José-Isaias Badillo-Piña’s Paper Proposal

LIVING IN CYBERNETICS IN THE CLASSROOM OF SYSTEMS SCIENCE

(updated abstract, June 24, 2014)
LIVING IN CYBERNETICS IN THE CLASSROOM OF SYSTEMS SCIENCE
Isaías Badillo-Piña, Ricardo Tejeida-Padilla, Oswaldo Morales-Matamoros
Instituto Politécnico Nacional, México
ibadillop@ipn.mx, rtejeidap@ipn.mx, omoralesm@ipn.mx

Purpose -Two of the purposes of the higher education systems are to communicate a current knowledge and facilitate the emergence of new knowledge, however knowledge is not a finished article that can be build like a manufactured product. It is necessary to understand the nature of the knowledge as a mental activity of translation/ interpretation.
Approach – The traditional approach to educate human resources is oriented to form specialist with advanced experience in one discipline, however “neither nature nor society is organized as the university or into disciplines” (Ackoff, 1999) both nature and society presents very complex issues which require a different kind of education to face them.
Most of the graduate schools where systems Science is learned accept students coming from traditional organized higher education’s schools which are organized into specific disciplines like engineering, Management Sciences, Law, Medicine, etc.
The graduate department of Systems Engineering of the Instituto Politécnico Nacional accept students coming from traditional Higher Education Schools, organized into specific disciplines like mathematics and natural sciences, biology and medicine, Social Sciences and Business management.
Findings – However a big problem was detected in the learning process of how to change specialized and fragmented way of thinking of the traditional disciplines to a systems and cybernetic way of thinking.
In this paper knowledge is considered a dynamic conceptual system in constant transformation according to evolutionary processes of hypothesis elaboration, error elimination and possible acceptance or refutation.
Value – In order to help students to change to a new way of thinking (systems and cybernetic way of thinking) a didactic tool, based in the Domain of Science Model of Warfield (1987) was developed into the propaedeutic curricula following the constructivism principles. For didactic purposes, initially we call this tool “The Structure of System Science” but could be called a model of System Science, a simplified paradigm of System Science, etc.
The Systems Science and Second level Cybernetics approach, are used to help understanding of the loops of interactions between emotions; knowing and understanding the process of generation of knowledge. This is akin Mead’s arguments that cybernetics should address cybernetics in a cybernetic manner.
The paper provides a basic conceptual tool of Systems Sciences to describe some aspects of knowing, considering that objective knowledge dos not exist independent or separately from observer/ knowers.
The paper seeks to presents Systems Science and Cybernetics as a science that enable certain improvements in the classroom of higher education, focusing on learning instead of teaching.
Keywords: Systems Sciences, Cybernetics, Knowledge, conjecture and refutation.

Cybernetic traditions:

  • 3) Experimental epistemology; constructivism; philosophy of science
  • 5) Education and conversation

2 thoughts on “José-Isaias Badillo-Piña’s Paper Proposal

  1. Ranulph Glanville

    It interests me that what you describe here, specially in your first paragraph, is very much what we intend by the ASC cybernetics in the future part of our conference, although I think we met be more liberal than you might expect.

    I hope you will find the forum we will provide you with a good place to contribute in the most open and generous manner. It’s good to know you’ll be joining us. Welcome!

    Reply
  2. Allan Randall

    Do you think that such an understanding could actually be used to change the way higher education is structured, and actually abolish the disciplines? Or you would not go that far?

    Reply

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