“SIMPLE”?
As a thinker, I enjoyed abstraction and looking for the big picture. As a pupil as student, as a learner, I sometimes found “grasping” things a bit difficult where others in the class, it appeared, got it pretty easily. I searched for a simple explanation, simple picture.
Thinking, Teaching & Learning, Modelling & Visualisation
At my interview for a lectureship in anatomy at the Leeds School of Medicine (a long time ago), one of the interview panel – an elderly grey haired Yorkshireman – told me a story and asked me a question: “When I was your age and on my first day as a medical school lecturer (and I’ll never forget this), the head of department took me to one side and he told me not to waste time on the slow students, but to focus on and nurture the bright students. What do you think of that advice?” I drew a breath and as a reflex my answer was that I did not agree with this advice at all, and that my aim would be to engage with the slower students who might appear to find it difficult to grasp the lesson, the anatomy, the ideas, and do whatever I could to help them. The Yorkshireman agreed with me and congratulated me. I meant what I said.
The Modelling and Visualisation of Large and Complex Systems
The World is not a simple place. It is composed of many large overlapping domains and complex systems. In the digital world the infosphere is enormous.
I have thought about the modelling and visualisation of large and complex systems since the mid 1980s as I engaged with medical and dental students in an endeavour to teach them (help them learn) about the human nervous system (and the other body systems).
Computers/computing/IT has developed over the past 50 years to enable us to process data, to process lists, to provide us with solutions to problems across domains: arithmetical, engineering, scientific, biological, medical etc.
The developments of “personal computing”, the world wide web, social media, quantum computing, and currently “artificial intelligence” have been revolutionary and while an elite of technologists and professionals have pursued, exploited and enjoyed these developments (for discovery, wealth and power), many ordinary people have become left-behind, catching their breath, enjoying the consumption of stuff being made more and more attractive, enthralling and easier and easier.
I was thinking about this around 2011 when I began to reflect on my past work in computer-based information modelling and browsable schemata, and to derive what became my thesis for ‘Frameworks’ as a methodology and tool for enabling simple structured thinking and the construction of simple graphical models for the representation communication and sharing of thinking and understanding.
Modelling & Visualisation
I am a visual thinker. I can’t draw very accurately but I like drawing diagrams – abstract shapes and diagrams of machines and processes represented as primitive shapes and symbols. Naming things and the classification and evolution of things. Clustering similar things and creating categories and representations of things in organised and memorable arrays.
Organising & Managing LOTS of Things
You need “information modelling tools”. Of which there is a wealth!
See; https://magicbrowser.co.uk/the-evolutionary-series/
Understanding and Remembering
What has this Got To Do With 2026 and the Education of the Next Generation of Citizens of the World?
We have got the next generation of state-of-the-art smartphones and tablets and everything on PC’s configured with sophisticated interfaces (attractive and engaging*), a bunch of cool apps and a couple of cloud platforms, and going forward, “AI Assistants”/”AI Agents”.
* engaging? Discuss; attractive, engaging, enthralling, distracting, misleading, where opinions masquerade as facts and every channel appears to be awash false truth!
You want to get access to the wealth of tools and the wealth of information, of data, of knowledge, of ideas? It’s all at your fingertips and might well begin with a dialogue with your “AI Assistant”/”AI Agent”. Your “AI Assistant”/”AI Agent” will do all for you. No more need to search and research, to compose documents, to organise and manage stuff.
Freeing you to? Think? The thinking about searching and researching stuff, the composition of documents, reports, summaries, and the organisation and management of stuff – all looked after by the “AI Assistant”/”AI Agent”. To Think about what?
Where is the opportunity for creativity – such as writing a book. Organising key elements, constructing chunks and chapters, and creating stories and narratives, pictures and models?
Thinking about yourself, your life, your work, your hobbies, what on your mind at any one time?
Gadet-led Consumption
“State-of-the-art” and sophisticated. Get a smartphone (a tablet, a PC), a web browser, an Appstore and the world has been your oyster for the past 10 years. Children and young people get “tech savvy” very early, very quickly and very easily.
What is it that they might NEED, that is wanting, is missing from the education of the next generation in matters of “complexity-and-informatics? Do they NEED strategies, and capabilities and skills in reducing scale and complexity to manageable proportions? Making sense of it all – the 21st century digital world of social media, misinformation, disinformation, opinions masquerading as truth and false narrative and false truth.
They need to think for themselves in structured and ordered fashion, so as to make organisation and management of LOTS of information, LOTS of data and LOTS of key knowedge easy.
‘Frameworks’ addresses these questions and provides a prototype.
Setting aside the wealth of sophisticated computer-based tools which they might encounter and employ later (in the world of higher education and work) – how about a (some) SIMPLE tools? SIMPLE access, simple menu, constructing simple graphical models of thinking and understanding – as vehicles for communication and sharing key thinking and key information.
Browsing Graphical Schematics of Thinking & Understanding
My original thinking about models – graphical models – of systems and domains was that they should be SIMPLE (minimal), interesting and visually attractive and “interactive” i.e. the graphical model is a “browser”, where the elements of the model are hyperlinked to definition, explanation and reference.
Parse the model; browse the model; select elements of particular interest and reveal, discover.
“SIMPLE”
(Merriam Webster Dictionary)
Free from ostentation or display. Credulous. Sheer, unmixed. Fundamental. Readily understood. Simplistic? Excessively simple or simplified: treating a problem or subject with false simplicity by omitting or ignoring complicating factors or details.
Visual Information Modelling [‘Frameworks’]
New Thinking in Education: Early Years in Preparation for the 21st century digital world – and a “human-centred” digital world?
“New Thinking”. Lots of talk. A bandwagon for a while. Oracy; speaking, communication. Analysing. Structured Thinking. Independent Thinking before AI in Education takes over? Lots of talk, various bandwagons.
Let’s try to couple ideas and theories and talk – with PROTOTYPES. Tangible, testable prototypes. Engaging teachers and their pupils in ways of thinking about the real world of complexity and constructing and sharing simple models?
While the powers that be debate and refine the curriculum?
A ‘Type C Project’ 9 months 3 people starting tomorrow?