The wicked and complex in education: developing a transdisciplinary perspective for policy formulation, implementation and professional practice

The concept of 'wicked issues', originally developed in the field of urban planning, has been taken up by design educators, architects and public health academics where the means for handling 'wicked issues' has been developed through 'reflective practice'. In the education of teachers, whilst reflective practice has been a significant feature of professional education, the problems to which this has been applied are principally 'tame' ones. In this paper, the authors argue that there has been a lack of crossover between two parallel literatures. The literature on 'wicked issues' does not fully recognise the difficulties with reflective practice and that in education which extols reflective practice, is not aware of the 'wicked' nature of the problems which confront teachers and schools. The paper argues for a fresh understanding of the underlying nature of problems in education so that more appropriate approaches can be devised for their resolution. This is particularly important at a time when the government in England is planning to make teaching a masters level profession, briefly defined by the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA) benchmark statement as 'Decision-making in complex and unpredictable situations'. The paper begins by locating the argument and analysis of 'wicked problems' within the nature of social complexity and chaos. The second part of the paper explores implications for those involved in policy formation, implementation and service provision. Given the range of stakeholders in education, the paper argues for a trans-disciplinary approach recognising the multiple perspectives and methodologies leading to the acquisition of reticulist skills and knowledge necessary to boundary cross. © 2009 Taylor & Francis

A list of websites and reading materials on strategy & complexity

The list has been developed based on a broad interpretation of the subject of ‘strategy & complexity’. Resources will therefore more, or less directly relate to ‘being strategic in the face of complexity’. Many of the articles and reports referred to in the attached bibliography can be accessed and downloaded from the internet. Most books can be found at amazon.com where you will often find a number of book reviews and summaries as well. Sometimes, reading the reviews will suffice and will give you the essence of the contents of the book after which you do not need to buy it. If the book looks interesting enough, buying options are easy

Artificial life meets computational creativity?

I review the history of work in Artificial Life on the problem of the open-ended evolutionary growth of complexity in computational worlds. This is then put into the context of evolutionary epistemology and human creativity

Diversity improves performance in excitable networks

As few real systems comprise indistinguishable units, diversity is a hallmark of nature. Diversity among interacting units shapes properties of collective behavior such as synchronization and information transmission. However, the benefits of diversity on information processing at the edge of a phase transition, ordinarily assumed to emerge from identical elements, remain largely unexplored. Analyzing a general model of excitable systems with heterogeneous excitability, we find that diversity can greatly enhance optimal performance (by two orders of magnitude) when distinguishing incoming inputs. Heterogeneous systems possess a subset of specialized elements whose capability greatly exceeds that of the nonspecialized elements. Nonetheless, the behavior of the whole network can outperform all subgroups. We also find that diversity can yield multiple percolation, with performance optimized at tricriticality. Our results are robust in specific and more realistic neuronal systems comprising a combination of excitatory and inhibitory units, and indicate that diversity-induced amplification can be harnessed by neuronal systems for evaluating stimulus intensities.Comment: 17 pages, 7 figure

Design project planning, monitoring and re-planning through process simulation

Effective management of design schedules is a major concern in industry, since timely project delivery can have a significant influence on a company’s profitability. Based on insights gained through a case study of planning practice in aero-engine component design, this paper examines how task network simulation models can be deployed in a new way to support design process planning. Our method shows how simulation can be used to reconcile a description of design activities and information flows with project targets such as milestone delivery dates. It also shows how monitoring and re-planning can be supported using the non-ideal metrics which the case study revealed are used to monitor processes in practice. The approach is presented as a theoretical contribution which requires further work to implement and evaluate in practice

Lower Bounds for Oblivious Near-Neighbor Search

We prove an $\Omega(d \lg n/ (\lg\lg n)^2)$ lower bound on the dynamic cell-probe complexity of statistically $\mathit{oblivious}$ approximate-near-neighbor search ($\mathsf{ANN}$) over the $d$-dimensional Hamming cube. For the natural setting of $d = \Theta(\log n)$, our result implies an $\tilde{\Omega}(\lg^2 n)$ lower bound, which is a quadratic improvement over the highest (non-oblivious) cell-probe lower bound for $\mathsf{ANN}$. This is the first super-logarithmic $\mathit{unconditional}$ lower bound for $\mathsf{ANN}$ against general (non black-box) data structures. We also show that any oblivious $\mathit{static}$ data structure for decomposable search problems (like $\mathsf{ANN}$) can be obliviously dynamized with $O(\log n)$ overhead in update and query time, strengthening a classic result of Bentley and Saxe (Algorithmica, 1980).Comment: 28 page

Embracing Complexity: Creating Cultural Change Through Education for Sustainability

Campus Kindergarten in Brisbane, Australia, is a community-based organisation for children and families that has embraced change through the evolution of its internationally acclaimed ‘Sustainable Planet Project’. The centre initiated the project in 1997, introducing a range of new curriculum and pedagogical processes - always with young children at the heart - that have led to improvements in play spaces, reduced waste, lowered water consumption and improved biodiversity. This child-focussed approach is reflected in the way that children’s ideas provide much of the motivation and inspiration for changing to more sustainable practices. A whole centre project on water conservation, for example, was sparked when preschoolers (aged 4 years) articulated their concerns to staff about water use in the sandpit. This paper overviews a recent research project designed to document, examine and highlight the Sustainable Planet Project, to assist centre staff, researchers and others with a commitment to sustainability, to understanding the change processes. An important feature has been the project's slow, sometimes erratic, development that has always added complexity to the teachers’ work. Such change, however, has not been viewed negatively. Complexity theory has helped to explain the project’s evolution and complexity has been embraced as a vehicle for creativity, engagement, critique and ongoing change in this learning organisation. As a consequence, a culture of sustainability now permeates the centre where a strong vision has been translated into small but realistic goals and achievements