Category Archives: Events

Parent Yarns—Learning Together: parent engagement in Australian schools

Posted on December 7, 2012 by | 1 Comment

During 2012, Australia’s largest children’s’ charity—The Smith Family—organised a series of parent/school engagement activities in Northern Territory schools that aimed to skill parents to confidently communicate with each other and collaborate with school staff to resolve student issues. Known as Parent Yarns—Learning Together, these sessions were facilitated by ViTaL partners, Julianne Willis and Marilynn Willis, who introduced the concept of ‘effective lifelong learning’ in considering how parents can best support their children to succeed at school.  The Smith Family’s vision is to support communities in   improving life outcomes for disadvantaged Australian children, with a particular focus on the challenges of working in Northern Territory schools where over 40 per cent of students are Indigenous.

Seminar with Tess McPeake from the Smith Family on 20th December at 1630 in the Graduate School of Education, University of Bristol.

Parents Yarns – December 20th 1630

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Learning Analytics and Knowledge 2012

Posted on September 23, 2011 by | Leave a comment

Learning Analytics and Knowledge Conference, April 29-May 2, 2012

http://lak12.sites.olt.ubc.ca

  • Full Paper submission: October 16, 2011
  • All other submissions: November 13, 2011

Keynotes

  • Katy Börner, George Siemens, Barry Wellman

We are experiencing an unprecedented explosion in the quantity and quality of information available not only to us, but about us. We must adapt individually, institutionally and culturally to the transition in technologies and social norms that makes this possible, and question their impacts. What are the implications of such data availability for learning and knowledge building — not only in established contexts, but also in the emerging landscape of free, open, social learning online?

This conference will be of interest to Learning Emergence readers since we are unquestionably entering the era of data mining, in which machines will be tasked with helping over-pressed humans to make sense of the data deluge. When this comes to learning, we need to make sure that the richness of authentic, connected learning is not lost through over-simplified indicators of “learning” which are deployed simply because they are the easiest things to formalize.

Full details of the topics, keynotes, and ways to participate on the website…

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Learning Emergence Launches!

Posted on May 6, 2011 by | Leave a comment
LearningEmergenceLaunches

Ruth Deakin Crick & Simon Buckingham Shum launch the website & network

Hurrah!
Following Howard Green’s superb inaugural seminar
for the Systems Centre: Learning and Leadership
on Rethinking Learning & Leadership
we officially broke open the bubbly
and launched Learning Emergence :-)

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Rethinking innovation in organizations through coevolving systems theory

Posted on April 8, 2011 by | 1 Comment

Professor Richard Vidgen Australian School of Business, University of New South Wales will be leading this seminar at the UoB Systems Centre on 1st June at 1700

Research into high performing workplaces identifies the ability of organizations to innovate as a significant indicator of financial performance. Unsurprisingly, innovation is of great interest to governments. Despite this interest from firms and policy-makers it is less clear how organizations can organize to encourage, generate, and capture innovation.

This paper develops an innovation organizing framework grounded in complex adaptive systems. The framework draws on three principles of coevolving systems: match coevolutionary change rate, maximize self-organizing, and synchronize exploitation and exploration. The last principle suggests that innovation should not be viewed in isolation, i.e., to talk about innovation (exploration) we must also talk about operational aspects (exploitation). Although this even-handed approach to innovation has been reported widely in the management research on ‘ambidexterity’, the organizational/organizing aspects are less well explored. The coevolving systems principles are illustrated through application to the new product development process, in which customers and products are viewed as coevolving species.

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Posted in Community, Events, organisational learning, Systems thinking

ICT, Resilience, Complexity & Sensemaking

Posted on April 6, 2011 by | Leave a comment

Last week I gave a seminar at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), renowned for its ground-breaking computing R&D in many fields, including Human-Computer Interaction, Hypertext and Sensemaking.

Contested Collective Intelligence: Resilience, Complexity & Sensemaking

I was hosted by my long time colleague Maarten Sierhuis (formerly NASA Ames, now Manager of the Knowledge, Language & Interaction Area) and Gregorio Convertino (Augmented Social Cognition Area) who organised the CSCW 2010 Collective Intelligence workshop we attended last year.

As the abstract indicates, the ideas we’re developing connect to Learning Emergence themes of how ICT intersects with resilience thinking in complex adaptive systems (such as educational institutions or leaning networks), and sensemaking. As discussed in another talk, the learning power concept of resilience (and other ELLI dimensions) are relevant when it comes to discussing the habits and skills of staff when an organisation is confronted by overwhelming complexity.

ABSTRACT: To thrive, organizational entities (learning communities; teams of analysts; formal companies) must make sense of a complex, changing environment. Our interest is in how sociotechnical “collective intelligence” infrastructures may augment this capacity. We are seeking conceptual lenses that illuminate this challenge, and draw ideas from resilience thinking, sensemaking, and complexity science. We propose that these motivate the concept of Contested Collective Intelligence (CCI), and give examples of how the Cohere platform is being designed in response to these requirements. This is a social/semantic web annotation and knowledge mapping environment, with tools for monitoring networks of ideas and generating novel analytics. We also report experimental integration with the Xerox Incremental Parser, in order to evaluate human+machine annotation of knowledge-level claims expressed through rhetorical moves in documents.

BIOS: Simon Buckingham Shum is a Senior Lecturer and Associate Director (Technology) at the UK Open University’s Knowledge Media Institute (KMi), where he leads the Hypermedia Discourse Group. Following a PhD at U. York in HCI/Hypertext/Design Rationale (sponsored by Xerox EuroPARC) he has developed a human-centered computing perspective to the challenge of computer-supported sensemaking, reflected in the books Visualizing Argumentation and Knowledge Cartography. He co-founded the Compendium Institute and LearningEmergence.net. http://people.kmi.open.ac.uk/sbs

Anna De Liddo is a Research Associate in KMi, where she works with Simon on the Open Learning Network project (olnet.org), focusing on the design and development of a Collective Intelligence infrastructure for the Open Education Resources movement. She gained her PhD at Polytechnic of Bari, investigating ICT for Participatory Planning and Deliberation, after which she held a postdoctoral position in KMi evaluating human-centred argument mapping for Climate Change. http://people.kmi.open.ac.uk/anna

These demo movies show Cohere as a complement to the slides. More detailed presentations of some of the ideas summarised in this talk are in the following:

De Liddo, A.; Buckingham Shum, S.; Quinto, I.; Bachler, M. and Cannavacciuolo, L. (2011). Discourse-centric learning analytics. In: LAK 2011: 1st International Conference on Learning Analytics & Knowledge, 27 Feb – 01 Mar 2011, Banff, Alberta. Eprint: http://oro.open.ac.uk/25829

De Liddo, A. and Buckingham Shum, S. (2010). Cohere: A prototype for contested collective intelligence. In: ACM Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW 2010) – Workshop: Collective Intelligence In Organizations – Toward a Research Agenda, February 6-10, 2010, Savannah, Georgia, USA. Eprint: http://oro.open.ac.uk/19554

Buckingham Shum, S. and De Liddo, A. (2010). Collective intelligence for OER sustainability. In: OpenEd2010: Seventh Annual Open Education Conference, 2-4 Nov 2010, Barcelona, Spain. Eprint: http://oro.open.ac.uk/23352

Simon Buckingham Shum, Ágnes Sándor, Anna De Liddo & Michelle Bachler: Integrating Human & Machine Document Annotation for Sensemaking. Seminar, 11th November 2010, Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, UK. http://olnet.org/node/512

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