Global Education Review 2 (2014), 64-89

Leadership and Methodology Challenges in Higher Education:Developing Competence in the Digital Age

Milan Jaros, Newcastle University, UK.

Abstract

It has recently been recognised that one of the outstandingeducational challenges of the digital age is to develop - andintegrate with the established practices - effective forms of‘competence’. It is argued here that the process of leading studentsfrom specialist skills to ‘competence’ be taken beyond the broadenednotion of their discipline’s territory favoured in the leadingliterature on competence development and measurement. The aim is todevelop a capacity for application of technical knowledge andjudgement in the process of engaging with and interrogatingeffectively disparate, open knowledge systems and contexts. Aprocedure is outlined for implementing a generic shift in leadershipstrategy and curriculum development towards these ends. It isgrounded in a bottom-up, iterative method facilitating both, theprocess of projecting the specialist knowledge upon and that ofrecognition of the mechanisms underlying development and innovationin the digital age. A brief account is given of such mechanisms. The iterative procedure also serves as a way of engenderinggradual integration of personal tutoring with the intellectualcapital offered by a mix of traditional and networked learningfacilities. What is at stake is to preserve the human-centredcharacter of University without depriving staff and students ofactive engagement with the trans-disciplinary networks underlyingthe novel divisions of labour.

Keywords: Educational leadership and methodology, interdisciplinarysynergy and competence development;

1. An Overview

1.1 Introduction The purpose of this paper is to describe, and place into novel,contemporary contexts of competence development and evaluationpeculiar to the maturing digital age, the approach (Jaros, 2009, and

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references therein) which had been designed to offer students anopportunity to actualise better their specialist skills by learningto formulate problems in an open space of design and managementcharacteristic of present day workplaces which depend for theirsuccess on the ability to interrogate and synergise disparate andperpetually evolving geo-political conditions and knowledge systems.In this approach, the curriculum is extended beyond the specialistterritories of an academic subject. It is structured as a project-based, context-conditioned, iterative learning process leading thecandidate from purely technical skills to the recognition of theirbroader developmental potential, and without turning the learnerinto a walking encyclopaedia. The final aim is to develop a capacityfor problem formulation and positioning in the network of pathwaysalong which contemporary thought, development, and power can travel,by familiarising the learner in the course of the iterative processwith the key principles governing the methods of choosing andsecuring parameters of models of development and their execution.The emphasis is on personal choice and responsibility for what isbeing done and for what purpose. It is to identify and nurture apersonal portfolio of skills leading the student into a worthyemployment niche, and to help preserve the human-centred characterof University, without depriving the students and staff of activeengagement with the trans-disciplinary networks underlying thedivisions of labour at the threshold of the 21st century. This amounts to a call for a generic change in approach to highereducation, and in fact in the way developing knowledge acquisitionand use at large, a challenge to leadership not just in highereducation but in all forms of human organisation. It is no longer acry in wilderness. ”A sea change is needed. What would thisbe? ...interdisciplinary perspectives at least as part of thebreadth but also possibly of the depth (of education)…,…to offer anapproach to interdisciplinarity through a recognition that there areconcepts that span traditional disciplines…,…(and) recognition ofthe …knowledge explosion…” (Wilson, 2010, p.114) The generic aim here is also to provide a more sustainablecomplement to the machinic curriculum delivery and testing currentlypromoted by influential corporate powers as a way of meeting the newproduction and management requirements (Blömeke at al, 2013).Although the procedure based on the objectivity of computer softwaremay well be adequate or even necessary for certain aspects of masseducation, it is unlikely - and certainly not sufficient - to instilin a ‘knowledge worker’ the sense of creative freedom, flexibility,and personal motivation that are the most desired outcome of anyworking practice. Still less is it likely to bridge the gap betweenthe much entrenched be it exhausted post-World War IIcompartmentalisation of Academia and the demand for competent

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problem formulation in a constantly evolving multi-dimensional taskenvironment. Furthermore, the quasi-privatisation process drivingthe new machinic structures threatens – if fully adopted – greatlyto weaken the public sphere of knowledge and its guardian the modernUniversity. The approach to leadership and curriculum development advocatedhere has been developed with a very pragmatic view to creating tools for complementing andreplacing the prevailing top down central-system managerialism,without taking head on the deeply entrenched ‘departmental’ and‘institutional’ powers, via step-like engagements “nudgingly”supplementing current practices and accomplishing (Thaler &Sunstein, 2008) a shift to a more ‘open-ended’ regime characteristicof state of the art graduate employment niches of today. Thismethodology acquires particularly fresh relevance in the light ofthe recent failure of traditional responses to meet changing demandsof the graduate job market accelerated by the financial andpolitical crisis in the Western world; it would appear that top downinterventions in large social organisations - no matter how wellintended and thought out - are short lived or simply vanish in the‘black hole’ of unintended outcomes. Finally, it might be worth noting, that the approach advocatedhere is well positioned to function in condition which – as outlinedabove - greatly resemble those invoked in modelling complex systemsmuch studied in social theory - as well as in professional modellingof many a problem in science, business, and engineering domains(see, for example, textbooks by Luhmann, 1995, Sornette, 2003). Akey property of such systems is the loss of the conventional notionof ‘control’, of ‘linear’ (line) management of planning, feedback,as well as of assessment of outcomes. A number of empirical results from practicing the ‘bottom up’approach for over a decade in a traditional U.K. universityenvironment support the claims made above. For instance, the student(and staff) ability to adjust to new conditions and to demonstrateflexibility and openness to context driven problems is notablyadvanced compared to ‘standard’ programmes. Students with lowerentry grades often flourish above expectation. Much improved studentmotivation and apparent link of what is required to their domain ofinterest cuts out repetitive interventions that reduce student andstaff productivity.

1.2 Competency, Competencies, Competence, and Synergy Today, higher education practices are very much involved in thedevelopment of both, particular competency or competencies as well

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as overall competence of learners - though it may not be in theseterms that the actual processes are always conceived andimplemented. This distinction is useful since it allows to separatethe former - a portfolio of ‘demonstrable skills’ and knowledge thebulk of which is normally taught and examined in a specialistsubject degree programme - from the latter which may be defined asthe “integrated” or integrable, “envelope” (Sadler, 2013, p.13)collection of attitudes and skills; or simply that which enables thelearner to interrogate and synergise disparate knowledge systems andtasks invariably encountered in research and development butrecently also in most graduate employment niches. Whereas thebenchmarking of delivery and assessment of specialist skills –across all aspects of curriculum delivery, from school to University- has been much reviewed, before and after the emergence of e-learning and networking (e.g. Bottery, 2004, and refs. therein), thedevelopment and measurement of competence have appeared on senioreducational agendas only very recently, and through channels at themargins of Academia. It presents a “methodological challenge” inwhat is a “widely neglected research field” (Blömeke et al, 2013,p.1).

1.3 Leadership for Generic Structural Change

Until recently, it has been assumed that the student acquires theability to apply specialist knowledge in wider contexts ‘naturally’,as part of a well thought out subject based degree programme.Anything else would have been tacitly or openly regarded byacademics brought up in the decades following World War II aslightweight or simply as charlatanism. Such attitudes still persist,and understandably so, be it for somewhat down-to-earth reasons; anambitious young academic in an English university of any repute isalmost entirely dependent for its rating on his or her (alwayshighly specialised) research performance. Teaching and tutoringenter largely as a means to promoting one’s expert standing amongcolleagues; and among undergraduates too, for the ablest ones mightbe impressed by one’s expert brilliance and seek a research positionin one’s group. However, the advent of digital age radicallyaltered the functional definition of ‘skill’, ‘work’, and‘discipline’. “We can think of knowledge as a multidimensionalspace…This provides the basis for articulating interdisciplinarityand its necessity in confronting contemporary problems” (Wilson,2010, p.8). Today knowledge and knowing change rapidly and draw inany single project on sources crossing boundaries of domainstraditionally claimed and closely guarded by different academicdisciplines. The competence in exercising ‘synergy’ among such

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sources must be a basic condition for successful implementation ofany programme. This is important both for promoting growth of newtechnologies and for improving graduate employability in general. Innovation and growth lead to new work niches and to closingdeclining ones. Institutional advances and financial gain areachieved by judicious expansion of sub-divisions and re-re-couplingin production, design, and organisation structures (see e.g.examples in Inns, 2010, or just recall the achievements of thefamous Head of Apple and his iPhone). The outstanding problem forpedagogy is then to bring the curriculum into closer contact withthis new way of advancing the material and social condition ofhumanity - while preserving as much as possible the rigour and ethosof an academic subject and its grounding of degree programmes.

