wallpaper dinding

Any e-learning project which aims to 'increase creativity' faces a central challenge: how can it be measured? For all the innovative computer software that might be developed, and all the initiatives to try and get (often reluctant) users to use it, at some point a judgement has to be made "is it any good?"; "are there any new 'creative' ideas emerging?"; "is there 'creative' behaviour that can be causally attributed to the interventions of the software?". These are incredibly difficult and possibly impossible questions.

Questions about the 'goodness' of interventions, or questions about causal attribution of project interventions tend only to be asked in the context of methodological practices in the social sciences which themselves demand deeper questions about the goodness of methodologies and causal attribution of their use: creativity, value and cause all contain aspects of infinite regress. Indeed the infinite regress of 'creativity' is closely related to the infinite regress of 'value': there appears to be a strong family resemblance between them.

We need practical ways around these problems. One solution is to focus on evaluation methodology and its associated ontology, rather than focusing on 'value' itself, or 'creativity'. This is an approach that emerges from  the philosophy of Critical Realism. Critical Realism presents a critique of causality - particularly in the form that has been handed down to social science from the philosophy of David Hume. Thinking about value, causality and creativity in this way means thinking about the possible deep mechanisms that might lie behind observed phenomena. Creative acts present observable phenomena in various ways: communicative acts, aesthetic products, behaviours and impacts. What I suspect is presented in a creative act is a particular 'form of life'. There may be ways of characterising such a form of life in terms of descriptions of relations of mechanisms. From a Critical Realist point of view, such mechanisms may have components which are transitive (i.e. continually changing through human agency) and intransitive (existing independently of human agency - for example, physical mechanisms).

In this way, a focus on methodology of evaluation allows for deep observation and analysis of behaviour. Technologies increasingly form the context and background for that behaviour. The bringing closer-to-hand of new technologies with widgets and apps means that the disruption to existing forms of life can be minimised. On the other hand, new tools provide opportunities for collecting rich data about creative behaviour - particularly those tools which embrace the emerging real-time web. Real-time data of creative behaviour in shared spaces provides the richest opportunities we have so far had for studying forms of life which might be deemed creative. It is an important 'personal' counterpart to the increasing significance of 'big data' within institutions.

To do this is not to attribute causal significance to any technological intervention. It is instead to use technological interventions to expose causal significances as a way of increasing our understanding of the subtle forms of agency which can have dramatic emancipatory effects on the soul.

I think of all the questions I've come back from the Heinz von Foerster Congress in Vienna with, this is the one which fascinates me most. After wonderful presentations by Louis Kauffmann on time and observation, Alfred Inselberg on Parallel Coordinates (see picture above), Pille Bunnell on distinctions and domains and Bernard Scott on Pask's contribution to psychology (in which he also talked about von Foerster's analysis in response to Luhmann's question "how recursive is communication?"), I'm trying to connect issues concerning time, anticipation and visualisation in a way which might be practical and applicable to learning technology and other areas.

First of all, we would have to ask "why visualise?". I don't think "because we can" is a good enough answer. A better answer is to connect visualisation with the issues of decision and control. Astrid was reading on Wikipedia about the reasons why the first world war was so destructive the other day, and read that

"More than 9 million combatants were killed, largely because of great technological advances in firepower without corresponding advances in mobility".

Now we have even greater technological power in the form of trading systems and global finance which is "firing" on mechanisms of national governance and coordination which are too slow-moving to react: consequence = crisis and destruction. The solution must be better mechanisms of governance and control, and that means better and quicker ways of reaching informed judgements. Currently, our methods for presenting data attenuate its complexity, and consequently this increases the complexity of decision-making because  the attenuated data is open to so many interpretations; politics and ego then win out in terms of the favoured interpretation and favoured decision.

The visualisation of complex data tries to address this social coordination problem by presenting something very complex without attenuating its subtleties whilst providing people with tools for exploring its complexity and reaching consensus more quickly than at present. Hans Rosling's 'Gap Minder' is perhaps the best example of this sort of process.

But to what level of complexity should we go? I think our aim should be to visualise a "form of life" because only by appreciating the rich diversity of "forms of life" and their relationship to individual action and the 'family resemblances' (another Wittgenstein phrase) between different aspects of life can we get a sufficiently rich picture of the world that meaningful decisions might be made.

But a 'form of life' is a nebulous thing. There are many aspects of the form of my life which are in my head, and which nobody else could possibly inspect. On the other hand, those things which are in my inner life do have an effect on the communications that I make and the actions I take, and these things are observable. In an online world, the amount of 'behavioural' and 'communicational' data is vast. Leydesdorff has brought techniques from cybernetics to try and make sense out of this, and I wonder that there may well be a way forwards here. Also I suspect that modelling a form of life is closely related to identifying the degree of 'conviviality' in a society.

