Showing posts with label chaos theory. Show all posts
Showing posts with label chaos theory. Show all posts

Friday, April 24, 2015

Applying Chaos Theory to the classroom

The Complex Adaptive Theory of Education
How you can use chaos and complexity theories in the classroom

Lee Chazen, M.A.


  1. Turn the class into an open environment with broad units of study.

  2. Use simple rules, but set high expectations.

  3. Act like a facilitator by encouraging self-organization.

  4.  Encircle the “complex system,” sending down occasional messages and reminders, while keeping broad parameters in place.

  5. Set the tone for creativity, expectations and behavior early on in the semester.

  6. These will serve as the broad parameters to guide creativity and scholarship.

  7. Get students out of rows and into random arrangements where they will encounter divergent ideas and opinions.

  8. Guide students to a middle ground or “edge of chaos,” where they can look for new discoveries and make potential breakthroughs.

  9. Work with colleagues to rid the school of rigid, black and white thinking where ideas of perfection or failure and winners and losers exist. Cross any and all imaginary pre-established lines to work with people from all departments.

  10. Work on building a new ethic of camaraderie, cooperation and collegiality.

  11. Create a “hub” in your class or at your school, that serves as a meeting place where collaboration and brainstorming can take place.

For information on how I can help your school, company or organization please contact me at lchazen@gmail.com or theglidercell@gmail.com. You can also read more about my services here. https://www.upwork.com/o/profiles/users/_~01cbea3802076b197f/



For the research supporting these ideas, click here.

Note: originally published on June 1, 2005. Revised and edited on April 24, 2015

Monday, September 28, 2009

Non Equilibrium Thermodynamics: a New Model for Teaching

Drink a cup of coffee and get into hyper-focus mode before you read this next piece. It is not for the casual reader. This is an excerpt from my thesis paper “Thriving on the Edge of Chaos: an Argument for a Complex Adaptive Theory of Education.”
The simple translation is this: students learn better from the bottom up.
As a teacher of high school social studies, I began experimenting with the idea of using an interactive game not as a side-unit of instruction nor as a supplement to the curriculum but as the curriculum itself. In doing this, I became more of a facilitator (creating a feedback loop) and switched from the use of lecture to an open-ended game format in order to deliver course content. I changed the structure of my classes to give students more opportunities for creative and critical thinking. As the classes changed in this way from the use of a traditional hierarchy to a lateral distribution of power, or heterarchy, I observed profound changes. The classes experienced a major increase in participation and, arguably, thinking as a result of complex, higher order behavior.
During the use of this game (called Global Challenge) I realized something interesting was taking place; a phenomenon of sorts. It remained an idea without a model for many years until two things happened:
1. I discovered a book by the famous biologist Edward O. Wilson entitled Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998). This book opened up the door on how one might merge ideas and subject areas in order to discover universal truths. There was occasional mention in the book about how physicists do not work enough with mathematicians and biologists, even though one might find answers for their area of study in a completely different discipline. The idea occurred that, by analogy and metaphor, professionals could find universal answers. One might even see the possibility for a “borderless,” 24-hour learning environment, uninhibited by pre-fabricated, school-imposed barriers on learning.
2. On a trip to England in early 2002, I discovered another book in the London Museum of Science called Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software (2001) by science writer Steven Johnson. This book exposed some other ideas, mainly the notion that the most productive and creative behavior seemed to happen from the ground up (Johnson, 2001). This book, and discussions with a long-time friend, led to the discovery of something more profound – chaos theory. Chaos theory disproved the second law of thermodynamics and offered hope that things do not have to disintegrate.
Since entropy and thermodynamics are important to the model or metaphor being presented in this paper, they are worthy of deeper analysis here. According to Gleick
(1987) the concept of entropy derives from thermodynamics and is a part of the Second Law (of thermodynamics). Thermodynamics, according to the Encarta World English Dictionary (1999), refers to a branch of physics dealing with the conversions of energy from one form to another “and how these affect temperature, pressure, volume, mechanical action and work.”
Gleick wrote that entropy was the tendency of systems in the universe to move towards a state of increasing disorder. Gleick also noted that this term has taken root in the non-scientific world and has woven itself into our culture. He gave as examples the non- scientific explanations for disintegrating societies and economic decay. People, it seems, use the term entropy to describe any system that is likely to fall apart.
In thermodynamics, certain things are true such as losing heat when transferring one form of energy to another. This would make perfect efficiency impossible. In addition, Gleick (1987) pointed out that the universe, because of this, was a “one way street.” A process tending towards disorder could not be reversed. These things may be true in the world of thermodynamics, he pointed out, but are not so true in complexity. He went on to say that thermodynamics did not explain the creating of amino acids, microorganisms, self-reproducing plants and animals, and the complexity, even, of the human brain. Systems such as these did not fall victim to entropy, but rose to a higher level.
When Johnson (2001) wrote about non-equilibrium thermodynamics, he spoke of the work done by Ilya Prigogine in the 1950s, and defined non-equilibrium thermodynamics as “environments where the laws of entropy are temporarily overcome, and higher-level order may spontaneously emerge out of underlying chaos” (p. 52).
Putting these things together, one might move in the direction of accepting complexity as a better system to use when defining and explaining the social system in use in education. Where thermodynamics refers to the transfer and conversion of energy, complexity is more of the working model, large enough to explain all systems. Entropy has become an excuse from which cynics can look to explain disintegration of social systems. When, in fact, such disintegration may be because of faulty design, imposition of too much order, lack of balance in the system and, most importantly, a model not suitable to handle random variables. At this point, these are suppositions but are worth considering.
The question naturally emerged as to whether there was some way to make sense of all the disarray and confusion people found in their personal and professional lives. What if there was a larger order to things that humans simply were not seeing, one where order would arise out of seemingly meaningless interactions? What if chaos and confusion were part of a larger design and could lead to greater things?
From a psychological, emotional, and social viewpoint, this could revolutionize the way people think and interact, just knowing that everyday friction and random interactions might actually lead to something. In Consilience, Wilson (1998) argued that there may be a higher order, one that fuses or synthesizes many subjects at the same time; that there might be, in fact, some universal laws that underlie all knowledge. This made an excellent case for interdisciplinary studies. After reading Johnson, however, I became more interested in emergence and chaos theory, thinking that such ideas might make for an appropriate model for education. These two ideas, if synthesized, could form a model for a higher order of learning based on complexity.