1.4 From Top Down to Bottom up Practices: The Problems

One way forward has been to bring about a shift from theprevailing top-down instruction and management strategies fenced offby subject boundaries to a bottom up, iterative learning processgrounded in but reaching beyond the conventional academic subject.The ‘outcome’ and its ‘value’ are determined through the process ofiterative interrogations of knowledge systems, individuals, andsocial spaces never fully controlled by the interrogator. Both thelearner and the tutor are ‘nudged away’ from their specialiststarting point by close encounters with the concrete (empirical)demands of the real world place and event coordinates. They seekiteratively competent choices leading to a satisfactory be itimperfect outcome. What are the pragmatic leadership challenges to implementingthis agenda? Firstly, there is the gap between the established mode ofcurriculum delivery and assessment and the rapidly changingexpectations of those employing graduates. In spite of the numerousreforms, a good degree is still awarded largely for showing theability in an examination room to recognise and produce solutions toa few of the ‘101 core problems’ that ‘every physicist’,philosopher, etc. is expected to master’ in the course of anaccredited programme. Since success in the upper echelons ofacademia is measured almost entirely by achievement in front lineresearch, leaders of established universities look - at least inprivate - with horror on any talk about ‘multi-disciplinarylearning’ and ‘competence’, not to speak of interference by outsidenetworks into their professional autonomy. At the time of austerity,insistence on subject ‘purity’ is also a way to protect academicpositions in that subject! No wonder that much of the finance

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promoting competence development and measurement comes from largeindustrial and governmental organisations! Yet in any graduate jobworthy of that name candidates will be expected to ‘create’ theirjob anew out of the chaotic conditions in which their employer findsitself just at that moment. The candidate must be able to see theprocess before him/her not in terms of fixed qualitative conceptsand textbook solutions but in terms of the local variables, scales,and means and goals of measurement. Secondly, it is the expectations of students framed by the ethosof schools anxious to top league tables even if it means separatingwhat is assessed from what is to be learned. After more than threedecades of rewarding staff and learners for perfecting this art, nowonder that there is - be it in various degrees depending on localconditions – anxious demand right across the U.K., expressed by manystudents and some staff, not for openness but, on the contrary, foreven more narrow, highly predictable and explicit instruction as towhat the high scoring answers are. The learning then becomesdominated by answers to tomorrow’s examination, rather then by whatis to be learned so that the retained knowledge can lead tocompetence in a real world task space and to long term benefits incareer and personal development. It is increasingly only at the veryend of the degree programme that the real state of affairs entersthe individual agenda - often accompanied with much anxiety andconfusion. While this challenge has been creeping into the highereducation agendas for some time, the perception of the problem, andits account in terms of the verbatim employed here – i.e. theexplicit need for a demonstrable “envelope” competence incompetitive bidding for work in a depressed market - has onlyrecently been fully recognised. This challenge is further complicated by the pressure to widenaccess to higher education, and to permit or simply make availablein different degrees digital or “e-systems” as a component ofcurriculum delivery. These take the form of computer softwarepackages, open source e-learning, and distributed knowledge andinformation networks, all of which are in some non-traditional formproviding lecture courses, tests, and behavioural instruction atvarious levels of sophistication. They are informed by a widevariety of methodological approaches and objectives. As a tool forlearning well defined topics at a well defined level ofaccomplishment, such packages are of great help. However, when usedby an uninitiated searcher, they are very likely to be a source ofconfusion and conflict, both in the process of acquiring the desiredknowledge of the topic in question at the level and in the contextof the local syllabus and examination framework or when seeking helpand approval from lecturers and tutors anxious to structure theircourse within its specificity. Here again it turns out that the

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bottom up iterative and personalised approach advocated here helps agreat deal; supporting learning by step-like, person to personiterations inviting the students to involve personal interests in aconcrete place and context helps to bridge gaps andmisunderstandings in a no-nonsense framework. It also helps amiablyto overcome the separation of assessment from the knowledge to belearned, from the material and social reality and its dynamics; theseparation that is invariably interfering in the learning process,particularly when it comes to more open ended tasks. Finally, theelementary ‘job satisfaction’ any step like cumulative processbrings helps both tutors and learners. It is ultimately thecompetence as “the capability to orchestrate knowledge and skillsindependently, in a range of contexts, on demand, and to a highlevel of proficiency” (Sadler, 2013, p.26) that makes it a usefultool for functioning in a task environment full of overlapping yetremote and deeply mismatched digital knowledge sources andinformation/instruction channels.

1.5 Bridging the Gap between Undergraduate and ‘Production’Practices The open ended iterative process is also the way a designer(e.g. numerous and varied examples of state-of-the-art ‘synergy’design practices in Inns, 2010) indeed any professionalinvestigator-modeller (e.g. Sornette, 2003) works - whether making aweather forecast, playing computer chess at grandmaster level,assessing possible family breakdowns or predicting values of shares.More precisely, the process of making use and interfacing diverseexpert systems and information networks takes place at the level ofinterrogating knowledge systems, never fully controlled andunderstood in a deterministic way by the inquirer, via extracting afunctional appreciation of ‘connectivity fit for purpose’. Thispractice is at least formally very similar if not identical whetherthe task in hand originates in physical or social science,engineering or arts and architecture! Thus it can be argued thatthe introduction of synergy practices not only upgrades the linkbetween a specialist degree and its usefulness at large but alsoserves as a way of bridging the gap between the ‘two cultures’,between sciences and humanities, academia and society, as well asbetween the state of the art research and design practices - wheresuch a synergy is at the heart of any significant project - andundergraduate curricula.

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1.6 Identity and Engagement: Addressing the Detachment of Staff andStudents from Sites of Learning and Experience

The so called box ticking culture represents a far deeper problemthan the frivolous label suggests. Once it became a norm to measureat any cost, it did not take long to discover that the outcomedepends very much on how we measure. Hence ‘skills’, even some basicones like reading, have been ‘redefined’ again and again to maximisecredits. The result in the extreme is measurement for the sake ofmeasurement (scores in league tables…). An audit of an academicdepartment now hardly touches the actual content of the course –only the ‘formal cause’ matters! This is the sign of the times: itmirrors social changes outside academia, the separation of industryfrom industrialisation, of (idle, casino) money from surplus valueand capital, of management from what is being managed (produced),etc. It widens the gap between the measured and desired outcomesacross the whole spectrum of human activities, including the highereducation. Attempts to overcome this problem by top downinstruction and legislations have been frustrated by unintendedoutcomes as has now been evidenced in recent public and specialistmedia reports. It is then difficult to imagine how a genericdirectional change of existing educational practices could beenforced solely by top down reforms. The bottom up iterativeapproach that leads both the learner and tutor from the familiar,local, and personal to the wider context driven and ‘trans-disciplinary’ may accomplish a step-like change, at least byinvoking unrestrained personal curiosity, and by many-fold nudging,incentivising, and ultimately by making it apparent that this is away by which both personal satisfaction and future employmentprospects can be better achieved. It is a reflective yet concrete,personal interest driven counterpoint to more machinic, mechanicalmethods by which to create a capacity to discriminate betweenreality and (the measurement-produced) images of reality.

2. The Project Methodology

2.1 A Brief Outline of Basic Considerations: A Step by Step Guide toSetting up and Implementing Iterative Projects

The essence of the first stage of the method in question here amounts to achieving a shift in learner’s attitude to learning, a shift from the prevailing top-down, impersonal instruction and assessment strategies familiar from school and college delivery of basic specialist knowledge, to a bottom up, ‘archaeological’ and ‘genealogical’ learning process. It aims at taking the student from

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the subjective and particular – from an object or event of personal interest chosen at the outset by the learner which then becomes a seed from which the work proceeds - to invoking ‘models of the world’ recognised by the Establishment and examined in standard examinations, such as Christianity, Newton’s laws of motion or ‘monetarist economics’ etc. This amounts to cycles of encounters with things, events, and people, proposals and counterproposals recorded in a concrete (visual, documentary) manner in a workbook - the way a painter keeps a record of his encounter with herself and the world in her sketchbook! What exactly is being proposed? How does it work? What is the pragmatic meaning of terms like bottom up, personal, models of the world? How and what exactly does one record in the workbook? I will give a down to earth description of the method. Later, when I come to dealing with a more advanced stage of this process, I will also provide examples of project topics and of their implementation. The usual assignment or project is either a set of questions thatmust be worked out as a way of testing what has been taught in lectures or a list of projects, essay titles, etc. from which one must choose one or two titles; again it is way of testing how well is the learner able to use the lecture material (equations, data, methods of solutions, logical procedures, etc.) in one of the archetypal situations. Often not only the eligible procedures and apparatus but also the answer is known in advance of the project commencement, from a hand-out, the internet or a textbook. In the present scheme of things the idea of a project is first of all to make people stop thinking at least for a while about ‘the course’, exams, and college objectives, and ask oneself what places, events or activities – anything from knitting or clubbing to gallery going or ‘exercising robots’ – happen to have been one’s recent favourite choice. Though knitting may not be an apparent starting point for ‘knowledge studies’, as a point of departure one owns it is no worsethan anything else; and if it is something one has been doing with loving interest for a long time, the chances are that there is already a great deal of factual information in one’s head - if not also on a bookshelf. From the simple act of sitting at home and making a pullover, it is easy to open a line of inquiry directed to either a more intellectual or a practical research question soon leading to one of the crucial issues in our knowledge society! For example, having done some knitting probably makes one aware of properties of various materials, their availability, costs, origins,of tools and devices for colouring, for making more ambitious designs, of the past and current work of designers and major companies, their views of what is beautiful and bad, socially favoured, sustainable, who wears what and why, and so on. It is a natural data base from which one can begin to project certain subset

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of information and knowledge to lead to a particular theme, to the ‘project’; the project title may well come to mind as something one has always wanted to know more about such as the rise of a global market of wool or the impact of new machines on employability in textile industry or fashion.

