The Open Repository @ Binghamton (The ORB)

Episode 2: Bringing the World to You: On the Humanities and Giovanna Montenegro's Work in Comparative Literature

Harper Sherwood-Reid et al. — Tue, 01 Oct 2019 15:24:20 PDT

In this episode, Harper speaks with Dr. Giovanna Montenegro about her work in comparative literature and how she thinks about sharing her research with the public. We consider Montenegro's work with Alexander von Humboldt and Germans in the Americas, reconsidering colonial legacies through renaming, and the aural nature of radio by considering Montenegro's academic career and current projects. Giovanna also reads poems "Immigrants" by Pat Mora and "Nuyorican Lament" by Gloria Vando.

Episode 1: Poetry from/Near/Considering la Frontera

Harper Sherwood-Reid — Tue, 24 Sep 2019 06:25:57 PDT

In the first recorded episode of the 2019-2020 school year, new host Harper reads poetry by Elizabeth Acevedo, Karla Cordero, Natalie Díaz, and Ada Limón in honor of Hispanic Heritage month and the powerful lyrics these female poets spin on, about, near, and far from the US/Mexico and other kinds of borders. The books of poetry referenced in this episode are Beastgirl & Other Origin Myths by Elizabeth Acevedo, How to Pull Apart the Earth by Karla Cordero, The Best American Poetry 2015 edited by David Lehman and guest edited by Sherman Alexie, The Carrying: Poems by Ada Limón, and the poetic communication between Limón and Natalie Díaz published by The New Yorker as "Envelopes of Air", published May 23, 2018.

Academic Skill Learning and the Problem of Complexity I: Creational Purposeful Integrated Capability at Skill (CPICS)

Martin F. Gardiner — Mon, 16 Sep 2019 16:10:30 PDT

Physical and mental skills are intended to achieve success at acting purposefully. As capability at any skill increases, the need to adjust details of application to complexity of context and goals will increase as well. It will become more and more important to prepare mentally for what I now term Creational Purposeful Integrated Capability at Skill (CPICS). This paper develops what I mean by CPICS. Theory concerning Complex Dynamical Systems (CDS) such as the brain and other evidence points to the likelihood that the mental operations by which our brain produces any kind of skillful behavior cannot remain constant, but rather must develop through stages for skill to progress most profitably. Using early stages of math learning as an example, I propose that what can hold back some students at development of a skill is that even if presented with all the information need for progress, some students have not yet discovered how to make the most useful mental restructuring that is also needed. This paper proposes and discusses as an example details of what may be especially useful restructuring for early stages of math skill learning. This example is then taken as helping to identify the more general type of restructuring that is especially useful for addressing complexity of application that produces CPICS at every stage of skill improvement.

Social organization and water control among the Borana of Southern Ethiopia

Johan. Helland — Mon, 16 Sep 2019 12:49:52 PDT

The long-term success of pastoral production systems depends on the adjustment of the human and livestock populations, which are potentially expanding, to the range resource, which is finite. Among the Borana of southern Ethiopia, this adjustment has been achieved through a complex socio-political system controlling human reproduction and the maintenance and use of dry-season wells. A complex system of generation classes, known as Gada, helps limit population expansion, and access to water during the dry season is controlled by well councils whose membership and function are based on a flexible, but well defined, system of traditional rules.

Wasserman et al Bystander Reporting Group Immediate Day 3 Raw Data (Supplementary material for Wasserman et al.)

Ralph Miller — Mon, 16 Sep 2019 12:39:33 PDT

Wasserman et al Bystander Reporting Group Immediate Day 1 Raw Data (Supplementary material for Wasserman et al.)

Ralph Miller — Mon, 16 Sep 2019 12:39:21 PDT

Wasserman et al Bystander Reporting Group Delay Raw Data (Supplementary material for Wasserman et al.)

Ralph Miller — Mon, 16 Sep 2019 12:38:52 PDT

Real Perception Experiment 1 (Supplementary Material for Wasserman et al.)

