Open Thinkering

Weeknote 10/2024

Posted on March 10, 2024March 10, 2024 by Doug Belshaw

What the crowd requires is mediocrity of the highest order.
Auguste Préault

The image portrays a vibrant watercolor scene that seamlessly combines a futuristic library with a communal gym. On one side, the library is filled with individuals engaged in study amidst advanced technological elements, such as holographic displays and interactive workstations, set against a backdrop of soft, diffused light. The characters appear focused and connected, symbolizing a collective pursuit of knowledge. Transitioning to the other side, the scene shifts to a gym where people exercise on treadmills equipped with futuristic interfaces. These treadmills face out towards expansive windows that offer views of a digitally enhanced landscape, blending urban architecture with natural beauty. The entire scene is rendered in watercolors, giving it a fluid, dynamic quality that emphasizes the integration of technology with human activity and the natural world.

Unless I’m on holiday, I hardly ever take photos any more. I’m not sure why that is. So, instead, I’ve asked DALL-E 3 to create an image based on this post. Note the woman running the wrong way on the treadmill.

AI is weird; I should take more photos.

We’re getting towards the time of the year when I start to actually have some energy to do new things. No longer in need of my SAD lamp to provide brightness to my day, I transition to a mode which I consider to be my default, but which only really lasts between March and September. Which pretty much coincides with hayfever season for me. Weird.

This week, Laura‘s been away so I’ve been working with John and Anne, but mainly alone. I forget that, for many people based at home who don’t co-work on a daily basis, this is ‘normal’ behaviour. John and I did some preparation for end-of-year finances, as our co-op celebrates its founding on May 1st (International Workers Day) and so we align our financial year with that. Anne and I ran a Community Conversations workshop, recorded a shorter version for those who couldn’t make it, and then embedded the video into a blog post entitled The Power of Community Knowledge Management.

Anne and I also carried out another user research interview for Participate, I had chats with a few people, and gave feedback on potential updates to the LER Ecosystem Map. The latter was also the focus of some of my MSc work this week, and I created first a systems map, and then updated my post to include an ‘audience ikigai’ style map. Both are incomplete, subjective, and currently only partially useful.

I’m learning more about Critical Social Learning Systems (CSLS) at the moment, and wrote the following while studying in the library:

Outside of work and study, I went to a local climate action reading group meeting and wrote up some thoughts. I ran every other day, still on the treadmill as it’s too cold/wet outside at the moment. I’ve gone back to making my Strava activities private, partly because it was getting a little too performative, and partly because I read Audrey’s post on un-tracking. Ironically enough, although I don’t intend to ditch my Garmin smartwatch any time soon, I did accidentally leave it charging when I went to the gym this morning.

Over on Thought Shrapnel, I published a bunch of things, but will draw your attention to one called Hope vs Natality. It’s a follow-up to the one I wrote after going to the climate action reading group, and is in response to reading an article in Aeon suggested by Will Richardson. I’ve just realised that I started following Will’s work over two decades ago now. I’m old.

Talking of following people’s work, this week I came across the portfolio/blog of Pascal Wicht, a “strategic designer, creative director, field researcher, futurist and teacher”. There are enough overlaps between our work and lives for me to find Wicht’s work deeply fascinating, and so I spent a good amount of time rabbitholing. He’s currently got access to an alpha of Midjourney 6, and has produced some incredible images around what he calls post-Holocene habitat systems.

It’s Mother’s Day today, so I’ll be going around to see mine later with a card and some flowers. I’ve also bought her a brand-new-second-hand Kindle, as it turns out she was still using the Kindle Keyboard 3G that I passed on to her ages ago. It’s stopped charging. Happy Mothering Sunday also to my wonderful wife, Hannah, who I made breakfast in bed this morning. We had to get up early to leave in for my daughter’s football match. Once we were completely ready, it was called off due to the rain 🙄

Next week, I’m hoping that we start planning our next in-person WAO meetup. We’d considered aligning this with MozFest House in Amsterdam, as we did last year. However, now that the dates have been announced, that doesn’t work for Anne or for me, so we’ll need to make other plans. I fancy Barcelona. But then I always fancy Barcelona, as it’s a great city.