2.2 Links to Traditional Curriculum Delivery and Sources

The project serves as an integrator of learning. It is complementary, and runs parallel to lectures and seminars or any other learning programme and interest pursuit one may be normally involved in at a traditional University. Its purpose is to lead the student from the personal and ‘subjective’, from interest motivated encounters of hers with the bodily life of the world prior and outside classroom experiences, to the ways the society (colleges, specialists, exam boards, institutions of state, etc.) recognise andorder the world, to the recognised ‘models of the world’ and the waythey function in practice, via finite, bounded etc. parameters of performance and means of measurement and evaluation. It encourages the students to choose a place, and a particular territorial and event space. After some time for reflection, the student begins her work by making a proposal of the project topic and work plan to her tutor or just to friends. This initiates cycles of a personal development process which is recorded in a workbook and in which thestudent, tutor and others may participate. Over the course of study students make choices and assume greater responsibility for the direction and content of their work. This ownership of the choice making and its root in spontaneous expression of personal desires and interests makes it possible to motivate students without depending on ‘ideological’ or ‘penal’ methods. It requires the student to develop the strategic awareness necessary for independentlearning and for developing a sense of the self as a learner who canchange and grow over time.

2.3 The Work Begins

The student begins with assembling concrete (visual, graphic, quantitative) ‘factual evidence’ about the chosen territory, the place where the empirical research is at least initially located (knitting at home, in factory, knitted objects in a shopping mall…).This may start with taking photographs or collecting cuttings and citations to be followed by more specific empirical data, how exactly was the building designed, what exactly is the material, howwas it modelled and tested and why, how much it cost, a link to what

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happens elsewhere expressed in percentages and pounds and tons, etc.This is an important part of confidence and good practice building and a sense of professionalism quite apart from the usefulness of such ‘empirical data’ for the assignment itself. However, in addition to the routine data gathering, the student isencouraged to organise her findings in the way an archaeologist records the finds uncovered in a buried city. This approach entails the systematic examination, layer by layer, of the material domain in question without any prejudice as to the status or hierarchy of objects and marks encountered there. Whether the territory of interest is a school, a city square or a rubbish dump, the place then comes into its existence as an assemblage of things, people andthoughts. For the student this place is a living place and its constitution, its existence is a dynamic rather then a static concept. To recognise what ‘it’ ‘is’ requires revealing its genealogy. Thus, when looking at a finding the student must ask whatthe connection is to the objects and marks in adjacent layers, what would have been there before, say in a earlier cultural periods, howit got there, what it was made of and why, who used it and who benefited from placing it there. The archaeological way of connecting pots from one layer to another simply by paying attentionto where they are found rather than what value can be assigned to them, that is the value learned in lectures on histories of culture,pottery or trade, just like compiling a family tree simply follows amale or female line irrespective of whether those people happened tobe pretty or ugly, princes or slaves. It is only after the raw data,the genealogical lines cutting across cultural, historical and otherdomains of insight and assessment have been assembled, that the inquiry may proceed to relating it to what he or she had learned in lectures, books, in top down instruction recognised by the Establishment.

2.4 Selecting

This procedure, no matter how imperfectly implemented in practice, at least creates an opportunity for maintaining some degree of independence. It opens access to the richness of what is before us and widens the perspective from which we begin to see it before the trained eye is engaged and compelled to reduce it all to what can bedone in terms of a particular ‘model’ of the world likely to capturethe researched event, a model chosen depending on the objectives in hand. For the trained eye of an ‘enlightened post-Newtonian’, as we now all are, in order to make use of its knowledge, must select fromall those experimentations and experiences it has gathered only thatwhich fits the parameters known to represent the model – the

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knowledge system it intends to make use of. Galileo did just that and succeeded where many others – including the likes of Aristotle before him – failed because he decided not to see a moving body of acat as a whole, as an organism. Instead of regarding speed as something inseparable from and peculiar to the body in motion, he neglected the Aristotelian organism model and paid attention only tothe speed he measured, i.e. to distance passed by a cat per unit time, to speed defined in terms of variables of length and time thatare ‘universal’, that do not belong to any particular body, place and time!

2.5 ‘Knowledge Maps’: A Door Opening Tutorial Tool for ‘Archaeology and Genealogy of Knowledge’ Cutting Across Subject Boundaries The purpose of constructing such ‘maps’ is to facilitate the unfolding (and recording) of the stages of iterative stages of the process of interrogation of human environment, of the search for meanings of the living place under consideration and of the buildingup of the sense of creative power and identity of the enquiring selfarising out of such research encounters. The process (see Jaros, 2009, and refs, therein) is divided into the following steps: Place, Narratives, Models of the world, Mechanisms of change, Concepts and contexts, Learning outcomes, Empowering outcomes. Start with the place (object, event, e.g. a railways station, Egyptian revolution, pop concert…) that is a point of departure for the ‘archaeological-genealogical’ study. List its key parts and features. Write them down. This will constitute the first column of the ‘knowledge map’. Draw arrows to link them to the related narratives. They are the bits of stories, cuttings from papers, pictures, quotations from books or simply what you heard that led you to this datum. Paste thepictures and cuttings into your workbook. List brief titles and put them into the second column of your ‘map’. As these pieces of ‘facts’ and the related stories that led you to them build up, you will realise that to make progress you will have to specialise; group your data by re-listing them (in your third column) so that the bits you think go together appear in the same group. Give the group a name you think can help you to recognise that group. That might be your fourth column. If you change your mind and re-arrange,add or subtract etc., do not discard the old list. Just make anothercolumn. As you endeavour to do this you will have to examine your picturesand numbers and quotes etc. again. You will see new features in yourpictures. Make/update your list of features that constitute your

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place. Keep drawing arrows to link items from different columns. Addnew documents, records of interviews, citations and pictures to yourworkbook. Now the list also reflects some degree of genealogy, of links you have discovered between your data in different columns, links between different times and spatially separated objects, materials, functions, social roles, persons and their involvement, and how you discovered them. Objects, citations have become ‘busy’! You will notice that in carrying our your observations you have been using different scales and tools of measurement (printed words scaled by the page size and print font, maps of roads and city streets perhaps again with a different scale, coordinates and choiceof what to map, or perhaps results of medical or astronomical observation and testing, results of train and air travel with yet another scale and ways of measurement, statistical data, different ways of turning ideas into things), results of evaluation invoking ameasure of what is small and large, fast and slow, close and distant, in other words ways of recognising, assigning meaning and order to material and experiential reality. List them and put them into a new column next to the relevant group of data. The group names and the tools of measurement and experimentation you have been listing will remind you of the models of the world youhave read about, heard of in lectures or in conversations with colleagues (political, religious, scientific, technological, geographical). They will be pointing you to a specific academic subject area you know from the school/college organisation and course syllabus, like physics, politics or history. List them next to the related ‘tools’ in the previous columns. You have now reached a point where your ad hoc, subjective, highlyspontaneous and personal interest-driven research comes into contactwith the ‘stuff’ taught in lecture courses given by a specialist such as a historian or physicist. This is also the ‘stuff’ that the Establishment requires in exams, it is, in brief, what passes for ‘objective knowledge’. You must now position your personal findings in relation to those established, examinable models of the world. You will see that what you have to address is far more specialised, not, say, the history of architecture, but history of York religious architecture, and may be religious customs in the 19th century. What did they tell you about it in history lectures? Can you list about half a dozen key dates or events or ideas relatedto your bit? If not, ask your tutor or a specialist teacher for help. It is very likely that you heard something about 19th century England, may be also about religious customs and places, but not specifically about York or the York Cathedral. To get closer to it, you will have to revise the general stuff you had in lectures or in your textbook, and then search further to make your knowledge of history more specific, more relevant to York. For that you might

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have to look up local sources, via the internet, library, or a trip to York! Every time you make a move, you record the key words which helped you to go forward. List them to form new columns. By now yourcolumns are full of blocks (groups) linked by crossing arrows. Note that to get this far you have had to narrow down your search again and again. Every time you did anything spontaneously, you produced a long list of items that might interest you. But then you realised you could not research all of it. You had to make choices about what aspect of your territory, your place, actually interestedyou. Some groups of original data were abandoned and those that survived grew into a multiple of groups leading you may be to different subject areas, like geography or philosophy; only for mostof them to be abandoned again in the next round of your research. In the end, you must look at what you have done, all the records and maps and arrows marking pathways through them. What is ‘in it’ for you – other than perhaps marks or a degree? These pathways, because of the way you arrived at them, are not just a means to producing a project report but a testimony about who you are, a mirrorof the way your mind works, of what really interests you, and therefore where you might want to go next. Of course, you may have also got lost in it and that is just as valuable a result - be it negative; it also tells you something about yourself and leaves you with a skill of orientation and selectivity to be used in your next project. The content of this learning process and its ‘quality assurance’ are best demarcated by the objectives that emerge gradually out of the process of formulation of the project itself. That makes it alsopossible to decide in a pragmatic manner how much and what kind of specialist knowledge is needed for the task in hand. It clearly allows an external assessor to see what has been achieved and how much of the syllabus of the subject towards which the project converged has been in captured and at what level. It is also a way of bringing into the learner’s consciousness those skills, values and attitudes which together constitute the power to learn, to name the world, to make use of abstract academic knowledge without breaking completely its link to discovering one’s life story, i.e. to grow as a person and to critically engage in living in the world in relation to others. The bottom up archaeological-genealogical method brings to the surface a number of issues that in the case of traditional programmes of instruction often remain buried under the prescriptiverigour of ‘established’ models, and of the ‘core’ problems (and solutions) constituting such models and as well as academic subjects. In the face of raw findings of an ‘archaeologist’ hoping to make some sense of what she found before looking for solutions ina list of established answers, the world of events is never easily

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reconstituted in terms one particular philosophical scheme, religion, artistic tradition, or political doctrine. It makes one question the established orthodoxy and instils the kind of curiositythat is indispensable in developing a critical, creative attitude tothe world. What is the value of ‘models of the world’ – of socialismor Big Bang Theory of Everything – of models that, by the time they reach a learner, will have necessarily been detached from their original source by processing and re-writing, by the networked media, and consequently stripped of the rigour and legitimacy they enjoyed within their discipline (e.g. history, physics)? What new ways of ordering and specificity of thought do current material exchanges - such as those studied in the learning process – impose and how such ‘ways’ find their place in the instruction, into human organisation?

