Dear Organlearners.
Winfried Dressler <winfried.dressler@voith.de> writes:
(snip, short account of creative learning)
>Dear At,
>so far my understanding of the dynamics of "creative
>learning", as you call it.
Greetings Winfried,
Thank you very much for giving us your understanding of creative learning.
Although it flollows somewhat my own understanding set out in many
different contributions, your own concise account may help many other
fellow learners to get the feeling of it. I would have loved to comment on
some of the things which you wrote, but you have written something else
also which I feel is more important to comment on. We will come to that
later.
>While writing, I found lots of possible sidewalks to explore
>and historical examples that would be interesting to analyse
>within this framework.
Winfried, this sentence is of paramount importance because it signifies
that your learning has been creatively. In other words, when any person
finds "lots of possible sidewalks to explore" while learning, then that
person is surely learning creatively.
This brings me to some important questions for education.
* Do we suppress exploring these many possible sidewalks
in order to work through a fixed curriculum?
* If not, should education adminstrate such excursions outside
a fixed curriculum?
But now to a very important comment which you have made:
>But I did not use or need "entropy production" which I
>understand you to think of as the central concept to
>understand all this. So I conclude: Either I missed the real
>point about the dynamics of creative learning - then please
>teach me again. Or the concept of "entropy production" is
>not necessary to learn about and understand what you mean
>with "creative learning".
Yes, Winfried, it is indeed possible to articulate much of creative
learning without ever mentioning "entropy production". This is very
fortunate. Imagine that it was not possible to articulate creative
learning without mentioning "entropy production" time and again. How would
our young children (like my own granddaughter Jessica who is going to
school next year) handle such a learning?
So why we have to bring "entropy production" into the picture of creative
learning?
Should we study human learning and its foundation through all the ages all
over the world, we will find many viewpoints. Comparing these viewpoints
alone will result in a book far too thick to publish in one volume. For
example, should that book contain a chapter on definitions of learning, we
would have to compare hundreds of different definitions. But what will our
finding be at the end of that book? What will we have learnt from such a
book? There is an incredible diversity in all the articulations of what
learning amounts to. In other words, there is a "diversity in becoming"
which we tend to call "chaos".
Education in chaos? Is that possible in a modern world like ours? Is that
possible in one of the biggest enterprises of our world (all countries)
with respect to both money and people? How dare someone say that this king
is without clothes? Is it not a most denigrating reflection on the
strenous efforts of hundreds of thousands of teachers, researchers and
administrators to make education successful? These are indeed questions
which many of us would rather have avoided. But what about the more than
a billion of humans suffering from poverty, malnutrition and voilence.
What value did our understanding of education have for them?
We can either accept or deny the fact that education is world wide in
chaos, trying to justify our choice by all means. But like with any
dialogue, such justification will merely stagnate our educational efforts.
If we accept the fact that education is in chaos, the future would seem to
be very bleak. This will be extremely depressing to all the hundreds of
thousands of teachers, researchers and administrators trying to make
education successful. As a result they will leave formal education. It has
been happening to thousands of teachers in several countries experiencing
the failure of education and a corresponding explosion in squatters. This
has upset the economical, social and political harmony in each of these
countries. The same will happen to the world which will dwarf its present
crises.
But is the future bleak? No, because chaos is not necessarily the end.
Only when we cannot reach the edge of chaos, will chaos be the end. In
this case chaos will cause ablative immergences -- a persistent
"corrosion" of all the educational structures which have emerged in the
past, resulting in a wasteland. All attempts to prevent this ablative
immergences will be futile. This we know from the countries in which it is
already happening. Moreover, should we realise that this is a general
feature of "entropy production" whenever it is not sufficiently created,
we are able to observe it also happening in the inanimate (chemical) world
and the biological world. Thus the inability to move to the edge of chaos
is deadly to all self-organising structures.
