Simon Grant of CETIS

At the CETIS 2009 conference on Wednesday we built a consensus model on the floor — or at least, made a lot of progress towards one — connected to competence. Not many people turned up in the end — we had more booked onto the session than came — but that was more than compensated for by the quality of those that were there. As promised, we talked a great deal, but not as a whole group, and used the traffic cones, string, paper, pens and staplers. I transcribed the “maze” onto CmapTools, and have posted it on the session wiki page, so no need to reproduce it here. We did indeed make as much progress in three hours as some groups seem to need years for, though it was clearly not finished.

There was a lot of very interesting discussion going on. As I had suspected, this generalised well from my own experience, recounted in a previous post, that one-to-one discussion is much better for helping one’s own model to develop than is discussion in a larger group. So, in the meeting, I discouraged conversations that were either across the floor, or threatened to involve the whole group, even though, as it happened, we probably could have got a long way with these as well, because of the small numbers involved. But it was more important to trial the method properly, so we can be more confident that it will work when scaled up to, say 20 or so people working simultaneously.

Personally, I will take a close look at the output, put together with my recollections of all the great conversations I had over one or other traffic cone, and apply them to the extension of my developing conceptual model. If anyone else wants to take the CmapTools file, and elaborate it with their own ideas, I’d be very interested to see the result. During the conference session, I had very consciously held back from putting in ideas from my own conceptual models, at least in the first half, so that what developed was independent of that. I did participate in the second half, working on what had been built up, and trying to play a normal role of a collaborative participant. Now, I’d like to repeat the exercise again, with this, or in related domains.

I’d keep the traffic cones as they are. Mark Stubbs commented that they were a good size. They aren’t the biggest ones you can get, but they are proper normal full-sized traffic cones. The string, paper and fibre-tip colouring pens were workable — not very neat, but adequate, and perhaps a little untidiness helps to keep the informal atmosphere that in turn helps people relax and discuss deeply and openly.

But I’m driven to incorporate the ideas from the top-level ontology I’m developing, as mentioned in the most recent post here. Perhaps we could decide which top-level categories are most helpful for collaborative conceptual modelling, and pop different coloured sports cones on top of each traffic cone, depending on the type of thing it is representing. In the models in earlier posts, I have used a four-way distinction:

• material things, including agents and non-agents together
• real instantiated processes that are proceeding, or have completed
• repeatable patterns of all kinds
• expressions, including assertions of fact and predictions

It might be helpful to distinguish agents from non-agents, and assertions from predictions. It’s not clear what will be most helpful in the practical situation of this “floor-based conceptual modelling”. There need to be enough categories to help people recognise what they and others are meaning, but not so many that they are themselves difficult to understand, or confusing. I’ll be thinking about it, talking with people, and waiting for relevant comments from readers here…

Is there a useful, simple, easily understandable set of categories (or “top ontology” ) for helping people know what kind of thing they are thinking of when doing conceptual modelling or concept maps?

I started to think about this kind of thing when writing my book on e-portfolios, because I wanted a decent basis for discussion of what kind of information there is, or could be, in e-portfolios — and also, what kinds of things can e-portfolios refer to. I couldn’t find anything that was simple enough and easy enough to understand, or that I thought would really be helpful to my readers. So I wrote a short section on that in my book.

But then, doing all this recent conceptual modelling work, for European Learner Mobility and other things, the same issues came back. For example when we talk about a “qualification”, what on earth are we talking about? Is is a (physical) piece of paper? A definition of some sort? A status in society? A string of letters? Perhaps the concept of qualification is multi-faceted, and means all these things and more. But that isn’t much use for a conceptual model, where concepts need to be related to other concepts. These different meanings of “qualification” participate in radically different relationships with other concepts.

So, I’ve taken the ideas started off in my book, and put them in a separate web page, which can be developed as people share their feedback with me. It is intended to help people reflect on and understand what kind of concept or thing they mean, when doing conceptual modelling, so aiding communication in and about concept maps.

Here, then, is a link to the page with my “top ontology” — open to discussion and development. Please comment (through whatever medium), and help me make it into a useful resource.

You’ve probably noticed for quite a while that many of us now apply considerable caution at being invited to join a new list, a new forum, a new network, a new way of interacting, or anything similar. Not surprising, I agree. But until now I didn’t have a good formulation of why. I’ve just read a message from a colleague, bemoaning - well that would be too strong a word, but you can guess what I mean and he meant - the lack of activity on a forum that he set up for us a while back. Even when it was being set up, as well as wishing him well, I had a sneaking feeling that there were already too many.

If you know my ideas at all, you will probably know that I’ve been developing ideas on multiplicity of personality/persona/whatever-you-like-to-call-it. Particularly the idea that a set of values attaches to a particular context of value, and in each one of these we usually manage to achieve one or more clear roles, a certain consistency of behaviour, and of personal values. This is the sort of context like “family”, “work”, “club”, except that each person has their own, probably different, list of the value contexts which they distinguish.

And you may have read about another related key idea for the future: that portfolio-like tools could well help us both recognise and manage the information and values relevant to these contexts, contributing to a process of ethical development, to the benefit of individuals and society.

But you are less likely to know about my PhD work, which was more about the cognitive contexts of complex tasks. We can manage a complex task by dividing it up into a set of contexts, in each of which we have a certain appropriate set of rules for action (small-scale behaviour), prompted and fed by a corresponding set of information that is relevant to those rule.

If we think back to the very old days before the Web, when Usenet News seemed to be mainly for technical folk, it was apparent that one newsgroup seemed appropriate for each distinct and separate topic; or maybe task. It was when life on the Net became a little more complex and less easily separable, that I started to think that it would be nicer if we could have fewer newsgroups, but more choices to filter within them. That kind of system still hasn’t become widespread - or at least not that I can tell. I’m still expected to join many different lists, many of which overlap.

Or at least, it has come to pass in a strange way: through blogs. A blog is no longer written in a particular group, but available to anyone, who then filter it: usually only on the person of the writer, but sometimes on the tags which are associated with each post. And I’ll stick with the idea that it is strange, because when writing a blog, I feel disconnected; I cannot be sure of who the audience is. Thus, I am not sure of the values that I want to display or put forward. Perhaps blogs only really work for people with complete integrity?

I’m going around this the long way, but I feel the need for the circuit. If we want to be comfortable with a non-universal value set, we need the security of a known group, where values can be observed, sensed, and acted on. Where those who don’t share the values stand out, and preferably get out. But on the other hand, we want to separate discussions where the topic is of interest to different sets of people.

So, please, someone out there who is writing code, here is a request for the kind of forum where I can join with other people who share my values in a large group, but where everyone only gets to see posts on the topics that interest them.

And I’m still going to be reluctant to join new forums of any kind.