2.6 Pedagogical Themes and Measurable Outcomes of the Project Implementation

To recapitulate: Procedural moves described above encourage the learner to become aware and capable of making use of the personal share in the responsibility for his or her learning process, for itsposition on the road map of the pathways of along which thoughts anddevelopment move today, and the outcomes and concomitant shifts towards organisational standards and their evaluation (‘measurements’ and its parameters). They encourage an ownership of the material place in which the knowledge in question is being developed and applied. Grounded in the fundamental, ‘paradigmatic’ shift in the material condition of humanity entering the maturing digital age, they promote an approach complementing but often critically augmenting the top-down ‘positivistic’ canon dominating much of the established curriculum design and delivery. The self re-cognises itself in its encounters with traces of material exchanges and their projection upon knowledge systems. The attributes of this generic procedural shift offer a pragmatic grounding of the term competence introduced earlier. Expressed in terms of cross cutting pedagogical themes familiar in the literatureon pedagogy and leadership, they lend themselves to designing the first level of assessment. 1. Show via a simple step like account the ‘genealogy of the event’in question, name its object, and identify steps taken (a ‘streetwise’ aspect of methodology) 2. Identify individual and corporate responsibility issuesconcerning the object/event in question 3. Keep a diary of mentoring/iterative steps of your inquiry

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4. Show links of the point of departure (e.g. to redevelop a railwaystation) to material and social aspects of the task and theirposition in the relevant specialities. Student outcomes can be summarised as follows:1. Personally engage with and critically analyse real life issues intheir domain2. Provide creative, innovative solutions which meet the needs at the site of inquiry/community3. Identify pragmatic limits of applicability of the relevant parameters4. Show links between the chosen parameters and the relevant models/mechanisms 5. Understand the impact on others in developing such an approach and on the environment. 6. Be aware of how you could use that knowledge to effect change, how to make decisions effectively and strategically in changing conditions underlying the task in question7. Design and deliver work amenable to evidence-based account8. Record and keep returning to the way you engage with and interrogate ‘knowledge networks’ and use this as a basis for understanding change9. Articulate ethical frameworks in which the project takes place and their impact

3. What Competence?

3.1 What is so new about Competence Development and Evaluation in the 21st Century?

The argument developed in the above paragraphs might be summed upby saying that the rise of the digital age brought about novel‘competing levels of being in the world’, e.g. those made possible byartificial materials, intelligent machines, genetic manipulations,networked knowledge etc., with their characteristic scales and unitsof measurement, tools and instruments, performance parameters, withgeneric changes in knowledge acquisition, processing, andmanagement. In particular, digitalisation of life and performancealike makes it possible to maximise gains by ceaseless sub-divisionsand re-coupling of material production and human organisations; acar is no longer made in one place but in many, all contributingagents operating independently in an open market rather then under‘one roof’. The structure and therefore the key parameters to be metin design and management have changed accordingly. For example(Westra, 2011, p. 110), over 80% of the profit General Motors

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declared in 2004 was not the capitalist’s surplus value from makingnuts and bolts but from ‘financial operations’. Westra shows thatnew fragmented producers and deregulated commerce now function in aplaying field in which industry and industrialisation, ownership andmanagement, agriculture and human needs of food, growth anddevelopment etc. have been separated. Hence ‘classical’ models inwhich the capitalist production is a closed loop, those of AdamSmith, Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes to name just the most famous,have been consigned to the dustbin of history. ‘Casino economics’rests on this decoupling. It is acted out in an open space of thederegulated global village: once money is decoupled from production, fromthe cycle of making and circulating things people need that createssurplus value, in place of ‘capital’ we end up with a bag of ‘idlemoney’, that is money totally bereft of social context (and conscience), idle moneyavailable and only good for casino-like operations governed by barerisk assessment! This process freed decision making in the smallestproduction and management niche from the old central managementstructures and its baggage of work practices born out of runninglarge factories and Fordist divisions of labour. It set in motionrapid changes in technical performance and costs. Such developmentsand structures are constantly evolving and open to re-designing, re-representation (re-financing and re-contracting…). It is argued above that the outstanding educational challenge of today is to develop new forms of competence enabling people to take notice of, appreciate, and eventually to harness these novel forms of complexification. If competence means anything at all, it is to enable individuals and organisations to fit into and function effectively in such a workspace. It is useful at this point to introduce a functional notion of what is meant here by ‘knowledge’, ‘knowledge systems’; and also ‘models of the world’ – i.e. models used to account for any development and for the tools used in measurement and computer modelling. These ‘systems’ and ‘models’ come to most knowledge workers not via a Grand Theory but via a few parameters of limited applicability which is never fully understood. For example, the ‘system’ of higher education is ‘known’ to most inquiring mortals in terms of a few (incomplete) sets of rules for loans, admissions, contact hours,degree classification, and so on. The functional definition of ‘knowledge’ is then the ‘knowledge’ of limits of credibility and applicability of such parameters that actually constitute the task or problem as seen bythe worker. This must be so in any real world task no matter how large. In designing an airport, the ‘synergy’ between contributors onwhose ability to exchange information effectively the success of such a complex project depends, and whose expert fields span scientific, caring, legal, engineering, security and other professions, is achieved by systematically iterating individual

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propositions, by gradually re-matching participants’ notion of the parameters by which all the different inputs are harmonised. Also, it is worth bearing in mind, that this cannot be accomplished without keen awareness of the way our neo-liberal capitalist system functions in the digital age. If the problem formulation and its implementation in the end always comes down to the ability of knowledge workers to identify, via successive iterations of propositions coming from all kinds of possible inputs, a reduction of the problem space to a few parameters with clearly marked domains of application, with measurable limits of performance and links to outside sources neededfor technical completion, the steps in this process may constitute apragmatic basis for competence modelling and measurement (‘assessment’!) as wellas a point of departure for further research of competence development.

3.2 Competence Modelling and Measurement: State of the Art

It is difficult – indeed impossible in the present format - to attempt a fair account of existing competence studies. The purpose of this section is to provide a few representative examples of what can be found in the literature. This will serve as an indispensable basis for appreciating in what way what is being proposed in the sections below amounts to another developmental stage. In the course of a recent symposium concerning competence development in higher education, Professor Richard Shavelson presented an accomplished state of the art study of competence modelling and measurement. He started from the premise, shared by other authors, that “…competence is a…complex ability…that… (is) closely related to performance in real-life situations” (Shavelson, 2013, p.30). He identified “six facets of competence from the literature, ‘complexity’ - complex physical and ‘or intellectual ability or skill, performance – a capacity not just to ‘know’ but also be able to do or perform, standardisation –task responses…and testing condition (that) are the same for all individuals, ‘fidelity’ – tasks (that) provide a high fidelity representation of situations in which competence needs to be demonstrated in real world, ‘level’ - …a ‘good enough’ level to show competence, and ‘improvement’ – the abilities and skills measured can be improved over time by education, training and deliberative practice.” Therefore, in his view, “the tasks and responses considered in competence measurement should meet the following criteria: 1. Tap into complex physical and/or intellectual skills…2. Produce an observable performance…

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3. Standardised set of tasks…4. High fidelity to the performances…from which inferences of competence can be drawn…5. The level of performance on tasks…6. Improvement can be made through deliberate practice.” Other, more recent examples of such a programme and its empirical implementation, involving a large sample of learners in a broad range of graduate projects, can be found in the progress report of aconsortium of German Universities under a programme entitled Modeling and Measuring Competencies in Higher Education (Blömeke & Zlatkin-Troitschanskaia, 2013, p.8.): “Competence Model “Engineering Mechanics” for the KOM-ING Project. The interactive matrix linking two sets of markers:Sequence one : “Subject Matter / Level of Requirements/ Knowledge about Conditions/Processes in Context specific performance” disposition/Context (i.e. Statics, Materials, Dynamics…) /Evaluate… Sequence 2: Abstract real objects to mechanical model/ Convert mechanical model into math. equations/ Solve Equations/ Evaluate… Delivery and evaluation guidelines: Competence levels will be identified for the test of summative assessment. With the aid of the results of the formative test it will be verified whether it is possible to identify typical competence profiles in students via latent-class-analysis on the seven cognitive dimension categories. The sample will encompass 900 students per instrument at a minimum of five universities (of applied science). Internal validation will be carried out by applying multidimensionalitem-response-modeling (MIRT), mixed-rash-modeling, and analysis of differential item functioning (Dif). External Validation will be realized by relating the EM-model to other constructs, esp. general abilities, and by predicting item difficulties through item attributes (construct validation). Further, content validation by expert judgments and standard-settingprocedures will be carried out. The study is organized into the phases of identification of curriculum content and systematization (1), item construction and quality control (2), piloting (3), review of items (4), main survey (5) as well as data analysis and identification…”

3.3 Stages in Competence Development and Evaluation

The process of leading learners from skills to competences described in the above sections may, at least for the sake of simplicity, be thought of in terms of three stages.