I’m meeting my MSc tutor on Wednesday which should just be a formality as I’m on-track for my End of Module Assessment (EMA). I’ve got quite a bit of a reading to do for my EMA, so I’m going to have to get cracking on that this week, too. Other than that, and selling some more stuff on eBay before we move house, it’s shaping up to be a pretty normal week.

Image: DALL-E 3

TB872: A systems map of organisations involved with LERs in the USA

Posted on March 8, 2024March 10, 2024 by Doug Belshaw

Note: this is a post reflecting on one of the modules of my MSc in Systems Thinking in Practice. You can see all of the related posts in this category.

As part of my preparations for my End of Module Assessment (EMA) I need to create a diagram giving an overview of an ecosystem I’m trying to help influence. Having already created diagrams from the perspective of the Digital Credentials Consortium (DCC) with which WAO is working, I’ve decided to try and take on the concept of Learning and Employment Records (LERs).

We’re currently helping the DCC think about what might go into an updated version of the LER Ecosystem Map. Given that LER is a term which is currently specific to the US context, I’m using this as an opportunity to braid my theoretical and practical understanding of how all of this fits together. Although I’ve worked with US-based organisations and visited there many times, I have no lived experience of the country nor of its systems.

Image from LER map website including circles such as 'Credentialing Organizations' and 'HR Systems' around the outside, and 'Developing', 'Issuing', 'Adopting' and 'Using' around the central word 'Equity'.

The above image from the LER map is colourful and nice to look at, but in my opinion does not help the visitor understand the ecosystem. Although my needs may be different to, say, employers or learners, I have come at this from an organisational point of view, trying to categorise them based on interest and objective.

While I’ve tried to make this as clear as possible it is confusing to me as well as to others I know who are more deeply immersed in it. Ideally, I would be able to represent this map in three dimensions.

A systems map showing a partial and incomplete understanding of the relationship between different organisations involved with LERs in the USA — *(click/tap to enlarge)*

Although I have interacted with representatives from some of the organisations mentioned on here, it is a very different landscape to a decade ago when I was working on Open Badges at Mozilla. It’s almost as if the digital credentialing landscape has fractured into three:

Skills-based hiring (LERs)
Academic-adjacent courses (microcredentials)
Holistic recognition of skills, etc. (Open Recognition)

One of the criticisms I have of the LER Ecosystem Map as it currently stands is that it appears to have been created by committee. It is unclear who is it is for, and as such there are multiple, competing, overlapping understandings of the ecosystem.

I have the following questions in terms of where there might be a need for a more systemic perspective:

What is the future we are collectively trying to imagine? Beyond helping HR departments more accurately and efficiently match workers to jobs, how do LERs make the world a better place?
Over and above lending an air of integrity, what is the role of academia in the LER ecosystem?
Where is the voice of the learner, earner, or worker in this system, beyond being the subject of research?

I’m sure other questions will come to me as I think about this and work more on the LER map. It’s been an interesting exercise, though, just to look at what the different organisations do and try to categorise and classify them on my (incomplete, subjective) systems map.

Update: it’s not a systems map as such, but a day later I realised that WAO’s Audience Ikigai template could be useful for this work. So I had a go trying to map the LER landscape using only four thematic areas:

Four coloured overlapping ovals entitled 'Policy & Funding', 'Skills-based Credentialing', 'Research & Academia', and 'Technology, Interoperability & Standards'

Various organisations (e.g. the Digital Credentials Consortium and Credential Engine) are positioned at various overlaps

TB872: Bawden and transforming worldviews

Posted on March 8, 2024March 8, 2024 by Doug Belshaw

Note: this is a post reflecting on one of the modules of my MSc in Systems Thinking in Practice. You can see all of the related posts in this category.

An abstract representation of a learning system visualized as a network of interconnected, glowing nodes, each signifying individuals or subgroups within a community. The nodes, varying in colors and sizes, represent diversity and are linked by both tense, sparking wires and harmonious lights, illustrating the dual nature of tensions and potential growth within the system. This metaphorical image captures the dynamic and complex relationships within critical learning communities.

This post focuses on the arguments made by Richard Bawden in his two chapters of the book Social Learning Systems and Communities of Practice. As I will show, his understanding and foregrounding of ‘worldviews’ is central to this.

