Giorgio Bertini's Public Library

For more than a quarter century, the polemics surrounding educational reform have centered on two points of view: those that favor a “progressive” child-centered form of education, and those that would prefer a return to a more structured, teacher-directed curriculum that emphasizes basic knowledge and skills. Vygotsky‘s social constructivist theory offers an alternative solution, placing stress on coconstruction of knowledge by more and less mature participants engaging in joint activity. This theory offers semiotic mediation as the primary means of obtaining knowledge, whereby the less mature participants can seek solutions to everyday problems by using resources existing in society. In addition to using illustrative examples from classroom studies, this book provides a comparative analysis of the theories and complementary developments in works by Vygotsky and the linguist M.A.K. Halliday. This unique volume will be of tremendous benefit to researchers in the fields of education, sociolinguistics, and psychology.

Steve Keen, Professor of Economics at University of Western Sydney in Australia – In part 1 of this interview, he talks about the flaws in economic theory. In part 2 he talks about how in his search for a realistic framework of capitalism he ended up with the work of Hyman Minsky. In part 3 talks about the role of private debt in the economy. In part 4 tells us why he prefers to speak of the credit accelerator, rather than the credit impulse. In part 5 he talks about the world economic outlook. In part 6 shares his views on Europe, China, and Brazil. A realistic model of capitalism should have money in it, says Steve Keen in part 7 of the interview.

The book contains the papers developed from the presentations at the Distributed Intelligence in Design Symposium, held in Salford in May 2009. In this context, Distributed Intelligence refers to the interdisciplinary knowledge of a range of different individuals in different organisations, with different backgrounds and experience, and the symposium discussed the media, technologies and behaviours required to support their successful collaboration. The book focusses on: how parametric and generative design media can be coupled with and managed alongside Building Information Modelling tools and systems; how the cross-disciplinary knowledge is distributed and coordinated across different software, participants and organizations; the characteristics of the evolving creative and collaborative practices; how built environment education should be adapted to this digitally-networked practice and highly distributed intelligence in design. The chapters address a range of innovative developments, methodologies, applications, research work and theoretical arguments, to present current experience and expectations as collaborative practice becomes critical in the design of future built environments.

This article reviews a range of ways in which issues of national identity have been shown to be linked with the topic of language. We suggest that there is scope for development both of the theoretical underpinning to claims made about the nature of these links, and also, in consequence, to the methodological approaches appropriate to empirical investigations of them. Here, we explore the ways in which aspects of the social world such as those summarised above are understood theoretically. The first part of the paper argues that debates about the relationship of languages to forms of social identity, particularly those associated with nationalisms, often make a number of assumptions – about languages, about collectivities and about social agency. The second part interrogates these assumptions and proposes the utility of realist theory in evaluating claims in this area. In the final part of the paper, we outline the methodological implications of our argument.

The current mind-set about learning, teaching, and education is dominated by a view in which a supposedly all-knowing teacher explicitly tells or shows unknowing, passive learners something they presumably know nothing about. A critical challenge is to reformulate and reconceptualize this impoverished and misleading conception.

A culture-of-participation perspective for learning and education is focused not on delivering predigested information to individuals, but on providing opportunities and resources for learners to engage in authentic activities, participate in social debates and discussions, create shared understanding among diverse stakeholders, and frame and solve personally meaningful problems. It is grounded in the fundamental belief that all humans have interest and knowledge in one or more niche domains and are eager to actively contribute in these contexts.

Philosophy is the love of wisdom. We associate philosophy with dry academic arguments and impenetrable books. But these are features of a professionalized academic tradition that has grown up within a competitive university environment. They are not features of philosophy itself. The fact is anyone can be a philosopher. Philosophy is associated with critical thinking; but critical thinking is not philosophy. Critical thinking is a set of strategies and techniques that philosophers have invented to help them get clear on things. Philosophy is what we do when we slow things down and take a good hard look at the meaning of it all. My definition of philosophy? In the end, philosophy is care. Philosophy is care for what exists and for existence itself. It hinges on a care for truth, meaning ‘the way that things really are’. Philosophy is a simple thing, really. To philosophize is to care for life.

Developing learning experiences that facilitate self-actualization and creativity is among the most important goals of our society in preparation for the future. To facilitate deep understanding of a new concept, to facilitate learning, learners must have the opportunity to develop multiple and flexible perspectives. The process of becoming an expert involves failure, as well as the ability to understand failure and the motivation to move onward. Meta-cognitive awareness and personal strategies can play a role in developing an individual’s ability to persevere through failure, and combat other diluting influences. Awareness and reflective technologies can be instrumental in developing a meta-cognitive ability to make conscious and unconscious decisions about engagement that will ultimately enhance learning, expertise, creativity, and self-actualization. This paper will review diverse perspectives from psychology, engineering, education, and computer science to present opportunities to enhance creativity, motivation, and self-actualization in learning systems.