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Stage one must be what the traditional degree programme (physics, history…) has in the course of the last 50-80 years always provided and tested in examinations, the 101 problems and solutions constituting - in the minds of its practitioners - their academic subject. A step further – stage two - has very recently appeared on the higher education agenda - be it only when it was no longer ‘politically sustainable’ to ignore the need to address the problem of developing and delivering a measure of competence demanded by thenew regime of the graduate employment market peculiar to the digitalage, by the leading corporations as well as by government institutions. It is about making the learner better aware of the choices and steps taken in the process of problem formulation and methods of solving it - within a broadened notion of the discipline owned by an academic department. It is, for example, about how the input from different techniques (such as mechanics, statistics, and quantum theory in Physics, New Deal and Monetarist models in Economics) is chosen, at what level of sophistication so as to achieve the most effective outcome. This widens and deepens the learner’s command of the discipline, the ability to appreciate better decisions made by an individual or a team on the way to solutions, the awareness of linksbetween core techniques and those that overlap with related disciplines (e.g. physical electronics for a physicist, mathematicalmodelling of complex system in business studies), the limits of applicability of the various techniques, and how exactly such limitsare related to the task in hand (context), the implications of such limits and contexts. The confidence and something like profession’s cultural maturity at least within the subject in question this training brings may help in bridging the gap between what happens ina classroom and what in a workplace; until recently, such considerations often disappeared amidst struggles with technical difficulties in the course of instructing learners in mastering seminal solutions. Stage three. The examples of competence as approached and measured in Prof Shavelson’s paper, as well as much of what is reported in KoKoHs papers, amounts to what is called here the second stage of competence development, still very novel and long overdue a move. Yet, the agenda remains dominated by the self-interest of the traditional Department, of its subject’s specialist research objectives and those of the Professoriate - be it with a novel dimension emphasising graduate independence, self-confidence, and a broader view of the profession, with some parallel methodologies andthemes added to the establish territory of interest. The third stage then is about building upon the achievements of the objectives of stage one and two, by interfacing the achievements of stage one and two with the learner’s ability actively to recognise, gain access

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to, and interrogate (engage interactively with, and take advantage of) the ‘flow’ of distributed knowledge and power structures of thedigital age in action. Again, it is to acquire the familiarity with and confidence in dealing with open-ended, ‘multi-disciplinary’ taskenvironments, at the interface between knowledge generation and use.The characteristic feature of this interface in the 21st century - and one that causes most problems in current practice - is that it consists of a superposition of overlapping and interrelated approaches whose conditions of applicability are often hidden and distorted by mixing and hybridisation with each other. This instability is fuelled by an ever increasing overkill of exposure to unstructured information (e.g. the internet and related gadgetry & ‘apps’ with poorly understood yet very powerful capabilities). The competence in question is essentially about the candidate’s ability to take on board what is given, employ the capacity for discrimination and appreciation of what comes from where, what exactly are the parameters and their limits of applicability, what are the specialist skills for the relevant part of the task; and in no smaller measure about the ability to produce a report by 4pm clear enough so that it can be passed to and appreciated by a colleagues. A piece good enough so that they can add their bit and return the work into whatever the iterative loop may be!

3.4 Matching by Iterations

This is not to say that competence amounts to pretending to be a ‘walking encyclopaedia’. Nor can it be, alas, as Danto laments (Danto, 1997, p.37), an attempt to resurrect ‘the renaissance Man’ in an ‘updated’ utopian version Danto cites nostalgically the famouspassage from German Ideology where Marx and Engels offered their vision of life in ‘post-history’, when “each can become accomplishedin any branch he wishes”. This, they write, “makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, and rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becominga hunter, shepherd, or critic.” Why not? Danto echoes Simone de Beauvoir’s striking insight offered in her Mandarins (written in the early 1950s!), of the moment when she and her friends grasped the challenge opened up by the blasts of atomic bombs dropped from giantplanes; by what she rightly saw in it - the coming of the man-made materials and structures made ‘meaningful’ as if coming from anotherplanet. “French intellectuals are facing an impasse…Their art, theirphilosophies can continue to have a meaning only within a framework of a certain civilisation…” (Beauvoir, 1993, p. 44). “I had not proclaimed the death of Art…” but “the end of art…the way …art has been conceived, as a sequence of stages in an unfolding narrative…

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that narrative had come to an end…whatever art was now would be post-historical…Anything and everything was now available to artists…we were not just in a new era of art, but in a new kind of era” (Danto, 2005, p. 3). Art has been separated from life, from bodily events and from the collective (social). We have lost access to – indeed the need of consensual space of history and of the meanings that brought them into existence. The much emphasised aim of above, of ‘bridging the gap’ between specialist knowledge and thereal (‘interdisciplinary’) world of synergy making is to remove thatpressure, the guilt even with which such ‘baggage’ plagues the working hours of many a highly educated knowledge worker. It is, like it or not, to instil in the mind a method of taking on board the state of the play as it is today, the new ‘finitude’ that frames humans affairs of today and their models of the world, and makes thetask ‘doable’. One does not have to be an expert or a ‘renaissance man’ to see that if people designing an airport or a space probe hadto possess specialist knowledge of all inputs required by the project, airports would never be built and rockets would never fly! What the knowledge worker has to be able to do is ultimately to recognise the opportunities for connecting and matching parameters from one system (e.g. building materials) to another (e.g. safety requirements and legal limits etc. prescribed for airports), that is across the quasi-boundaries between specialist domains. To this end, the learner should be from day one gradually familiarised, in parallel with, andultimately as part of the existing modules of degree delivery - particularly via assignments and projects - with the novel mechanisms underlying and often driving the growth and functioning of new knowledge, management structures, the market etc., that is the rules of the playing field in which the product of specialist labour must be positioned, sold, andmake useful.

3.5 Stage three: An Example of Competence Assessment

Take, as an example of a ‘real world task’, an assessment of the recent redevelopment of down town riverside in Newcastle-on-Tyne (a well documented - in local sources - task whose technical problematic ranges from town planning and social/cultural policy to civil engineering and transport policy), in the light of current sustainability concerns about both delivering sustainable products and making the users aware of it. The examiner would then hope to find to what extent the candidate, who was presented with such an open ended task and asked to respond in an hour of so, could express his/her views of how to approach the task, and how to go about implementing such a proposition: i.e. to identify1. relevant stakeholders and sources of input,

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2. aims of stakeholders, 3. key technical inputs in terms of the parameters on offer,4. ways of modelling and demonstration of sustainable development: e.g. development of context based definition and communication symbols to promote its recognition at Newcastle, 5. ways of modelling and demonstration of Environmental Technologies(ET): e.g. development of “living models” of technologies (definition via social signatures of specific technologies) and their role in inscribing social attitudes (consequences of particular models for uptake and acceptance),6. a method grounded in object-based empirical research. E.g. to develop methodology capable of visualising specific ET out of experiencing an object or an assemblage of objects (actual rather then idealised ET),7. task-specific technologies: e.g. ET of energy and management/connectivity as “living systems” - in context definition.Identify and model key icons and archetypal signs of generation and distribution of energy as interactive network (as opposed to idealised demonstrations of individual feature e.g. of a wind turbine),8. show a methodology for separation of the economic-technological growth aspects from social practices and attitudes to ET: e.g. use genealogical ‘examined life’ approach (understanding recent evolution of particular technology) at the site of action via stability parameters rather then economic advances. An example of a desired submission, entitledSustainability, environmental technologies, and the issues of delivery and uptake concerning Newcastle downtown redevelopment. 1. What is at stake? Environmental technologies (ET) and their uptake by institutionsand individuals already constitute a well-established research and communication programme. However, such programmes are almost withoutexception conducted strictly along traditional “specialist” lines. This creates “an educational gap” between ET as “image” created by the media via macro indicators of desirable progress as opposed to ET as experienced (lived) reality by an individual. It is the latterthat must be addressed if we are to alter attitudes that might lead to new practices with high uptake of ET. Today most stakeholders understand any technology, indeed any change in its mediatised form.It is dominated by the spectacle of material progress, e.g. invasivetechnologies like robotics, artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, travel opportunities and medical and communication technologies. It is common practice that the process of experiencingmaterial life (technology and development) today is removed into theabstract plane of a lecture room or demo outfit. For the purposes ofpromotion of awareness and uptake of ET such as, for example, new

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sources of energy, nanotechnologies or human health management, ET are defined, characterised and demonstrated (communicated) by projecting them out of the system of generation and distribution, and reduced to a primitive “model site” often resembling cheap leisure parks. The stakeholders are shown and lectured about a wind turbine or life saving device. The “holistic” aspects are "abstracted" into a lecture mode. The essence of this proposal is in developing a new object based context driven model for defining and communicating ET. It aims at bringing the stakeholder into contact with the latest and most provocative manifestations of technology. The Eco parks and institutes are uniquely positioned to attract sponsorship of major companies and government agencies to install state of the art machinery and to support its demonstration via professional knowledge maps which will bridge the educational gap created by the prevailing practices for promotion of ‘eco-awareness’. All technologies, particularly body invasive technologies that serve as a node for links to variety of forms of energy consumption, should be seen and approached as the ET! What are the sustainability criteria depending on who uses them and where, how they influence orframe decision making processes? What could be a minimum necessary set of data/information to develop criteria for sustainability in a given technology (e.g. energy consumption) and given region (e.g. Newcastle riverside)? Can such indicators be integrated and harmonised? One way to engage stakeholders is to begin identifying criteria/models for positive and negative aspects of a given technology and the accompanying consumption process. For example, a sequence of research questions might be: Is dematerialisation, virtualisation, and de-personalisation etc. taking place? Is it good or bad for sustainability? What is the concrete (material) technological feature that informs this judgement? Is there real evidence for the substitution of information for material or energy? This will be achieved by a composite of scientific and social empirical moves starting from the concrete material objects and their local genealogy as lived by individuals. This may also providea material basis of action research engaging students and other stakeholders in small or large “personal projects”. This leads to research questions such as what is this bridge made of? Why, what scientific models and techniques were used and how they work, was itreally necessary, what were the risks, costs, who built it, who designed it, who uses it, who benefits from it, what was there before, what sources of material, finance and human input are involved, how did it change the status of the place? We then isolateone or two specific technologies, e.g. energy or materials used to make the bridge. In this approach “energy” is not just the act of,

