Ackoff Center Weblog

Building Resilience: Responding to a Turbulent World

Call for Papers - UK Systems Society International Conference 2008

At Oxford University on the 1st -3rd September 2008

Keynote speakers:

Professor Ralph Stacey, Professor of Management at the Business School, University of Hertfordshire, author of numerous books on complexity.
Dr. Tony Kendle, Foundation Director at the Eden Project.
Mark Lynas, Journalist and author of three books on climate change.
Sarb Sembhi, Director of Metis-For, is a world expert on networked surveillance, IT security and cybercrime.

Please download the Conference 2008 Flyer

Turning Learning Right Side Up

Putting Education Back on Track

Russell L. Ackoff, Daniel Greenberg

Jul 2008, Hardback, 224 pages
ISBN13: 9780132346498
ISBN10: 0132346494

Description

Over the past 150 years, virtually everything has changed... except education. In the age of the Internet, we educate people much as we did during the industrial revolution. We educate them for a world that no longer exists, instilling values that are antithetical to those of a free, 21st century democracy. Perhaps worst of all, too many schools extinguish the human creativity and joy they ought to nourish. In this book, legendary systems scientist Dr. Russell Ackoff and "in-the-trenches" education innovator Daniel Greenberg offer a radically new path forward. In the year's most provocative conversation, they take on the very deepest questions about education: What should be its true purpose? Must schools be the way they are? Do classrooms make sense anymore? What should we teach? What should individuals contribute to their own education? What if students did the teaching and teachers did the learning? Is it possible to eliminate old-fashioned distinctions between subjects and between the arts and sciences? What would the ideal lifelong education look like: at the K-12 level, at universities and colleges, in the workplace, and beyond? How do you educate for a world that doesn't yet exist? And how do you pay for tomorrow's "ideal schools"? Ackoff and Greenberg each bring a lifetime of success making radical change. Here, they combine deep idealism with a relentless focus on the real world and arrive at solutions that make far more sense than anything we're doing now.
To read more about this book, click on the following URL: Turning Learning Right Side Up

University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA

July 13-18, 2008

ISSS2008: Systems that Make a Difference

Location: University of Wisconsin, Memorial Union, 800 Langdon Street, Madison, Wisconsin

The title for this conference borrows from Gregory Bateson’s definition of information as “a difference that makes a difference.” The question for systems researchers and practitioners is, “what difference are we making?”

For more information see the Madison 2008 main page, and the Madison 2008 Conference Announcement