Social creativity and cultures of participation are facilitated by meta-design that allows stakeholders to act as designers, contributors, and decision makers in personally meaningful activities. This paper defines conceptual frameworks and briefly describes different applications contexts in gaining a deeper understanding of the challenges how to exploit the power of cultures of participation to enhance social creativity.

By studying social creativity in specific application contexts that foster and support cultures of participation, our research activities have contributed to and enriched conceptual framework. Achieving and supporting social creativity is not only a technical problem; it requires new cultures, new mindsets, and socio-technical environments that provide people with powerful media to express themselves and engage in personally meaningful activities. Research activities have only scratched the surface of exploiting the power of collective minds equipped with new media. The challenges of the complex problems that we all face make this approach not a luxury, but a necessity.

We examine the concepts of quantitative research and qualitative research, and argue that this dichotomy has several dimensions which are often, erroneously, assumed to coincide. We analyse two of the important dimensions – statistical versus non-statistical, and hypothesis testing versus induction. The crude quantitative-qualitative dichotomy omits many potentially useful possibilities, such as non-statistical hypothesis testing and statistical induction. We also argue that the first dimension can be extended to include establishing deterministic laws and the consideration of fictional scenarios; and the second to include ‘normal science’ research based on questions defined by an established paradigm. These arguments mean that the possible types of research methods are more diverse than is often assumed, and that the terms ‘quantitative’ and ‘qualitative’ are best avoided, although other, more specific, terms are useful. One important sense in which the term ‘qualitative’ is used is simply to refer to the use of data which yields a deep and detailed picture of the subject matter: we suggest the use of the word ‘rich’ to describe such data.

An individual fish reduces the danger to itself by swimming as close as possible to the center of the school. That is how schools hold together. John Davis says that researchers and fish are alike — both engage in herd behavior. PhD production, the role of journals, the incestuous relationship between top universities — Davis looks at it all with an eye to informing policy to promote diversity and alternative views in the profession — this is new economic thinking.

We are moving away from a world in which a small number of people produce and most people consume toward a new culture in which everyone can actively participate in a large number of human activities. More and more people are not only using artifacts and media but also getting involved in framing and solving personally meaningful problems. The power of cultures of participation is grounded in the opportunity that the development and evolution of socio-technical environments is undertaken by a large number of users with diversified needs and skills, each making a small contribution.

Most interesting, important, and pressing problems facing societies in the 21st century transcend the unaided individual human mind. They require collaborative systems to explore, frame, solve, and assess their solutions. Cultures of participation represent foundations for the next generation of collaborative systems by supporting all stakeholders to participate actively in personally meaningful problems. Meta-design supports cultures of participation by defining and creating social and technical infrastructures in which users can choose to become designers.

Indigenous knowledge is entering into the mainstream of sustainable development and biodiversity conservation discourse. Article 8(j) of the Convention of Biological Diversity (Rio, 1992) has contributed to this process by requiring signatories to: “respect, preserve and maintain knowledge, innovations and practices of indigenous and local communities embodying traditional life-styles relevant for the conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity”. As the potential contribution of indigenous knowledge to key items on the global agenda gains widening recognition, an increasing number of scientists and policy-makers are calling for the integration of indigenous and science-based knowledge.

Drawing upon cognitive science and systems theory, this article examines a number of issues commonly undertaken in theorizing “online communities.” The thesis is that current approaches to online community that focus on specific online “places,” such as LamdaMOO, may overlook the actual practices engaged in by current internet users, which focus on ad-hoc interactions with a distributed community. Systems theory, as developed by Vilem Flusser, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, is used to examine the relationship between communication and community. Through this examination a definition of community as a distributed communications systems, in which individuals function as nodes in the overall system, is developed. The conclusion considers the significance of this definition for the evaluation of the internet as a tool for political action and self-realization.

It is relatively easy to investigate how to employ a particular research method in the social sciences. It is considerably more difficult to decide which to use. Which method to use is arguably a more important question than how to use that method. ‘Which method?’ is, at least, the necessarily prior question. One cannot look up how to do something until one has decided what that something is. Methodological innovation depends directly on methodological choice. Researchers continuing a tradition, or working within a paradigm can often avoid making difficult methodological choices. Researchers seeking to innovate cannot. The question ‘which method?’ is particularly important for selecting research designs, because design choice importantly shapes most of the other choices researchers make. Designs are most effective and have the greatest potential for innovation when they are dictated by the nature of the research problem.

Creativity enhances life. It enables the great thinkers, artists, and leaders of our world to continually push forward new concepts, new forms of expression and new ways to improve every facet of our existence. The creative impulse is of particular importance to scientific research. Without it, the same obstacles, ailments, and solutions would occur repeatedly because no one stepped back and reflected to gain a new perspective.

