{"title":"Creativity as an Emergent Property of Complex Educational System","authors":"Ceire Monahan, M. Munakata, Ashwini Vaidya","doi":"10.22191/nejcs/vol1/iss1/4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22191/nejcs/vol1/iss1/4","url":null,"abstract":"The importance of creativity in education has been discussed often in the literature. While there remains no agreed-upon definition of creativity, the psychological literature points to traits of a creative person. These include the ability to think outside the box, make connections between seemingly disparate ideas, and question norms. The literature provides several examples of classroom experiments to help foster creativity in the classroom. In science and mathematics, we can start by getting students to recognize mathematics and the sciences as being creative endeavors. While these attempts are noteworthy, they are not necessarily aligned with instructional practices. In this article, we propose that to promote creative thinking in our classrooms, we need to see our educational system as a complex system or a network of connections between different disciplines. The 20 century notion that school and college education is rooted in discipline-based reductionism and that learning leads to specialization caters to a few, leaving a large number of students to fail out of the system. The American liberal arts educational model prides itself on giving students a holistic perspective by exposing them to various disciplines. However, merely exposing students to different ideas without having them realize the deep, underlying connections is like expecting interesting dynamics in a collection of disconnected nodes. We propose that the education system is a complex system composed of various nodes, representing different disciplines with the edges representing the flow of unifying ideas between them. Connections between the nodes allow for flow in these paths, resulting in greater opportunity for creativity, which is an emergent property of such a network. The abstract notions discussed above are illustrated by deliberate attempts (ambitious though small) made at the authors’ institution to build an educational experience focused on creativity.","PeriodicalId":184569,"journal":{"name":"Northeast Journal of Complex Systems","volume":"109 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124838556","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Fractality and Power Law Distributions: Shifting Perspectives in Educational Research","authors":"M. Koopmans","doi":"10.22191/nejcs/vol1/iss1/2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22191/nejcs/vol1/iss1/2","url":null,"abstract":"The dynamical character of education and the complexity of its constituent relationships have long been recognized, but the full appreciation of the implications of these insights for educational research is recent. Most educational research to this day tends to focus on outcomes rather than process, and rely on conventional cross-sectional designs and statistical inference methods that do not capture this complexity. This presentation focuses on two related aspects not well accommodated by conventional models, namely fractality (self-similarity, scale invariance) and power law distributions (an inverse relationship between frequency of occurrence and strength of response). Examples are presented of both phenomena based on my empirical work on of daily high school attendance rates over time. We will discuss how the statistical indicators are generated and interpreted and what they reveal about the underlying dynamics of school attendance behavior.","PeriodicalId":184569,"journal":{"name":"Northeast Journal of Complex Systems","volume":"56 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125482924","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Editorial Introduction to the Northeast Journal of Complex Systems (NEJCS)","authors":"Hiroki Sayama, G. Georgiev","doi":"10.22191/nejcs/vol1/iss1/1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22191/nejcs/vol1/iss1/1","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":184569,"journal":{"name":"Northeast Journal of Complex Systems","volume":"146 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123430948","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Anticipation Induces Polarized Collective Motion in Attraction Based Models","authors":"D. Strömbom, A. Antia","doi":"10.22191/nejcs/vol3/iss1/2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22191/nejcs/vol3/iss1/2","url":null,"abstract":"In most models of collective motion in animal groups each individual updates its heading based on the current positions and headings of its neighbors. Several authors have investigated the effects of including anticipation into models of this type, and have found that anticipation inhibits polarized collective motion in alignment based models and promotes milling and swarming in the one attraction-repulsion model studied. However, it was recently reported that polarized collective motion does emerge in an alignment based asynchronous lattice model with mutual anticipation. To our knowledge this is the only reported case where polarized collective motion has been observed in a model with anticipation. Here we show that including anticipation induces polarized collective motion in a synchronous, off lattice, attraction based model. This establishes that neither asynchrony, mutual anticipation nor motion restricted to a lattice environment are strict requirements for anticipation to promote polarized collective motion. In addition, unlike alignment based models the attraction based model used here does not produce any type of polarized collective motion in the absence of anticipation. Here anticipation is a direct polarization inducing mechanism. We believe that utilizing anticipation instead of frequently used alternatives such as explicit alignment terms, asynchronous updates and asymmetric interactions to generate polarized collective motion may be advantageous in some cases.","PeriodicalId":184569,"journal":{"name":"Northeast Journal of Complex Systems","volume":"35 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-10-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124938691","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}