Supported open learning for rural development: some experiences from the Open University, UK

Four key elements which have underpined the OU(UK)s success in delivering an integrated system of supported open learning are outlined. These are: high quality, multi-media teaching materials; locally-based tutorial support; first class research and scholarship and highly professional logistics. The argument is put that when designing any contemporary education programme there are advantages in considering the programme as if it were a learning system. To be responsible, designers also need to consider this within a context of global sustainable development which encompasses environmental decision making. Seminar delegates are invited to consider the question: How can distance education and open learning contribute to the emergence of viable and sustainable rural livelihood systems? It is further argued that a valid response to this question involves surfacing the value positions of the major stakeholders as means to establish what is culturally feasible and so as to define what relationships stakeholders wish to conserve in any organisation that is constituted for the Greater Mekong Sub-Region. Evidence from other contexts suggests that any effective rural development strategy needs to be owned by more than one ministry. This presents particular challenges for a multi-national “university” concerned with rural development. International partnerships have a potential role and the OU(UK)’s collaboration models are summarized

Systems practice and the design of learning systems: orchestrating an ecological conversation

Human beings live in language and only they can take responsibility for how they think and act. So what understandings of response are possible? The relationship between responsibility and response-abilty is explored in the light of emerging critiques of the prevailing Western attitude to reason, viz: Lakoff and Johnson's (1999) fundamental challenge to prevailing models of Western thought. They argue that reason (on which much practice is built, including research practice) is: (i) not disembodied, but arises from the nature of our brains, bodies and bodily experience; (ii) evolutionary, in that abstract reason builds on and makes use of perceptual and motor inference present in 'lower' animals; (iii) is not universal in the transcendent sense but rather universal in that it is a capacity all humans share; (iv) mostly unconscious; (v) largely metaphorical and imaginative and (vi) not dispassionate but emotionally engaged. Systems practice is introduced as a means to orchestrate a particular type of conversation; it is also an ecological conversation. As a species our unique selling point is that we can engage in conversation. In the process we bring forth both ourselves and our world. To converse is to turn together, to dance, and thus an ecological conversation is a tango of responsibility. A conversation is inventive, unpredictable and is always particularizing to place and people. Drawing on experiences of teaching systems thinking and practice for environmental decision making a praxiology is outlined for stakeholder responsibility and response-ability. It is argued that capacity building in systemic inquiry and the design of learning systems are central to this praxiology

Fruits of Gregory Bateson’s epistemological crisis: embodied mind-making and interactive experience in research and professional praxis

Background: The espoused rationale for this special issue, situated “at the margins of cybernetics,” was to revisit and extend the common genealogy of cybernetics and communication studies. Two possible topics garnered our attention: 1) the history of intellectual adventurers whose work has appropriated cybernetic concepts; and 2) the remediation of cybernetic metaphors. Analysis: A heuristic for engaging in first- and second-order R&D praxis, the design of which was informed by co-research with pastoralists (1989–1993) and the authors’ engagements with the scholarship of Bateson and Maturana, was employed and adapted as a reflexive in-quiry framework.Conclusion and implications: This inquiry challenges the mainstream desire for change and the belief in getting the communication right in order to achieve change. The authors argue this view is based on an epistemological error that continues to produce the very problems it intends to diminish, and thus we live a fundamental error in epistemology, false ontology, and misplaced practice. The authors offer instead conceptual and praxis possibilities for triggering new co-evolutionary trajectories

Public policy that does the right thing rather than the wrong thing righter

Motivated by the reprisal of ‘wicked problems’ in Australian public policy discourse we make the case for understanding climate change adaptation, water and river managing, and other complex, uncertain, natural resource issues as ‘wicked problems’. This ‘framing’ of social planning dilemmas dates back 40 years yet public policy practitioners still do not seem well equipped in terms of understandings and practices to engage with these situations and to effect systemic improvements. Drawing on a decade of research in Europe we make the case for investing in social learning as an alternative governance mechanism and as a form of praxis for managing in ‘wicked problem’ situations. We outline our main research findings to explain how we understand and enact social learning. In doing so, we also draw on the Open University UK’s 35 years of experience of teaching systems thinking and practice for managing ‘wicked problems’. We conclude by opening up an invitational space to explore the commonalities and differences in research on social learning with that on deliberative practices and governance

If you're a fish, what can you know about the water?

The authors of this paper have been engaged in Systems Thinking, Systems Practice and Systems Teaching for many years. In this paper they reflect on their experience of engaging systemically with their own organisation in order to bring about change. Re-structuring the Systems Department of the UK's Open University to create new sites for emergence of fresh ideas, interests and enthusiasms raised questions about meaning and purpose as well as theoretical questions about practice. The authors describe their own attempts to answer these questions and to manage their own evolving understandings and emotionings by reflecting on some critical incidents

Illuminating the possibilities for social learning in the management of Scotland’s water

Our research explores the context of water management in Scotland as it existed in late 2003. We took as a key question: Is the Scottish policy context conducive to the emergence of “social learning” as a purposeful policy option in the future management of water, and in the implementation of the European Water Framework Directive in particular? Data generated by several means, including semistructured interviews with key stakeholders, tested the explanatory potential of a SLIM (Social Learning for the Integrated Management and sustainable use of water) heuristic concerned with how changes in understanding and practices can transform situations to produce social learning. Our research demonstrates how the historical context, including initial starting conditions; conducive institutions, especially political devolution, and policies; facilitation; building stakeholding; and the use of learning processes together can create the possibilities for social learning. The processes that went on through the development of the Scottish Water Bill exemplify how social learning as concerted action emerged, but it did not do so from any overall purposeful design. A major challenge is to create purposefully the conditions for social learning as a deliberate policy or governance mechanism

Human knowing and perceived complexity: implications for systems practice

Complexity has been understood in different ways since its (re) introduction into scientific discourse. Therefore, instead of proposing a definition of complexity, we group the existing explanations about it into two distinct categories: descriptive and perceived complexity. The main features of these categories are described and how they arise as the result of the adoption of contrasting epistemologies is discussed. These categories together with their implications for our doing in the world are explored under the rubric of the 'epistemological problem of complexity'. The practical significance of the issues we address, especially as they relate to building capacity for systems practice, understood as a way of managing in situations of complexity, is also of concern. "Even when the individual trees are highly interesting and picturesque, it has use to see what the forest looks like in the large" (Rescher, 199S; xvii)

River basin planning project: social learning (Science Report SC050037/SR1)

This report documents the findings of a 12-month Environment Agency science project on social learning for river basin planning. Our aim was to use social learning approaches and soft system methods to inform the development of the River Basin Planning Strategy and improve the effectiveness of the Environment Agency's Water Framework Directive (WFD) Programm