Ralph Miller — Mon, 16 Sep 2019 12:38:39 PDT

Example Stimulus 1a-Fem-F1-M2 (Supplementary Material for Factor et al.)

Ralph Miller — Mon, 16 Sep 2019 11:12:15 PDT

A Patterning Approach to Complexity Thinking and Understanding for Students: A Case Study

Shae L. Brown — Sat, 14 Sep 2019 05:35:22 PDT

Complexity thinking and understanding are vital skills for young people in these times of uncertainty and change. Such skills contribute to resilience and capacities for adaptivity and innovation. Within my teaching practice I have found students to be aware of complex dynamics, uncertainty and change, both in their lives and in the world. However, the current curriculum lacks language and process to conceptualise, articulate and develop complexity understanding. To address this problem, I developed and introduced a patterns-based design and process to a cohort of Australian secondary students. Comprising flowform patterning together with ecological metaphors, the design forms a conceptual language and practical process for thinking about, understanding and engaging with complex phenomena and change. Together these capacities are described here as complexity competence. Implemented initially to engage with time as a complex phenomenon, the design is described as the Patterns of Humantime (PHT), and the process of implementation as Complexity Patterning. Implementation during the development phase demonstrated the design’s capacity as a way to understand time as a complex phenomenon, as well as facilitating a relational and identity development approach to learning. In more recent research workshops with American undergraduate Liberal Studies students, the PHT design showed to be effective for understanding complexity and indicated the design’s capacity as a patterning process for engaging in collaborative projects in complex situations of diversity, change and uncertainty. Avenues to develop curriculum and evaluation materials, as well as professional development workshops, are being explored.

Being in Uncertainties: An Inquiry-based Model Leveraging Complexity in Teaching-Learning

Diane Rosen — Fri, 13 Sep 2019 11:08:03 PDT

Education is traditionally structured as a closed system, privileging result-driven methods that offer control and predictability. In recent decades this reductionist approach has been effectively challenged by interdisciplinary work in complex systems theory, revealing myriad levels of orderly disorder that make either-or, linear instruction an inadequate norm. Narrowing the broad implications of a complexity lens on education, this paper focuses on generative uncertainty in teaching-learning, a paradoxical state of epistemological and creative growth described by English poet John Keats as "the negative capability of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts." Opportunities to advance this potentiating capacity are especially abundant in constructivist curricula, for example the Methods of Inquiry (MoI) program discussed herein. MoI's open, complexity-based approach foregrounds uncertainty-tolerance and other interactive dispositions, providing a fluid structure for the emergent, often turbulent nature of meaning production. Such dynamic attitudes and strategies are seen as essential for any classroom practice that seeks to transform as well as inform, to guide and also empower.

Creativity as an Emergent Property of Complex Educational System

Ceire Monahan et al. — Fri, 13 Sep 2019 11:07:51 PDT

The importance of creativity in education has been discussed often in the literature. While there remains no agreed-upon definition of creativity, the psychological literature points to traits of a creative person. These include the ability to think outside the box, make connections between seemingly disparate ideas, and question norms. The literature provides several examples of classroom experiments to help foster creativity in the classroom. In science and mathematics, we can start by getting students to recognize mathematics and the sciences as being creative endeavors. While these attempts are noteworthy, they are not necessarily aligned with instructional practices. In this article, we propose that to promote creative thinking in our classrooms, we need to see our educational system as a complex system or a network of connections between different disciplines. The 20^th century notion that school and college education is rooted in discipline-based reductionism and that learning leads to specialization caters to a few, leaving a large number of students to fail out of the system. The American liberal arts educational model prides itself on giving students a holistic perspective by exposing them to various disciplines. However, merely exposing students to different ideas without having them realize the deep, underlying connections is like expecting interesting dynamics in a collection of disconnected nodes. We propose that the education system is a complex system composed of various nodes, representing different disciplines with the edges representing the flow of unifying ideas between them. Connections between the nodes allow for flow in these paths, resulting in greater opportunity for creativity, which is an emergent property of such a network. The abstract notions discussed above are illustrated by deliberate attempts (ambitious though small) made at the authors’ institution to build an educational experience focused on creativity.

