Abstract
This chapter synthesises the earlier work on modelling learning and tries to create a design toolkit for anyone who wants to design for learning. However, the conceptual starting point for this chapter is the desire expressed in the EU Bologna Process to integrate “informal,” “non-formal,” and “formal” learning. The authors believe that the process the EU carried out, which led to the Horizon 2020 funding programme, was mistaken. The critical dimension of this lies in whether one examines these three dimensions of learning by starting with the existing formal structures of education or if one starts with the largely unexamined processes of learning. Education assumes that learning is an automatic by-product, an epiphenomenon, of the education system and so does not need to be defined separately. As has been seen in the chapters based on an ethnographic study of learning in digital environments and on learner-modelling (Chapters 1 and 2), learning has not been sufficiently discussed or described in much academic literature focused on education.
TopSystems Design And Organisation Structures
When Fred taught Business Information Systems, he used his first lecture to look at the underpinning Systems Theory, before looking at businesses, information or computers in order to design andbuild computerized information systems. This underpinning aspect of Systems Theory was concerned with how we first identified real world activities (the ‘prime system’) of any kind, before moving on to modelling those same real world activities, usually of a business, with information (the ‘model system’). The information system model of a business needed to capture the typical operational transactions of, stock control, production, distribution, sales, finance, and accounting (say) in such a way that the information required to analyse the prime system, in order that critical business decisions could be taken, was both available and sufficiently accurate. However Only Peter Checkland with his ‘rich picture’ approach of ‘Soft Systems Analysis’ was concerned to describe the prime ‘context’ within which business information systems would be designed and now they have becoming increasingly standardized (and ‘decontextualised’) subject to American information systems design in the twenty-first century.
Table 1. 3 Stages of business information systems design
| Systems Theory | Work Force | Information Model |
| Owners | Decision Systems | Executives | Strategic |
| Office/Business | Model Systems | Managerial | Managerial |
| Real World | Prime Systems | Workers | Operational |