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say, wind turbine generation, burning oil or carrying a burden (e.g.KWatts) but also the energy consumed in the course of distribution, networking, and their impact on “place” (i.e. the structural or “entropic” component of the energy-human interface, groups of people…). We develop in the mind of the participant a model of technology which enables him/her to separate, via her own experience of it, theET from economics and technological progress, without forgetting their importance. It is then possible to bring the individual parameters of the model (e.g. the generation and usage at this particular site-energy) into wider context, i.e. how it is taken up and by whom, for whose benefit, with what alternatives. The stakeholder now enters the problem via a personal research project, by being encouraged to investigate this as part of a life strategy and personal local examination rather then via “growth” or macro economic efficiency indicators familiar from the media. 2. Proposed Method of Delivery A group of researchers, i.e. staff and research students will identify archetypal local objects/events of interest, for instance "the Newcastle millennium bridge", local nanotechnology laboratories, hospitals, etc. They will examine the concrete material facts/objects in that domain as an archaeologist does her fossils. It will bring to light the genealogy of these objects, the materials, science and production methods used to design, to make and to use them, the symbols (aesthetic, ideological), personal utopias and contexts animating them. They will select, assemble and make professionally designed exhibits in the form of panels and collection of objects with suitable explanatory texts to form a coherent platform for communicating the changes occurring at the bodily sites of making and consuming (the Living Place as a knowledge-human interface) to a wider audience. It will provide the means to engage (via discussions, media exposure, exhibitions, conferences, etc.) others in the process of developing fresh awareness of the techno-scientific content of the objects before them, their cultural origin, and the way they function in local conditions.3. Summary of the ‘knowledge map’ describing the study:Territory (Place): Gateshead - Newcastle Millennium Bridge & its surroundingsTechnology: Energy and materials used to build the bridge and to redevelop its surroundingsDrivers of Development: Records of personal experience of (the ‘local dynamics’ of) ordinary objects, materials and practices, and the techno-scientific versus personal & social understanding of suchobjects and movements by people; e.g. how this Place has changed from a village to a port, and then to a major ship building

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workplace and dock, and very recently to a post-modern theme park with restaurants and clubs connected with a hyper-tech bridge leading to an elite art centre and concert hall on the other bank ofthe river, twenty meters from a housing block with boarded windows and no go streets!Technologies and Material Evidence: Graphic, material account of theabove stages in e.g. newspapers, and local archival sources of images and material properties (e.g. of steel, glass, energy generation and distribution, computer modelling), and of objects andpersons associated with them from different periods;Evidence of geographical space management and social functions of materials science and manufacture technologies, distribution and network structures and consumption of such objects and their assemblages; Evidence of the ET aspect and its change via individualexperience and self-evaluation.Models and Mechanisms: Modes of progress and their origin in science, scientific models and methodology (e.g. measure and quantify), ideology of progress, understanding science via examination of objects in real contexts, personal experience as a clash between stable life strategies and consumption via knowbots and playbots; spatialisation of time and meaning, fragmentation of the traditional narratives and customs (ornaments, symbols, materials), ET models as part of life strategies enabling to see practices separately from macro indicators of progress, and as a ground for developing notion of stability, sustainability, and technology Method of delivery: Reports and dissertations; documents relating to objects and customs related to the Place and its Life; exhibitions and small group discussions leading to individual initiatives, meetings with and memories and reactions of e.g. students and visitors; bringing to light the material-technological origin of life strategies…

3.6 Models and Mechanisms of Contemporary Development

It may be worth reiterating that any leadership intervention of substance, whether internal or external to University, will be acted out in the landscape structured by pathways and vortices along which thoughts and power travel and collide. They are cast there by the drivers and mechanisms of change peculiar to the globalised digital age. The success of leadership interventions – just as the fate of new graduates expected to apply their knowledge (‘competence’) in synergy dependent task spaces - will no doubt in large degree depend on their ability and willingness – courage indeed – to recognise, to find access to, and make use of these mechanisms,

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their context dependent character and self-transformative dynamics. To enliven the dry theorising - at least within the limits of the format of this paper - ad hoc examples of such ‘mechanisms’ and their naive contextualised form and role as a gate into ‘what is going on’ have been given in the sections above. However, it is important to acknowledge a more mature view of the generic changes by which the market place values standards of novelty, connectivity,and of course business-worthiness. A minimalist sample of such processes is given below.

3.6.1 Long-Range Lock-in and Short-Term (Accident) Models

From Plato to the thinkers of the 20th century, physical and socialmodels of the phenomenal world had one feature in common: they have been developed in a top-down manner. One made a number of brilliant speculative assumptions and at best looked at whatever ‘facts’ one could find to support the scheme. Indeed, during the ‘modern’ periodrich in grand theorising - between about 1750 and 1970 - the most valued models of physical and social reality were different versionsof this way of thinking, what Prof Morris (Morris, 2010) calls ‘long-term lock-in’ outlook. This includes the ‘Grand Narratives’ ofHegel and Marx but also those of a multitude of schools of philosophy, aesthetics, and economics of the late modern period, theschemes the traces of still dominate syllabuses of many a degree programme today! Such ‘long term’ models were based on at most 3 to 12 thousand years of selectively chosen ‘data’ of planet’s history. The ‘bottom line’: they were taken seriously because it was thought - quite rightly - that this was the best one could do. Indeed, in spite of an impressive number of empirical and theoretical insights,until well into the second half of the 20th century there was no reliable, quantitative (scientific) data even about the geo-history of the planet, not to speak of genes, neurons, and ‘revolutions’. Hence no definitive refutation of even the most outrageously speculative a model was possible whatever the reservations voiced byits critics. These speculative schemes have been the generators of meaning (and decision) making until very recently - with well know disastrous results (just think of the likes of Hitler and Stalin andtheir illustrious ‘sources’, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Marx, Lenin). ‘Short – term’ (‘accident’) models are very recent. Their argumentnever spans more than 100-200 years and ignores factors other than those chosen for the model.

3.6.2 The Methodological Shift

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The message of the scientific research of the last two decades is clear. In order to remain credible, people will have to be content with a finite domain of interest and with a parametrisation legitimated by quantitative empirical data and by clarity in specifying their boundaries in territory, scale, time, and concept. This amounts to a major methodological shift, in fact quite unprecedented in our history! In his book Why the West Rules – For now Prof Morris presents an evidential model of the relative social development in the West and East. It is a good example and source material about what this new thinking, its advantages and limits are. For the present purposes, it is important as a demonstration ofhow it differs from the problem solving techniques characteristic ofundergraduate degree programmes in physical as well as social subjects, e.g. from demands of universality, of proofs, predictions and solutions. Such demands stick only because students are given well formulated problems that had been solved by the Great and the Good of this world, i.e. in which the complexity of the physical andthe social alike had been simplified to make room for just such solutions and proofs! In his book, Prof. Morris chooses four empirically supportable parameters to characterise social development, namely the degree of energy capture, urbanism, information, and capacity to make war. Hence outcomes (‘predictions’ etc.) are not independent of the choice of parameters. Indeed, any ’finite parameterisation’ is like that! For example, one might say that Morris’ choice of parameters favours a consumerist model of society. The more you consume, the higher the levels measured and the more superior the country. A culture with less power consumption and with more efficient and lesswasteful technology and lifestyle, no war machine, and sensible sizeof cities (may be even sustainable!) ends up with an inferior ‘social development’ mark! There are other paradoxes: for instance America’s military - in spite of the huge capacity to wage war – didnot actually win any wars after 1945! The price for this updated realism - as Prof Morris shows - is then that one has to sacrifice the claim to universality and open oneself to never ending debates about the choice of parameters and their realm of relevance, about the degree to which the sample represents the process under consideration, and so on. Of course, in the eyes of any ‘old timer’Morris just tells the ‘story of his facts’… However, the reward for dropping the aims of Grand Theorists is to be able to practice quantitative modelling supported by empirical data processed and evaluated subject to quasi- scientific methodology! Needless to add, this is a domain where the learner may benefit from well prepared software packages showing at some length, and often in an interactive mode, the ways of carrying

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out such tasks in an state of the art manner and with the option to choose a task specific context. To sum up, the shift from grand speculative theories to local, finiterange quantitative empirical studies led to two fundamental methodological-philosophical novelties. There are no universally ‘consensual’ criteria for legitimising the choice of these parameters. All current quantitative evidential studies turn out to be built around one or two issues such as ‘global warming’, ‘why the Westrules’ or ‘gender inequality in France’. If predictions and solutions are required – as they always are in the real world of social policy making and business, the social and physical processesin question must be simplified so as to minimise the effect of complex system behaviour. Only then can formula measurements and predictions - the results of which make it as far as the daily press - be made use of.The above example - offered by a distinguished academic - well demonstrates this state of the art of modelling.