Rethinking Educational Reforms Through a Complex Dynamical Systems Approach: Preliminary Report from an Empirical Research

Eugenia Tsiouplis et al. — Fri, 13 Sep 2019 11:07:40 PDT

Literature on educational reforms is rich of cases where changes have been attempted, without however to attain success. Likewise the Greek education system had experienced a lot of reforms, most of which have failed to make the intended changes and they attenuated shortly after their implementation or they ceased at the stage of legislative planning. On the other hand, the traditional research have failed to develop a coherent theoretical perspective and provide satisfactory interpretations of the perpetually unsuccessful reforms. This paper is part of wider project which attempts to address the above issue following the Complex Dynamical Systems (CDS) perspective, that is, by fostering the CDS epistemological assumptions and applying nonlinear methodological approaches. This endeavor focuses on teachers' readiness for change and explores the dimensions of the resistance to change related to the values, attitudes, dysfunction beliefs and planed behaviors of teachers. Given that the project is still ongoing, here, only the outline of the research design and the strategy followed are discussed along with some preliminary findings. At a first stage, the investigation implemented focus-group settings to reveal clues of those dimensions. The recorded data were analyzed via orbital decomposition analysis (ODA), a method designed for categorical time series and discourse analysis. Some of the crucial dimensions of resistance-to-change were subsequently measured via a survey instrument and were used to predict teachers’ position with linear and nonlinear models. Statistical analysis showed that the cusp catastrophe model was superior to the linear alternatives and revealed discontinuities in teachers’ positions, while certain variables proved to be bifurcation factors. The implications of these findings are discussed, while methodological aspects of ODA and catastrophe theory modeling are briefly presented. The present work sets a framework for the application of complexity theory and nonlinear dynamics in organizational theory of educational change.

EW Wasserman et al Supplementary Material Bystander Reporting (Supplementary material for Wasserman et al.)

Ralph Miller — Thu, 12 Sep 2019 15:45:52 PDT

EW video brighter (Supplementary material for Wasserman et al.)

Ralph Miller — Thu, 12 Sep 2019 15:45:43 PDT

EW Correlations Sept 2019 (Supplementary material for Wasserman et al.)

Ralph Miller — Thu, 12 Sep 2019 15:45:33 PDT

EW Data analysis summary 8-31-19 (Supplementary material for Wasserman et al.)

Ralph Miller — Thu, 12 Sep 2019 15:45:24 PDT

EW Real Perception Experiment 1 (Supplementary material for Wasserman et al.)

Ralph Miller — Thu, 12 Sep 2019 15:45:15 PDT

Fractality and Power Law Distributions: Shifting Perspectives in Educational Research

Matthijs Koopmans — Thu, 12 Sep 2019 14:51:17 PDT

The dynamical character of education and the complexity of its constituent relationships have long been recognized, but the full appreciation of the implications of these insights for educational research is recent. Most educational research to this day tends to focus on outcomes rather than process, and rely on conventional cross-sectional designs and statistical inference methods that do not capture this complexity. This presentation focuses on two related aspects not well accommodated by conventional models, namely fractality (self-similarity, scale invariance) and power law distributions (an inverse relationship between frequency of occurrence and strength of response). Examples are presented for both phenomena based on my empirical work on of daily high school attendance rates over time. We will discuss how the statistical indicators are generated and interpreted and what they reveal about the underlying dynamics of school attendance behavior.

Editorial Introduction to the Northeast Journal of Complex Systems (NEJCS)

Hiroki Sayama et al. — Thu, 12 Sep 2019 14:51:08 PDT

Editorial Introduction to the Northeast Journal of Complex Systems (NEJCS)