Current approaches to visualisation don't I think address the deeper issues of coordination and control. They tend to wonder in self-amazement at the degree of interconnections between things (twitter feeds, facebook posts, etc) without really thinking:
a. what does it mean?
b. how might it be useful?
Those are the central questions, and now the thinking needs to be done to really exploit the visualisation tools we have at out disposa to give ourselves better mechanisms of human control so that the balance between technologies of the market and globalisation and the technologies of governance and control once more have requisite variety.

Clearly, with at least a year-on-year reduction in funding of 8%, universities are having to shed staff. In the main, this is being achieved through the euphemistically-labelled "natural wastage": those close to retirement are being presented with "offers they can't refuse". However, there are a number of cases emerging nationally of compulsory redundancies achieved through the game of 'musical chairs' which I talked about in a previous post (see http://dailyimprovisation.blogspot.com/2011/11/banality-of-restructuring.html). There are real human tragedies emerging from this, responsibility for which the managerialism within institutions is wishing (understandably!) to distance itself. In the process of distancing, the metaphor of "University as Business" is employed: Universities are businesses; businesses hire and fire regularly; Universities cannot afford to  be any different.

There are serious problems with this position, and they underpin the human tragedies that are currently emerging. However, it is a grey moral area and getting close to some clarity on the issue which goes beyond belly-aching is challenging. I think a possible way of examining it is to take a closer look at those individuals who are on the receiving end of losing their jobs.

Academic jobs have never been, to this point, short-term. The form of life of being in an educational institution has been one of accomodating the range of personal skills and attributes which make up the university with a forgiving and compassionate sense of community. This contributes to a prevailing atmosphere which is supportive to students, and (importantly) conveys values which are to be aspired to (although rarely achieved) in the outside world of industry.

The form of life in industry, on the other hand, often is high-risk and short-term. I remember my time working for a range of companies from small family businesses to large international corporations. The smaller the business (particularly if it was a family firm which often was characterised by an authoritarian structure) the higher the risk. Everybody knew that, so everybody was prepared for the moment when it was pulled away (and perhaps secretly hoped for that moment to come!). I personally remember being permanently terrified as a young software developer of losing my job (I didn't think I was very good at it!!).

So the difference is between a form of life which is generous and accommodating, and a form of life which is threatening and risky. What happens to individuals in each form of life is drastically different when compulsory redundancy follows. To understand how they are different, it is useful to appreciate how personal identities form in tandem with the form of life that is lived.

Bowlby's work on attachment and care is useful here and can help go deeper in the understanding of these different forms of life. Bowlby documents the reticence of children to attach who have had attachments rejected or withdrawn in the past: they acquire strategies for not letting themselves get hurt and become more reliant for their identity on other resources which they find they can control more effectively (for example, objects). In adulthood, it is reasonable to expect this to manifest as various types of fetishism, and an emphasis on strategic action as a means of protection. Is it too far fetched to suggest that such behaviours are characterised by those who work in industries which are high-risk and insecure?

Most people who work in education have had good educations themselves, and often their educational success has depended on strong family relationships and attachments in their upbringing. University traditionally has continued an environment of strong attachments, and its forgiving and compassionate nature has been very similar to the family environment. This is the environment that academics go to work in, and aspiring students aim for. It is attachment that nurtures knowledge.

On the other side of Bowlby's equation, however, is loss. All individuals experience loss in the form of bereavement at some point in their lives. Some losses are expected; some not - and those can have particularly devastating consequences. This is because when an object of attachment is lost, so is part of the identity of the person who was attached to it. The damage is often irreperable.

Now perhaps its easier to see the impact of compulsory redundancies in Universities in comparison to those in industry. The compulsory redundancy in a university is more like an unexpected bereavement. It is the loss of something which had become part of an individual's identity, and which always gave reassurance to the individual that the attachment was compassionate, forgiving, and likely to be always there. Were the university a business, the attachment wouldn't have formed so strongly in the beginning, because the individual would have sought to protect themselves from the risk of loss.

Managerialism wants to make the university more like a business. But there is an inherent contradiction here. This is because of the relationship between knowledge and love, and means of giving love is through the provision of an environment where strong attachments can form. I cannot see how the environment of the future 'corporate universities' can possibly do this: unable to provide attachments either for staff or students, they will instead fall back on anonymised "processes", which themselves will present enough risks and pitfalls for both staff and students to inspire the most inauthentic and strategic learning practices. In the corporate university with its business efficiencies and unfavourable working conditions, who would ever dare to attach?