Monday, May 15, 2006

Using Chaos Theory in Organizations

Finding a link between chaos, complexity and education was the central theme of my thesis research. The research has implications in any large or small organization.

Excerpted from a piece I worked on in 2004 called Bridging the Gap: A Complex-Adaptive Solution to the Great Political Divide

…Chaos theory tells us that everything in the universe has an emerging nature, from the evolution of organisms, to volcanic eruptions, to weather patterns, to the growth of civilizations. Secondly, the greatest creativity, evolvability and progress appear to take place at the “edge of chaos.” In chaos theory, random forces can converge to form a higher order. Research in the field has gone from the study of planets to the study of the weather to microorganisms, to the growth of companies to organizational and group behavior. What one learns from a study of complexity is that random forces converge to form a higher order behavior. Keep your eye on the larger picture as we delve into the details.

Steven Johnson, in a book called Emergence: the Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software (2001) wrote about studies of slime mold in the 1960’s by Mitch Resnick. The studies revealed that microorganisms displayed collective intelligence. Instead of one large organism moving across a floor in search of food, it was revealed that the “slime” was actually hundreds of single celled organisms coming together for a larger purpose.

In fact, evidence of self-organization is everywhere. Prigognine and Stengers in their much-cited compendium Order out of Chaos (1984) said that the biosphere as a whole and all its components existed in a state far from equilibrium. Based on this, they said life, as part of the natural order, was the “supreme expression” of a self-organizing process. Simplified, this means that the air, land and sea are all part of a complex system that tends towards equilibrium. It does so because it is adaptive. If it doesn’t – if it were rigid – it would cease to exist, and we would cease to exist.

Another example of a highly productive emergent process took place at the RAND Corporation in the 1950s. As Nasser told the story in A Beautiful Mind (1998), people drifted into each other’s offices, or would just chat in the corridors. The grids and courtyards were set up “to maximize chance meetings.” The interchanges would lead to new research and colleagues exchanging challenging problems with one another. In this informal way, RAND memoranda would often start out simply as a handwritten paper being handed over to a math department secretary (Nasar).

Friday, May 05, 2006

Important Differences Between Chaos and Complexity

In an upcoming blog entry, I'll be giving you some interesting information about complexity and the need to simplify. Before doing that, though, it's important for you to understand what complexity is and why it is different from chaos. This should help... and no, there will not be a quiz at the end of the hour, but you'll still need to pay attention.

"Chaos theorists typically look for patterns of order in chaotic systems – such as the eddies that appear and disappear in turbulent water – and try to derive these patterns from a set of generative mathematical rules. Complexity theory, in contrast, explores the activity of complex systems at the edge of chaos, such as living organisms. Complex systems exist on the cusp of too much and too little order; they are systems that act as wholes but are nevertheless far from equilibrium. In other words, complex systems are capable of undergoing rapid and radical transformations in order to adjust to changes in their environment. Complexity theorists are primarily interested in the ways in which such systems are self-organizing, or autopoietic, developing new structures without any external cause or motive."

From the review by Stephen Schryer of Mark C. Taylor's, The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. $32.00, 340pp.