IFSR Newsletter 1998 Vol 17 No. 2 June
Gordon Dyer (UK), Sylvia Brown (UK), Gerhard Chroust (Austria), Yoshi Horicuhi (Japan), Gary Metcalf (USA), Moonhi Rhee (Korea), Gordon Rowland (USA), Cecilia Tagliaferri (Italy)
The participants came from three different continents – Asia, Europe and North America. The initial discussions provided a fascinating exploration of eastern and western philosophy and the various national cultures, and thus what currently influences learning systems. Because we believed that change of culture to support learning for systems design could only be achieved via “experience” this lead us to an initial trigger of “how to create experiences of co – creation throughout life”. The ensuing discussion focused around a tentative model for “creation of value(s)” which we saw as an appropriate theme to drive a life -long learning agenda. This is represented in the matrix below:
| How to create conditions | What leads to the conditions | Why are we doing this? | |
| Individual level | Personal Development (Designerly Living) | Personal Mastery | Creation of Value(s) |
| Community Level | Communication/Dialogue (Evolutionary Learning Community) | Shared Vision | Harmony |
| Societal Level | (Evolutionary Guidance System?) | Concern for all current and future generations | Sustainable Development |
To illustrate – under the heading of “why?” – creation of (appropriate) value at individual level should ideally lead to harmony at community and sustainable development at societal level. The model is at an early stage of development with much to be explored within the cells of the matrix and their inter-relationships. We recognized that in order to bring about the kind of transformation to current learning agendas
(which in the developed world are largely driven by the economic imperative) to a learning agenda of this kind, will probably also require the development of a “transcendence guidance system”. Exploration of this provisional model will continue as a discussion theme for the team.
Footnote:
Gerhard Chroust, Secretary of IFSR, and member of the group commented that there was
an interesting parallel in this work to the current thinking in software engineering. The underlying objective is to assure the quality of the software to be delivered. It turns out we cannot directly evaluate the software product (neither afterwards nor beforehand). Currently the only way to approach this is to evaluate the capability
of the delivery organization by evaluating the process used to develop the software product. And so it may be with evaluating levels of achievement of a life long learning agenda to these types of criteria.