For all the talk about teaching and learning which dominates e-learning discourse, the principal strategic problem that Universities face is assessment. It is at the moment of  assessment, when an individual teacher passes judgement on the worthiness of a student's work that the problems begin. And whilst we try to 'moderate' that judgement (with a second opinion), ultimately it still is a high-risk unpredictable situation for students, who can often be placed in a position where they find it hard to tell whether their work will pass with flying colours or fail miserably, putting their investment of time, money and effort in jeopardy. Added to this, there are increasing organisational pressures which make the problem worse:

1. the pressure of student 'consumer' demands in the light of fees
2. increasing cultural and organisational distribution of teaching, learning and assessment
3. institutional difficulties in separating quality management from delivery (exacerbated by 2)

In other sectors of education (in further education or school), teaching and assessment are separated. Assessment is conducted  usually by examination boards, who publish clear criteria for the expected standard of work and the grades it will receive. There are still problems here, but it does mean that the person doing the teaching is not the person doing the final assessment, and this can create greater uniformity and predictability for students. Some FE courses work on the basis of publishing clear learning outcomes, leaving the design of assessments (in the form of coursework) to lecturers. This design is then moderated by external examiners. This is more open to problems, although it has operated successfully for many years.

However, an approach to the separation of assessment and teaching is being presented by technology in the form of Adaptive Comparative Judgement (ACJ - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_comparative_judgement). ACJ is a different approach to separation of assessment and teaching, where there are not distinct groups of people doing assessment (independently of teaching), but rather the workload of assessment is spread across teachers working for the organisation. The cognitive load of assessment is spread much more widely, with an overall judgement being dependent on a large number of small 'comparative judgements'. These amount to comparisons between like-pairs of sections of work, with the judgement task being simply to say which of a pair is better.

This can only really become practically useful with computer support. With the computer support, the workflow of judgements that are required to be made, the distribution of work, the continual adaptation of the judgements that are required can all be managed. What emerges is a distribution of 'merit', upon which grading boundaries can be laid.

Obviously this would fit some areas assessed work more than others, but its organisational benefits go deeper than simply greater objectivity in assessment. I think it could be a way of making the whole business of assessment more convivial and community-driven. I could be wrong here (it could be something horrible!!), but the spreading of the cognitive burden of assessment means that collective coordinated small efforts of teachers can be seen to contribute to much greater transparency for students: that the universal benefit of working together coordinated through technology can be greater than the super-human efforts of a few individual judgements. 

If cybernetics is stuck it is possibly because there was some unfinished business at its inception. Norbert Wiener must have had an inkling of this because on the one hand, he knew he was founding a discipline that was concerned with emergent phenomena over time, whilst at the same time he was introducing a method of analysis of time-series which was based on a particular way of looking at time which owed more to the thing he wished to overturn: the Newtonian classical view of time as 'clock time'. His attempt to grapple with the issue is contained in the first chapter of his book "Cybernetics" where he addressed the issue of "Newtonian and Bergsonian" time. Drawing on Bergson's description of time, which concerns evolution and psychology more than the clocks of Newton, he argues that

"the modern automaton exists in the same sort of Bergsonian time as the living organism; and hence there is no reason in Bergson's considerations why the essential mode of functioning of the living organism should not be the same as that of the automaton of this type. Vitalism has won to the extent that even mechanisms correspond to the time-structure of vitalism; but as we have said, this victory is a complete defeat, for from every point of view which has the slightest relation to morality or religion, the new mechanics is fully as mechanistic as the old. Whether we should call the new point of view materialistic is largely a question of words: the ascendency of matter characterizes a phase of nineteenth-century physics far more than the present age, and "materialism" has come to be but little more than a loose synonym for "mechanism". In fact, the whole mechanist-vitalist controversy has been relegates to the limbo of badly posed questions"

For Wiener Newtonian time is 'reversible' because it is an abstraction. Bergsonian time, related (for Wiener) to evolution, is not reversible but continually emergent. (Bergson himself would have had something to say about this, but he was dead by this stage and his work was quickly being eclipsed by the phenomenologists). Wiener argues that Cybernetics is much more closely associated with Bergsonian emergent time rather than the Newtonian time of classical physics. In a way, this can be seen to be an attempt to make a clear distinction between the classical enlightenment thinking and the 'new age' that Wiener wanted to draw attention to, and an age of thinking about complex systems with feedback. The problem that Wiener didn't address was that the methods of analysis of his Bergsonian time were still inescapable Newtonian, and this set up a contradiction which was well buried within a discipline which had enough early and important successes in technology, communications and computing to allow this contradiction to be unexplored.