Should we know more of "entropy production" and that it is first
manifested automatically as chaos (diversity of becoming), we will realise
that there is two ways to resolve the chaos. The one way is to reduce the
"entropy production" by reducing each entropic force-flux pair. This is
what the majority of governments try to do (all happening on the tacit
level of knowledge) within the constraints of democratic values and human
rights. But will it work? Take South Africa during the apartheid years as
an example. White people tried to reduce this chaos even by denying
democratic values and human rights. But their attempts still failed.
The other way is to allow the entropy production to increase so as to
reach the edge of chaos where ordinate bifurcations will happen -- the
second manifestation of entropy production. This will result in either
constructive emergences which bind the chaos into them, or destructive
immergences acting as new carriers for the dispersion of the chaos. In the
latter case the original chaos will not be resolved, but only diversified
into new lower orders. Thus we will have to be pretty sure how to promote
constructive emergences, otherwise the future is pretty bleak. I am sure
that along this road Learning Organisations will play as essential role.
The task of LOs will be to guide the "entropy production" into
constructive emergences. These emergences do not happen automatically.
They happen highly contingent, thus making their management extremely
complex.
My insight is that the seven essentialities of creativity are the
contingencies for these emergences. But my experience is that few people
are willing to learn about these essentialities. Let us take merely one as
example, namely wholeness. After the Renaissance, Leibniz was the first
person to realise the importance of wholeness to our creative endeavours.
He identified wholeness with the concept "monad". His attempts to walk the
path of "monadology" was met with contempt. The next important contributor
was Jan Smuts, the father of holism ("Holism and Evolution"-1926). He
received 24 honary doctorates from prestigeous universities all over the
world. He was a highly revered international statesman. During WWII his
advice as key figure among the allied forces was invaluable. But in peace
time very few of his warnings were heeded and suggestions were followed,
despite the fact that he substantiated them in terms of holsim and
evolution. Next on the scene was David Bohm. Like others before him, his
insight into wholeness had little impact on the developments in physics
and science. The fragmented ways of doing things seems to be too valuable
to give them up.
>Reviewing the past year of my LO-list participation, your
>series on the seven essentialities is the absolute highlight.
>There we dealt in midst of a world full of danger for
>immergences (and probably not only danger) with what is
>needed to support emergences. But suddenly, there was a
>break. I don't know where it came from, but I think it started
>with "It hurts" and went on with your experiences on the trips
>you had. May be the theme changed from "support emergences"
>to "avoid immergences". And with this you decided that it is
>necessary to teach us more about the dynamics or content
>of creative learning.
Winfried, you are right on target. I realised with a shock last month that
more than four months have elapsed since the last contribution on the
essentiality fruitfulness ("connect-beget"). Yes, I have stopped
momentarily (even for five months now) on the series because I felt the
need for delving into the dynamics ("content") of creativity. Thinking
about the seven essentialities themselves concerns the mechanics ("form")
of creativity. Thank you for reminding me that we need to complete our
study of the the "form".
>Content! Entropy production, entropy saturation, conversion
>of free energy, chaos and order... the dynamics are equal for
>emergences and immergences. In order to be able to act as
>the content of creative learning it needs the form of creative
>learning - the seven essentialities. Without this form, the
>produced entropy is poured away. You started to help us to
>create this form on my request after Easter 1998. But a few
>months ago you started to pour content into this form
>before it was completed and stable.
Winfried, it is another case of which comes first, the "egg or the
chicken". You, me and a few others who have had an unusual amount of
mathematics in our training, learnt how to accept form and then pour the
content into it afterwards. This is a central feature of thinking
logically in terms of symbols. But there are many people who have had
little training in symbolic logic, either formally or tacitly in terms of
a subject like physics or chemistry using applied mathematics. A lot of
them have to work from content to form like an artist making a sculpture.
