Great minutes, Fridolin, thanks. I highlight the following: " one problem of dealing with stakeholders is: the complexity of matters below the surface". Indeed, assigning labels to individuals do not solve the underneath complexity of every person. Quite often, when we organize a workshop a need to categorize the participants by stakeholder groups, or activities, we do not find pure tribes. Usually, the same person wears 2-n hats, working as practitioner, AND teacher, AND content provider, AND etcetera. And yet, we try to put everyone in a specific box, when real life is more complex than that. On experimentation and categorization’s shake, these boxes are good; however, they do not reflect reality.

The same happens with topics and expertise. Unless you are a Playmobil or a Smurf, a person usually does not play a single role in lifetime, not yet at the same moment. Definitively, we should find a way to mock up on the Internet how real life is instead of making us all to fit into a number of isolated boxes.

Daniel Burgos.ATOS 212 days ago

Interesting point, I feel guilty of adopting this superficial one role persepective despite the fact my own multiple roles are clear to me... 

Joshua Underwood 209 days ago

Interesting deabte! I would have to plead guilty too if I look at my use of models  ... they tend to take the shape of the Harvard matrix (2x2) ;)

However labels, categories and models are not supposed to reflect the complexity of reality, on the contrary - they are to reduce complexity in accordance to what reseaerchers think of the most important factors - they are social artefacts http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_artifact and are mearly supposed to support our talking and thinking ABOUT reality ... so we are all able to choose a point of view and put on hats as requested ... 5 min being a teacher and the next 5 min being a developer.  

Bottom line, I don't think we can model real live complexity - in a near or midterm future - we just have to trust and empower human experts and make clear under what circumstance we get better or worse predictions from models or any other research using categories and labels as methodological approximations.   @Josh - I think that goes also into the direction of open learner models ... 

Cheers Christian 

A classic in this regard: Wartofsky, M. W. (1979). Models : representation and the scientific understanding. Dordrecht, Holland ; Boston: D. Reidel Pub. Co.

Christian 206 days ago

Yes, I can see this Christian and agree - but I find myself adopting models and forgetting they are 'only' models. We may not be able to model real life complexity and models can certainly be useful but perhaps I need constant reminding that even valuable good models can miss out stuff that's important and it doesn't necessarily mean I need to throw the model out or that what it misses is irrelevant. 

I'm kind of wondering about your link to open models, I guess open collaborative models could enable people to mark-up and share all the exceptions, additions, corrections to a particular instantiation of a model - and turn it into a complex mess... ;-)

Joshua Underwood 206 days ago

Hi Josh, regarding open collaborative models - yes, people could share exceptions, additions etc. it's the dream of crowdsourcing. It could become a 'complete mess', true - or it could be an educational space, people would navigate in order to learn - appreciating diversity - rather than searching for a simple model, applicable to all cases ...    

Christian 206 days ago

You remember Anderson's essay about the end of theory? He claims

"Today companies like Google, which have grown up in an era of massively abundant data, don't have to settle for wrong models. Indeed, they don't have to settle for models at all." (Anderson, 2008)

So this restores the balance: there are people overdoing it on the other side of the spectrum as well ;)

Fridolin Wild 205 days ago