develops the critical design inquiry by integrating the richness of contemporary critical thinking into that of systems thinking and design thinking. To make the critical design inquiry an educational praxis, rather than just another design theory, the author takes a participatory and collaborative approach to design with a group of adult students. The critical design approach aims at enlightening the adult learners’ inner systems revolution and enriching the outer learning environments through collaborative design engagement. In the final section, the author explicates how the confined roles of instructional designers could be conceptualized through the critical design inquiry.     

Fostering Design Culture Through Cultivating the User-Designers' Design Thinking and Systems Thinking

In this paper, the essence of design thinking and systems thinking is reviewed, analyzed, and synthesized. Although there are many valuable schools of systems thinking, I focus on both Banathy's and Senge's since there are design spirit embedded in their systems thinking. I attempt to grasp the spirit of Banathy's systems models and the essence of Senge's systems thinking, incorporating them into my design inquiry. I propose adopting an enlightened, transformative design approach in order to enhance the revolution of the public's inner and outer systems through collaborative design engagement. It is expected that by utilizing the transformative design approach, the public or user–designers could gain the necessary skills to envision their own learning, assume responsibility for designing their own learning environments, and systematically reflect upon their habitual thinking and actions. Ultimately, the user-designers would be able to transform their model-driven or theory-driven approaches to systems application into a cultural approach to the cultivation of systems thinking and design thinking. Indeed, design thinking, as well as contemporary systems thinking are two powerful wings to make us fly in the capacious learning world of the 21st century.     

Systems Practice in China: New Developments and Cross-Cultural Collaborations

This short paper introduces a special issue of Systemic Practice and Action Research on new developments in Chinese systems practice. It focuses on the recent history of systems thinking in China, describing a paradigm shift that is currently taking place from an "objectivist" to a more pluralistic stance. Details are provided of the Hull–Beijing research program, which has contributed to this paradigm shift. In one way or another, all the papers in this special issue can be seen as having a connection with this research program.     

Social or Individual Learning? An Aggregated Solution for Coordination in Multiagent Systems

There are mainly two different ways of learning for animals and humans: trying on yourself through interactions or imitating/copying others through communication/observation. How these two learning strategies differ and what roles they are playing in achieving coordination among individuals are two challenging problems for researchers from various disciplines. In multiagent systems, most existing work simply focuses on individual learning for achieving coordination among agents. The social learning perspective has been largely neglected. Against this background, this article contributes by proposing an integrated solution to decision making between social learning and individual learning in multiagent systems. Two integration modes have been proposed that enable agents to choose in between these two learning strategies, either in a fixed or in an adaptive manner. Experimental evaluations have shown that these two kinds of leaning strategies have different roles in maintaining efficient coordination among agents. These differences can reveal some significant insights into the manipulation and control of agent behaviors in multiagent systems, and also shed light on understanding the social factors in shaping coordinated behaviors in humans and animals.     

Systemic Thinking and Practice Toward Facilitating Inclusive Education: Reflections on a Case of Co-Generated Knowledge and Action in South Africa

This article offers our reflections around a case of facilitating systemic thinking and practice in which the first author of the article (Tlale) interacted with research participants/participant researchers with the intention of strengthening systemic thought and action toward fostering inclusive education in the setting (a rural school in the Eastern Cape in South Africa). We reflect upon the process and also how our engagement was perceived by participants, as expressed in feedback received from them. We point to how Tlale introduced the idea of systemic thinking (to teachers, school management team, school governing body, and a district officer for the district) as tied to the possibility of acting to generate transformation toward a more inclusive educational context for the benefit of the learners at the school in question, thus acting as a systemic mediator on their behalf.     

The Dark Side of the Moon—Unilluminated Dimensions of Systems Practice

This paper explores some of the unilluminated or less explicit aspects of issues faced by those using systems approaches in real-world problem situations. The paper contends that discourse on systems approaches tends to be dominated by rational logical aspects of methodology, though other aspects of the intervention process, such as political dimensions of legitimacy, have become more important in the last 10–15 years. Unsurprisingly the discourse has been different for different methods. Method has been largely invisible in the hard systems area (or at least relatively little discussed), and although it has been the subject of much debate in the soft systems area, the debate has been nonetheless narrowly defined. It is narrowly defined in its relative neglect of process aspects for conducting a systems study. Since the nature of these processes (for example, the client/consultant relation) changes from hard systems to soft systems to critical systems in a way that makes social process progressively a more important dimension of each approach, this aspect has featured more in discourse on critical systems, but in general it remains a curious area of neglect. There is increasing interest in this area, and some signs that relevant theory and practice from closely related domains is being accessed to strengthen these approaches. This paper attempts to make a contribution by outlining and discussing some areas that could usefully complement existing systems approaches. The paper considers the following areas: (a) client relations, (b) analyst role, (c) language and communication, (d) group processes, (e) culture (and rationalities), (f) information gathering techniques and processes, and (g) change management or implementation. The paper draws on experiences of systems practices in the literature, interviews with systems practitioners, and writings in related areas. The paper ends by discussing some of the implications of these issues for the development of well-rounded systems approaches.