In Chapter 3, which was originally written in 1999, Bawden (2010) sets the stage by illustrating the journey that faculty at the Hawkesbury School of Agriculture underwent. Shifting from a production-centric to a focus on “responsible rural development,” they also moved from a teaching approach to one focused on learning, and from a paradigm they realised was reductionist to one much more holistic.

The chapter highlights the challenges involved in transformation at both the individual and community levels, with Bawden identifying the “tensions of difference” within the sub-systems making up the overall learning system. These tensions, he believes, are crucial to the effectiveness of critical learning systems in community development. Bawden criticises prevailing non-systemic models of development as being inadequate in addressing the complexities and uncertainties of modern life. Not only are they deterministic and materialistic, but they are individualistic, leading to community disintegration and a deficit of trust.

The way forward, Bawden argues, is to transform communities into learning systems which are capable of adaptive learning. He proposes a synthesis of ‘inspirational’ and ‘experiential’ learning to allow meaning to emerge, with an integrated model which weaves these elements together. Bawden then concludes the chapter with a list of practical considerations for those seeking to establish, develop, and/or evaluate learning communities.

Moving to Chapter 6, which was written specifically for the edited collection, Bawden (2010b) reflects on his experiences at Hawkesbury, focusing on the collective beliefs of the faculty. He discusses worldviews specifically and how they influence systemic action. This chapter is much more focused on issues around wellbeing, ethics, and the growing climate crisis.

Bawden transitions from talking about theoretical issues to more practical applications, ending with a discussion on the global and systemic nature of contemporary challenges. Whereas in the previous chapter, Bawden spoke of “critical learning systems” in this one he explicitly talks of “Critical Social Learning Systems” (CSLS), defining this as “a group of people that have decided to collaborate in order to seek systemic improvements to some messy complex situation that together they regard as critically problematic” (Bawden, 2010b, p.94). “In other words,” he says:

a CSLS is a collection of individuals who agree to act together as a coherent group of people who are prepared to ‘collectively learn their way through’ an issue that they all agree is problematic in some way or another to them all. They accept that in addition to learning all they can about that issue as ‘the matter to hand’ as the prerequisite for taking informed action to improve it, they will also address, and respond to two other ‘levels of learning’ as they proceed: In essence they will be learning in three dimensions concurrently. So even as they are investigating the matter to hand they will also be critically reflecting on the processes of learning that they are bringing to bear: their ‘meta-learning’. These
reflections will include (i) their own impressions on the actual processes that they are using to generate shared knowledge and understanding from their experiences, (ii) how they are testing the quality or validity of that knowledge, (iii) how they are designing plans for action in the face of the knowledge that they are generating and decisions that they are beginning to formulate in response, and (iv) how they might actually put those plans into action for change. In this manner, they are seeking improvements in the way that they are learning even as they go about that learning.
Bawden (2010b, p.94)

Central to Bawden’s argument is the concept of worldviews: mental models that shape our interactions with the environment, influence our sense-making processes, and serve as the context for our judgments and the foundation of our moral compass. He emphasises the transformative potential of worldviews, questioning whether our cultural perspectives leave us equipped to handle life’s complexity. In fact, he wonders whether we are even aware of our own worldviews.

Worldviews, according to Bawden, comprise “personal presuppositions” about the following:

(a) the nature of nature (or ontology, philosophically speaking),
(b) the nature and origins of the universe, of life itself and, especially, of the spiritual essence of mankind (or cosmology),
(c) the nature of knowledge (or epistemology) and
(d) the nature of human nature especially as it relates to motivations, dispositions
and values, especially ethics and aesthetics (or axiology).
Bawden (2010b, p.96)

By recognising and transforming our worldviews, Bawden believes that we can better address the “complex messiness” of today’s challenges. Although this transformation must take place on an individual level, it is also crucial that it happens collectively: a communal shift towards reflective, adaptive, and holistic learning systems.

References

Bawden, R. (2010). ‘The community challenge: the learning response’. In Blackmore, C. (ed.) Social learning systems and communities of practice. London: Springer. pp.89-101. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-84996-133-2.
Bawden, R. (2010b). ‘Messy issues, worldviews and systemic competencies’. In Blackmore, C. (ed.) Social learning systems and communities of practice. London: Springer. pp.89-101. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-84996-133-2.

Image: DALL-E 3