The fact that within it there lurked a problem became apparent with Von Foerster's identification of a need for a 'Cybernetics of Cybernetics', or 2nd order cybernetics: the cybernetics of observing systems. Supported by a philosophical critique of Wiener's 'engineering cybernetics', the question of observation and the psychological factors involving the feedback between the making of distinctions about the world and the unknowable nature of the world itself, led to a renewed theoretical effort in the 1960s and 70s. Spurred on by biological cybernetic theories and philosophical constructivism, this led to developments in psychological theory (from family therapy to Neuro-linguistic programming), pedagogy and teaching machines (Pask and Von Glasersfeld), groupware and workflow (Winograd and Flores), and many of the theories that have underpinned the development of the web.

But whilst the biological theories and Von Foerster's constructivism critiqued Wiener's focus on cybernetics and engineering (and certainly acted as a necessary corrective to engineering hubris!), it didn't critique the underlying paradox of time which Wiener himself was aware of right at the beginning.

Of the cyberneticians who were aware of the problem, I think Stafford Beer is the most perceptive. He resisted 2nd order cybernetics because, he argued, the issues it drew attention to were always in cybernetics deep down from the beginning. It concerned the nature of models. Beer understood models not as metaphors or analogies, but as ways of understanding the world. In effect, they were ways of telling stories about it. The essence of the model was in the story-telling, not in the universal isomorphism of its parts to the world (1st order cybernetics), or in the personally-constructed isomorphism of 2nd order cybernetics. It is the stories that change the world, and that was what Beer was interested in.

In this way, we can understand models as more like allegories than analogies or metaphors. Seen as allegories, there is no reason why the Newtonian conception of time needs to remain at all. But what we need is an allegorical view of time, rather than an analytic one. But what would this look like?

I think an allegory of time must concern at the very least 'beginnings' and 'endings': birth and death. Between birth and death is the thing that matters. For this we have to think of that "thing that really matters" which only concerns the bit between being born and dying (so 'life' won't do). The best I can think of is 'love'. So birth, love and death are the constituents of an allegory of time. But also it is worth considering that the cycle birth, love and death is recursive: that within the love of any one, is the birth love and death of many others. Moreover, love appears to us as a movement towards something - it has an object, and that there are many myriads of other objects "moving-towards" something within any "motion-towards" of any particular object: it is recursive. Moreover, the "motion-towardsness" of other objects within the horizon of love are themselves part of that horizon. Finally, love has a strong family resemblance (to use Wittgenstein's idea) to beauty, as beauty in turn is related to symmetry. So all of this "motion-towardsness" has a harmony and a symmetry about it.

But this is getting a bit poetic! More concretely, cybernetics has given us powerful ways of telling stories through the logic of mathematics and systems. The problem is that these "systems" have hidden their treatment of time. I think the time is right for time to be made explicit, and that this will reveal a different sort of cybernetics which will allow for a way to be found out of the impasse. The question to ask is how this new mathematics and logic of cybernetics relates to the ways which cyberneticians think at the moment, which they've inherited from Wiener, Shannon, Ashby, Bateson, etc.

There is much more work to do on this, but to begin with a simple mapping is a useful beginnning.
First, DIFFERENCE can be seen to correspond to 'BIRTH'. In this way, difference is still an 'event', but it is not an event on a horizon of time, but on the horizon of another entity which is similarly between birth and death: difference is an event on the horizon of love.


The biology of love itself is something which has already drawn the attention of the cybernetics of living things (notably Maturana). Autopoiesis and Structural coupling are good starting points for thinking about love. But they suffer from the inherent time-laden mechanicism where time is uninspected. I've always thought that regarding love, Luhmann got closer. And indeed, Bowlby's attachment theory provides a rich way of thinking about the inter-relationship between inner and outer worlds. There may well be ways of expressing these without using time, or explicitly formulating time where it isn't glossed over.

Finally, DEATH is generally not inspected, apart from the understanding of the pathological processes of system oscillation. I think death is key to understanding time: there can be no understanding of time without an understanding of death. And what death represents is ABSENCE.

I see these working together. ABSENCE creates a motion towards, and as such is a driver for LOVE (through maintaining attachments and establishing balance between inner and outer worlds), and within that process gives rise to BIRTH. I think this process can be expressed in terms of symmetry, and that fractals may be the best mathematical foundation for doing this.

...that's all a bit intense!

There is something fascinating (and slightly narcissistic) about watching user stats accumulate in real-time using Google's new real-time analytics feature. I've been discussing with David Sherlock how the immediacy of this might affect individual behaviour - that we get caught into a cycle of 'stat-chasing'. It strikes me that the fast feedback mechanism between agency and environmental feedback through the technology is pretty similar to the mechanism described by John Bowlby for attachment formation and maintenance.


(and part of our exploration of this will be to watch what happens when I post this.. I post up a video later...)