Unfortunately, in the academic world—where much of today’s scientific innovation takes place—researchers are encouraged to maintain the status quo and not “rock the boat.” This mentality is pervasive, affecting all aspects of scientific research from idea generation to funding to the training of the next generation of scientists.

This groundbreaking text applies the concepts of complexity science to provide a unified scientific explanation of all aspects of human creativity. The book clearly describes the psynet model – a novel complex-systems theory – that integrates ideas from computer science, mathematics, neurobiology, philosophy, and cognitive and personality psychology. Goertzel shows how common computer science algorithms, such as neural nets and genetic algorithms, fit into the mental and creative process, and proposes that the understanding of mathematics must be extended to successfully deal with the mind’s workings.

“Collective Creativity” combines complex and ambivalent concepts. While ‘creativity‘ is currently experiencing an inflationary boom in popularity, the term ‘collective’ appeared, until recently, rather controversial due to its ideological implications in twentieth-century politics. In a world defined by global cultural practice, the notion of collectivity has gained new relevance. This publication discusses a number of concepts of creativity and shows that, in opposition to the traditional ideal of the individual as creative genius, cultural theorists today emphasize the collaborative nature of creativity; they show that ‘creativity makes alterity, discontinuity and difference attractive‘. Not the Romantic “Original genie,” but rather the agents of the ‘creative economy‘ appear as the new avant-garde of aesthetic innovation: teams, groups and collectives in business and science, in art and digital media who work together in networking clusters to develop innovative products and processes. In this book, scholars in the social sciences and in cultural and media studies, in literature, theatre and visual arts present for the first time a comprehensive, inter- and transdisciplinary account of collective creativity in its multifaceted applications. They investigate the intersections of artistic, scientific and cultural practice where the individual and the collective merge, come together or confront each other.

… emergent change … is not in anyone’s agenda or weather radar. It simply manifests in our biological and social systems when the underlying components have achieved a new order that give way to new behaviors … only us—the members of the social system can create emergent change. This is a profound message as we look at our future as a species. We have the power to create the right interactions as we differentiate in an emergent change cycle. Disruptions of our current coherence will always take place. We have no choice in that matter. Our choice lies in how we differentiate. The new state of coherence is based entirely on how we interact with each other and our environments. Our future—our new coherence—rest in our hands. This has been true since the Big Bang and has not changed.

In the past decade, two topics have generated much interest in the idea of social networks and network analysis. These are social capital, popularised by Robert Putnam, and small-worlds, popularised by Duncan Watts and Albert-László Barabási. Social capital highlights local processes and network structures, theorizing the ways in which relations and their patterns link individuals and groups to resources and beneficial outcomes. Small-worlds emphasizes global network structures, describing how large, heterogeneous networks can nonetheless appear small to individual actors, largely as a result of the high clustering and weak, bridging ties that make up these networks‘ structure. Although social capital and small-worlds share social networks as a common basis, they emphasize different sides of a spectrum: social capital focuses on the local and small-worlds on the global. In addition, both focus on seemingly different social phenomena: social capital emphasizes access to resources, whereas small-worlds emphasize the tension of actors living in a social world that is simultaneously large and small. In spite of these differences, the literature points towards overlaps in the ways in which network structure is described: both social capital and small-worlds discuss structures of openness and closure, and these structural overlaps provide a means by which to start exploring, on a theoretical level, additional ways in which to bring about a synthesis of the two bodies of literature. In this paper, I situate social capital as an explanatory framework for the emergence of small-worlds. I do this through three phases: first, I discuss how each topic describes and theorizes opennenss and closure. Next, I develop a series of propositions that show how social capital can be linked to small-worlds in a coherent framework. Finally, I offer an empirical illustration of these propositions through the use of p*, one of the models from the larger family of exponential random graph models (ERGMs), which allow analysts to test the probability of certain local structural tendencies in a given network.

Many books on the topic of creativity have been written, predominantely by psychologists, and therefore it is interesting to read about this topic from a philosopher’s perspective. Since one of the main purposes of philosophy is to clarify notions and concepts it is indeed useful to have philosopher’s comments on creativity. In this book we find some very entertaining and enlightening articles such as Saari’s lectures on voting systems in front of fourthgraders. He offers us an example of some social psychological parameters that influence children in their creative thinking, one realizes the necessity of a creative environment for children. Those articles in combination are very enlightening and yet puzzling, just as a good book in philosophy should be. While others leaves with an amazed facial expression at the newtonian discoveries saying this form of creativity is divine and not analyzable in components, the writers in this book go further to analyze the conditions of a discovery of that dimension. In understanding the concept of creativiy this book is an extraordinary way to get a grip of the problem and then again fall into the deepest of confusion. The philosophy has helped us to explain some of the components of creativity and given us some tools to think by ourselves but leaving us without a concrete answer to the question of the essence of creativity.