Abstract
Research into human behaviour have produced much innovative modelling, some respectable instrumentation, but little empirical theory-testing. This chapter follows suit, but rather than pursuing a traditional division between abstract conceptualisation and pragmatic procedures in the analysis of systemic human behaviour, focus is on social and psychological systems defined as information-processing entities in a context of verbal organisation, communication and control.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Systems Thinking: A concept for describing a way of helping people view systems from a wide perspective, seeing overall structures, patterns and cycles in subsystems, rather than seeing only specific events in the main system.
Dialogism: All human thoughts are dialogic and everything ever spoken exists as a response to the things that have been said before and will be said in the future. All the ideas and relations that language contains and communicates is dynamic, relational and engaged in a process of endless reconstructions of the world.
Learning Object: It is a mediating tool in learning activities, more specifically a digital or non-digital entity used for learning, education or training.
Mediation: Human knowledge is embedded in artefacts which produce and transform human experience. It is a process in which tools are understood as objects or stimuli that bring about or enhance reflection, discussion or learning activities.
Social cybernetics: An approach to describe how people create, maintain and change social systems through language and ideas in an approach where knowledge is constructed to achieve human purposes.
Soft system: A concept employed with a methodology for problem solving and management of change processes in complex situations where there are divergent views about the definition of the problem.
Interbeing: An element of the interhuman, a holistic principle of interconnectedness, interdependence and interrelatedness suggesting that everything is in everything else.