3.6.3 Modelling Complex systems: From Complicatedness to Complexity of the Social

It is important to distinguish between the colloquial meaning of complexity as ‘complicated’ and its functional definition in professional modelling of physical and social phenomena. As the density of elements (individuals, machines, organisations…)and interactions among them increases beyond a certain critical level – as it often the case in the digital age of ours - the need to increase the number of parameters needed to model any development also increases. Complexity, defined for the purposes of computer modelling, increases when the ratio of the number of parameters N needed to describe the system to the number of elements/components M to be described, N/M, approaches 1 (see, e.g. Sornette, 2004, for an accessible account of complex systems). When it does, the system becomes ‘unpredictable’; it is not ‘programmable’. Clearly, not all complex systems so defined are complicated though they are always un-programmable. For example, take all primary numbers (such as 7, 13, 23, 29…i.e. numbers that have no common factors). The only way to represent them is to list them; hence N/M is 1. The complex systems that evolve in time must always crash though the precise timing and form of the crash cannot be predicted. After a crash, the system spontaneously re-organises itself. A good example of a dynamic complex system is the stock market; its history is a visible proof of the veracity of this concept! The behaviour of such systems (often referred to also by other attributes such as chaotic, non-linear…) can only be modelled by enacting, by seeking to reveal what the process can do with inputdata by iterating for all possible configurations.

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It is important to be aware of practical consequences of complex system behaviour and complexification of life in general created by the great expansion in population, technological advances, and the rise of digital communication networks. For example, Luhmann’s model(Luhmann, 1995) of social systems (the best known generic model of complexity in social studies) gives up the Aristotelian premise thatsocial systems are living systems. For him it is a system consisting of units of communications, of ‘virtual’ events in time that produce the networks that maintain and re-produce the system. This is a key point: it is argued that the traditional social constructs (grand narratives of social development and policy like socialism etc.) have been replaced by models of change in which the social is reduced to (projected upon and epistemically defined as) that which is only expressible in the language of communication dynamics (i.e. via formal parameters fit to account for connectivity rather then the forces of the material exchanges themselves). For example, instead of the chemistry of re-production of cells one focuses on the meanings they acquire in a communicative system. The operationaloutcome of great impact is that once a social domain reaches the points at which it must be treated a complex system (i.e. the density of elements and interconnection exceeds a certain critical level) it will behave solely to promote itself and its structure; the veracity of this claim is well documented by daily reports of seemingly mindless institutional self-promotion. Much of current modelling and evaluation depend on the team’s ability to recognise the point at which the system’s complexity reaches a critical value. They then either split up and simplify the problem so that it is still quasi-programmable, or model it by iteratively re-enacting its behaviour. This is the way one models the stock market or weather, amethod fit for modelling any ‘non-linear’ (chaotic, complex…) system. Postscript: When Barack Obama faced the debate with his presidential opponent, he did not confine his preparation to consultations and trial question and answer sessions with his advisors. He had built a full scale model of the auditorium, and every detail was made as real as possible including the appearance and manners of all present. Like a whether forecaster, modeller of ocean waves or the stock market, his team enacted again and again the whole contest, iterating to discover and become accustomed to the possible configurations of arguments and behavioural nudging. Well, he did win!

3.6.4 From design to meta-design

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Designing things, buildings and cities has always been on a par with any other form of creative authorship, of writing, painting, ofinventing new equations. Once the renaissance thinkers shook off themedieval anonymity, the creative act was a way of expressing oneselfbut also a step to immortality of a unique, autonomous being equipped with a worldview that enables one to transcend human finitude and particularity as well as the commodification of the products of one’s labour. Since the weakening of the legitimacy of this worldview in the course of the 20th century, the method of design and the status of authorship in general have changed beyond recognition. First to gowas the modernist demand of proofs of originality as the demonstrable ‘first time’; instead what has for some time passed fornovelty can take the form of a re-arrangement of old ideas and stories. It becomes a furtive mixture of different styles and contextual features, a pastiche - what has until recently been called kitsch! A more aggressive version of the newly acquired departure from themodernist canon, whether applied to art or economics, has been a programmatic advocacy of the view that what passes for reality is too complex, and presents itself to the observer through too many diverse and sophisticated networks of knowledge, power, and languagegames, that it is inseparable from the very context of which the inquiring observer is supposed to be independent. The best choice ofparameters etc. is ultimately a result of the ‘market forces’! Hence outgoes autonomy and independence of the modern inquiring Subject, the capability to transcend the commoditisation of her labour. And with it her claim to modernist’s originality! It is well worth taking on board that this outcome is no accident of nature but a result of a very successful, programmatic debunking of the enlightenment projectincluding its 20th century products. It goes back to a group of intellectuals gathered in von Hayek’s illustrious Mont Pelerin Society, to people of the Milton Freedman and Sir Karl Popper’s calibre, who already in the 1940s launched what is now known as neo-liberalism; it came into its own under Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher’s terms of office, and has since become the dominant mode of conducting any business. This is so even now, after the Crash of2008; in fact now more then ever (Mirowski, 2013)! Mirowski’s analysis is much to be recommended as a guide about the way of thinking needed to function effectively in the post-crash world… And so the designer of today is much more than a designer of things and sentences. She becomes a meta-designer – meaning really ‘more-then-designer’. She adjusts her ambitions and methods to the fact that the naked reality is only partially apparent and accessible to her. Its image is much affected by the networks and language games standing between her and what in recent past was

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still believed to be the naked reality of the ‘out there’, turning data into meta-data! She has to interrogate and work with knowledge systems impossible fully to be understood by her or anybody else. ‘Re-readings’ and re-productions of old ‘masterpieces’ and productions pride themselves in savaging those very works - they claim to have the right to break up and re-cast them as they please.Such ‘masterpieces’ - be they works of art, theatre or design - are treated as ‘found objects’, a mere inspirational experience, a gold mine full of valuable bits and pieces which those smart enough to see and grab can use as they please.

3.6.5 Life in Uncanny Networks: Creativity and Novelty in the Digital Age

By 2010 the ‘digital’ generation have accepted the ‘neo-liberal’ state of affairs and decided to make most of it. The creative act has been replaced by the rule of pastiche, of re-writing and re-arranging. The new technologies are let loose to transform science and art into industry, into commodities. This it is also a process –intentional and unintentional - of erasing all traces of tradition and systems of thought and taste which used to separate novelty and cumulative progress from imitation and kitsch. Geert Lovink’s Uncanny Networks’ concluding essay (Eshun, 2004, pp. 348-358) sums it up succinctly. It marks the most radical expressionof the shift in our attitude to reality and to the means and values of access to it. “... negative thinking and speculative thought were allies…the extraction of concepts from any field demands that these concepts be used as probes in order to get into a possibility space. Not to contextualize and historicize, tracing the archaeologyof concepts, where they come from, which is what the academics are trained to do…thinking should be reconstituted as concept manufacture…we cannot help it if (Marcel) Proust tells us as much how space-time works as Einstein does…the theory-fiction border is utterly permeable…” (The intellectuals) “used (Grand) theory for prestige… (it is like) trying to apply Heidegger to Parliament-Funkadelic because they had seen the word ontology on the cover, instead of using Parliament to read Heidegger…” That is it matters little whether we actually understand what Martin Heidegger meant in his philosophicalwork on ontology (existence) or what this work led to. What matters is whether our reading of his lines is ‘creative’, whether it inspires in us ‘new’ ideas, read: how to produce new merchandise! “Everything is to be done…(why? Because now) everything is scale,

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can be on the one hand microscopic, and totally macro as well…molecular and molar… I started to connect music with art and sciencefiction…Once you see that they are (already) connected, the effort stops to bridge them …when scale becomes more important then analogyor metaphor…” And as if this was not radical enough, what about “the plea for a‘primary literature? Today texts are a part of a media conglomeration; they form a moment within a network. (Their) appeal (for primary literature) is directed at a class of Bildungsburger…But this bourgeois intelligentsia is all but dead. They will be replaced by a poly-technical intelligentsia and people who have a good nose for the true poetry of today…The victory over ‘real literature’ is just a question of time, until this enlightened humanistic clique is done for…artists…are leaving ivory towers and taking up their places in the control room.”

