Keith Hamon's List: Connectivism

• Systems behaviour, then, may be divided into two zones, plus the boundary between them. There is the stable zone, where if it is disturbed the system returns to its initial state; and there is the zone of instability, where a small disturbance leads to movement away from the starting point, which in turn generates further divergence.
• Given that the key finding claimed for complexity theory is the effective unknowability of the future, the common assumption among managers that part of their job is to decide where the organisation is going, and to take decisions designed to get it there is seen as a dangerous delusion. Management, afflicted by increasing complexity and information overload, can react by becoming quite intolerant of ambiguity. Factors, targets, organisational structures all need to be nailed down. Uncertainty is ignored or denied. The management task is seen to be the enunciation of mission, the determination of strategy, and the elimination of deviation. Stability is sought as the ultimate bulwark against anxiety, which might otherwise become overwhelming. All of these managerial reflexes, many of them seeming unassailably commonsensical, are (we shall see) quite counter-productive when viewed from a complexity theory perspective.

  • If analysis cannot lead to certainty, then how is analysis changed?
• This kind of management theory and practice, Stacey and others tell us, bears the hallmarks of the over-rationalist thinking which has dominated since the triumphs of Newton and Descartes. The organisation, like the universe, is conceptualised as a giant piece of clockwork machinery. The latter was thought to be, in principle, entirely predictable; and good management should be able to get similarly reliable performance from the latter. Discoveries by the theorists of complexity and chaos show that even the natural world does not operate this way – and this revelation of the role of creative disorder in the universe needs to be taken to heart by managers.

  • This is the core of Morin's argument: the shift from reductionist, simple thought to complex thought. I still wonder how this affects critical thinking.
• The need for an emphasis on learning stems from the central finding of this theory – that the future is in principle unknowable for systems of any complexity.

  • This does not suggest that organizations have ignored learning in the past. Rather, it suggests that learning no longer has an end point, a graduation date, a time when we can say, "Okay, learning is now over, and we can start working." In this view, learning is continuous, simply a part of being a productive citizen, employee, etc.
• • Schools also value maintaining a common culture, despite the counter-culture of student life. The classroom assumes a unified group of students, with the same needs, same demands, same ambitions, same learning styles.
• This sort of learning cannot easily take place within an organisation which puts a premium on maintaining a common culture.
• agility of thought based on the fostering of diversity is a prerequisite for the organisation’s longer-term success.

  • Can traditional critical thinking skills foster agile thought? Good question.
• The organisation will build on its strengths, fine-tune its adjustments – and succumb to more innovative rivals.

  • Will this be the result for universities?
• Strategy is the emerging resultant.

  • If strategy is dynamic, then what are the thinking skills that promote that kind of dynamic vision? Scanning, feedback, pattern skills?
• Rather than trying to consolidate stable equilibrium, the organisation should aim to position itself in a region of bounded instability, to seek the edge of chaos.

  • QEP should "seek the edge of chaos." That's where all the fun is.
• the first step required is an act of faith.

  • Management does not like faith. They want certainty.
• In effect management needs to combine permissive style with abrasive challenge.

  • "combine permissive style with abrasive challenge." I like this. Be permissive and open in classroom behavior and management and yet be extremely challenging in what we are calling students to learn. Set a very high bar, then move out of the way to permit students to devise their own ways to clear the bar (even if that means letting them move the bar).
• The strategic role of senior management is largely to facilitate processes of dialogue which can lead to innovation, rather than to preside as final arbiters over an elaborate analytic process.

  • This sounds something like Morin's dialogic principle of thought, which differs from Hegel's dialectic in that there is no assumption of a synthesis. Rather, the thesis and antithesis remain in perpetual tension, forever unresolved, forever dynamic and creative.
• For him rationality is fine, and necessary, for handling routine business, but is just not up to the job of sense-making in poorly structured situations.

12 more annotations...

• online communities of practice are necessarily a manifestation of connectivism.

  • "Necessarily" seems a bit strong.