Content begins with observations, sensing things from the "world outside
me". The first level of form to emerge from these sensory signals is
experential knowledge. Then follows the tacit, the formal and finally the
sapient levels of knowledge. Thus it is my task to create experiences for
fellow learners relating directly to entropy. I hope I have succeeded in
doing so the past five months. But I promise to give more attention to
completing the series on the seven essentialities.
>At least this is what I sense while writing these lines.
>You asked me privately a few weeks ago, why I am so
>quiet. I couldn't tell you - formaly I just had no time (I hope
>my busy-ness was not the reason to interrupt the series on
>the seven essentialities and to wait for me !?) But really
>why? I think these lines reflect some of my unease with
>the developments of the past months.
Winfried, in all respect, try to observe yourself. Your unease is a sign
that you are now experiencing a deeper need for knowing more about the
seven essentialities. You have articulated that you need the form to pour
content into it. But is this your tacit knowledge which you have
articulated correctly? Perhaps you now want to give form to content. This
happens when we begin to realise that form has a "back action" on content.
To use Leo's insight, content pushes into form resulting into a spread of
forms. But once some of this form has emerged, its back action is to pull
and thus concentrate content into form. In other words, the back action is
to FOCUS content into form. Is this not exactly what you are asking with
the following?
>May I ask you with all my heart to continue with the
>series on the seven essentialities? To teach your formal
>knowledge and to share your experiences and to help
>us to connect with our own experiental and tacit
>knowledge on how to become a midwife for creative
>learning?
This focusing is a very important feature of the back action of the higher
order emergent on the lower order substrate. For example, it is the leader
who have to formulate the view which followers can focus onto by sharing
it. It is not the other way around. Now let us take another example,
namely our present thread on the "relationship between creativity and
learning". A number of people have participated in this thread. A few said
that the relationship is so close that they see almost no difference. When
I posed the question "Which comes first, creativity or learning?", they
were astounded by me asking such a "egg or chicken" question which seems
to have no definite answer.
But you have provided me with the "fruchtbare Moment" (fruitfulness) to
help others to connect their own tacit knowledge to experience an
emergence into formal understanding. Which ever comes second (higher
ordered), will pull the first into focus. Let me formulate the next
question for all of you to answer. I know that it is a very unusual
question, but as Leo says, let your thoughts meander on this question.
Is it learning which pulls creativity into focus, or is
it creativity which pulls learning into focus?
Despite the danger of aiding you into forming an opinion, I want to state
my own case clearly. For the past thirty years since I have busied myself
with the relationship between creativity and learning, it was always my
learning which pulled my creativity into focus. Conversely, my creativity
was always pushing my learning into new forms or fields of knowledge.
>When we have the form completed, we can fill it up with
>content. And then we may start to cook up this content
>to higher levels of creativity such as faith and belief.
Let us take this line of questioning one leap further. I have written on a
number of occasions that learning is the first order emergent of creating
(creativity) while believing is its second order emergent. In other words,
believing is the first order emergent of learning. Now let your thoughts
meander over the following question:
Is it believing which pulls learning into focus, or is
it learning which pulls believing into focus?
It is now time for the "dog to bite its own tail". I began this
contribution on a note which may have appeared to be too bleak for man y.
Why? Do we believe in a future of doom or do we believe in a bright
future? On what kind of learning will our particular belief be focused? We
will have to get ourselves into order (by way of emergences) for the sake
of our children and grandchildren.
>P.S.: I definitely didn't write the mail I intended to when
>I started this morning. But I just reread the first paragraphes,
>discribing what I intend to do, and I notice that it fits perfectly.
Winfried, thank you very much for doing so, telling us spontaneously about
your thoughts This is what an open dialogue is about. I have never
experienced the back action of focus so clearly as when reading and
answering your contribution.
Best wishes for the new year.
--At de Lange <amdelange@gold.up.ac.za> Snailmail: A M de Lange Gold Fields Computer Centre Faculty of Science - University of Pretoria Pretoria 0001 - Rep of South Africa
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