3.7 What Reform?

The ‘competence’ development, and particularly its more advanced (‘third’) level has, as argued above, only recently entered the higher education agenda. This is in spite of the frequent calls by senior educationalists and managers of large corporations for ‘a seachange’ in developing a more open approach to curriculum delivery. That is not to ignore the importance of preserving independence of Universities in research and development unthinkable without much single mindedness and ruthless specialisation! One of the key leadership challenges is to preserve the academic freedom and human centred expertise by making it an integral part of the toolbox of the machinic age; for this ‘age’ can only generate new productive niches and mass access to them - which drive our wellbeing - if it is fuelled by creativity ‘owned’ by humans who promote it! However, it is only realistic to assume that the second and particularly the third stage of competence development can only be introduced gradually, in a step by step manner, with leadership ‘nudgingly’ promoting pragmatic incremental reforms. Accordingly, the methodological moves described here are tailored so that, at least initially, they can be practiced in parallel to or as part of the traditional programme delivery, i.e. as part of what is called here stage one and two of the competence development. In spite of a multitude of much trumpeted changes and box ticking auditors introduced in the course of the great expansion in student numbers, the main effect of these micro-interventions has been chaotic fragmentation of the curriculum reaching its climax during the pre-crash consumer boom. The sense of social relevance and

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academic discipline has evaporated into the atmosphere of anything goes so long as it makes the quarterly indicators (money) look good.The structural reforms that are long overdue will eventually have tobe made at the level of significance comparable to Humboldt’s reformin Prussia at the beginning of the 19th century or the reform of English education in 1870. Indeed, processes of privatisation, computerisation, and market-driven divisions already being introduced amount to a change of an unprecedented magnitude. The new structures, whatever they may turn out to be, are most likely to follow the example of reforms that have taken place in most of industry and management. This means creating smaller units under a new managerial umbrella, with divisions of responsibility quite unlike those of the present system, i.e. those of the registrar, theexecutive, and the academic senate. The current structure defined sometime in the 1950s protects little fortresses incapable of flexibly adopting new developments. This is quite the opposite of the current structures of large companies (Ford, Microsoft), where the centre is about subcontracting and synergising everything from design to marketing while shifting the responsibility for maintaining the competitive edge and the matching capability of parts in question in the hands of the smaller unit responsible for its own budget, recruitment, etc. The Brand centre can supervise, fire, and connect at a carefully chosen level of responsibilities, but the management of the front line execution of the task and its face in the market place is left to the small unit. This would remove, at least to some extent, both the isolation and the slave-like dependence of such units on the key decisions monopolised by the top level management. It would also begin to bridge the gap between the practice of running a degree programmes and those commonly used in leading research and development centres based on a kind ‘distributed partnership’.This would be one of the possible scenarios for what Prof Wilson called ‘a sea change’. Yet there is nothing inevitable about the so called conquest by machines and the rise of Cyborgs. It is a challenge for leadership to ensure that centres of learning, in particular Universities, exploit the coming reforms to reclaim their leading role in developing new tools for curriculum delivery at the level of contemporary knowledge and technology. The computerised tools of delivery and measurement resourced and supervised by a large corporation are bound to be prepared in a way that will favour the interests of such a corporation (e.g. the IBM, Dunlop, Shell). It is essential for the leadership in higher education to provide a mediating and moderating (social, human) agency (tutorial, managerial, editorial) that would ensure a sense of proportion and balance in relation to other interests and aims. In doing so they might be able to make a fresh bid for an improvement of the

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esteem and power of the University as a guardian of the social, human ownership of knowing and being.

4. Results and Research Agendas

The approach advocated above has been applied at various levelsof sophistication to BSc, BA, MSc, and MPhil programmes at Newcastleand Bristol universities in the UK, over a period of more than twodecades (see Jaros, 2009, and references therein). In particular,the BA Single Honours degree in Philosophical Studies of Knowledge and HumanInterests at Newcastle has been in existence since 1999. Thisundergraduate degree programme was set up as an extension of anearlier optional package - which grew spontaneously, out of a minorinformal event, and rapidly attracted students of many differentdisciplines, from theoretical physics to English literature. Thedegree programme was designed as a ‘trans-disciplinary’ yet a highlyintegrated course; it contains substantial (1/3 of student time)project and optional (again, 1/3 of student time) components. Thebackbone of the course, a series of compulsory lecture and seminarmodules, is conceived as an onto-epistemic account of modern systemsof thought and their links to broader cultural contexts - e.g. ofEuropean artistic and political traditions, of the making of ourtechno-scientific infrastructure, etc. The programme has beenrunning along the methodological lines described in the sectionsabove. The reports on undergraduate projects and Master ofPhilosophy (MPhil) dissertations generated by successive groups ofstudents who successfully participated in this programmes, thoughnever reaching statistically significant numbers, do provide auseful insight into how such a programme functions. We have already reported significant achievements in motivatingour undergraduates and in improving their competence in launchingcareers after graduation. The student independence in handlingabstractions as well as their sense of ‘reality’ has also increasednoticeably. However, in spite of its recognised financial andacademic success - including the highest degree of studentsatisfaction - the programme still retains its ‘experimental’status. As pointed out in the sections above, the current structureof curriculum delivery in a red brick English University does notoffer a ‘natural’ position for a course with such a degree ofstudent choice, a problem surely shared in varied degree with othercountries and institutions. Particularly when it comes to developinga personal portfolio of skills and competence that ultimatelycrosses departmental boundaries, not to speak of the influence ofoutside Institutions! Audit, quality assurance, and externalexamination procedures always highlight this mismatch. But it goes

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to the credit of those involved that, at least in our experience,the praiseworthy student performance and satisfaction has so faralways prevailed and allowed us to continue our programme. It has also been argued above that, given the structural inertiain Higher Education almost everywhere, the best way towards a shiftfrom what is called here stage one to stage two and three ofcompetence development must be a step like iterative process of‘nudging persuasion’ and tricky compromises. Having accepted thisstrategy, it is easy to draw key guidelines for leadership andresearch agendas, that is those affecting both, pedagogical andstructural (organisational) aspects of the curriculum delivery.Alas! Instead of general guidelines to be fought for and implemented(and published along the stratified referee guidelines) across thehigher education at large, it must begin with incremental changesthat can be identified and negotiated ‘locally’; that is for aspecific degree or faculty programme, and with a view to a specificcontext such as the urban or industrial ‘territory’. The example insection 3.5 records one such (successful) project which served notonly as a valued project for a student but also as a ‘Trojan Horse’in setting up, in the course of implementing it with various partsof the Establishment, the necessary precedent and therefore a bridgefor future moves. The research agenda, as indicated schematically inthe outline of this project and its delivery, is then given by theneed to develop and justify the instruction given to staff andstudents. This includes the standards of style and level ofdifficulty to be demonstrated in the workbook and in the writtenreport, of the marking scheme, and of the links to specialistknowledge and the empirical range of such knowledge. The role ofindividual tutoring, as well as that of networks, apps, andfieldwork output generated by work outside University, must also bebalanced and ‘quality assured’; again the only hope of achievingsuch a balanced outcome and its acceptance by the Establishment isto tie it to a specific context. In sum, the aim of the academic research and leadership agendas isto build gradually a set of locally respected ‘precedents’ whichcome into existence (and enter institutional records!) as a multi-dimensional ‘assured’ package. The leader - academic manager whoaccepts the need for competence development and modelling will inturn acquire a base from which to begin re-directing and re-sourcingthe staff and students. It may even help in clarifying, andhopefully also justifying the real value of what may – in comparisonwhich the academic rigour of an established degree delivery – looklike a somewhat suspect process. Finding a way of engaging andinforming staff along these lines - without compromising thereputation and the skill base of the individual academic disciplineswhich do and always will form the backbone of a healthy higher

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education institution - is indeed an outstanding and formidabletask. It is not made easier by the inability to appeal, at least atthis initial stage of development, to some universal lines ofinstruction and quality assurance to which the EducationalEstablishment in particular is so accustomed! This is not a lament;it is really a call to all those concerned about competencedevelopment to form national and international groupings capable of criticallysharing their experience and supporting each other in their endeavour to bringhigher education closer to the demands of the divisions of labourpeculiar to the digital age. Some encouraging initiatives designedto address this objective and noted particularly in section 3.2 havealready made good progress!

References

Blömeke, S., Zlatkin-Troitchanskaia, O., & Fege, J., Eds. (2013).Modeling and Measuring Competences in Higher Education. Rotterdam:Sensepublishers.Blömeke, S., & Zlatkin-Troitschanskaia, O., Eds. (2013). Modeling and Measuring Competences in Higher Education: 23 research projects on engineering, economics and social sciences, education and generic skills of higher education students, KoKoHs Papers 3. www.kompetenzen-im-hochschulsektor.de (November 2013)Beauvoir, de S. (1993). The Mandarins. (Transl. by L. M. Friedman).London: Flamingo.Bottery, M. (2004). Educational Leadership. London: SAGE.Danto, A. C. (1997). After the End of Art. Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress.Danto, A. C. (2005). Unnatural Wonders. New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press.Eshun, K. (2004). “Everything Was To Be Done. All Adventures AreStill There.” In Lovink, G., Ed. Uncanny Networks (pp.348-359).Cambridge: MIT Press.Inns, T., Ed. (2010). Designing for the 21st century. London: Gover.Jaros, M. (2009). Pedagogy for knowledge recognition andacquisition: knowing and being at the close of the mechanical age.The Curriculum Journal, 20, 191-208.Luhmann, N. (1995). Social Systems. Transl. Bednarz, J. Jr. & Baecker,D. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Mirowski, P. (2013). Never Let a Serious Crisis Go To Waste. London: Verso.Morris, I. (2010). Why the West Rules – For Now. New York: Farrah, Straussand Giroux.Sadler, D.R. (2013). Making Competent Judgments of Competence. InBlömeke at. al., Eds. Modeling and Measuring Competences in Higher Education(pp. 13-27). Rotterdam: Sensepublishers.

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Shavelson, R.J. (2013). An Approach to Testing & ModellingCompetence. In Blömeke at. al., Eds. Modeling and Measuring Competences inHigher Education (pp. 29-44). Rotterdam: Sensepublishers.Sornette, D. (2003). Why Stock Markets Crash. Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press. Thaler, R.H., & Sunstein, C.R., (2008). Nudge. Yale: Yale UniversityPress.Wilson, A. (2010). Knowledge Power: Interdisciplinary Education for a ComplexWorld. London: Routledge.Westra, R., (2012). The Evil Axis of Finance. Atlanta: Clarity Press Inc.

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