2016年4月5日 (二) 07:39的最后版本

极限学习过程： Extreme Learning Process (XLP)

The eXtreme Learning Process (XLP) is an interdisciplinary learning platform that employs a linked series of resources and methods, which organize and support learners from various disciplines in the design and execution of guided, collaborative learning activities. It is aimed at learners with widely different backgrounds to encourage and train them to effectively work together in developing solutions to challenging problems that converges in reaching a common goal, such as developing a prototype product or a specific service. XLP creates a realistic social context by providing participants with a common coordination mechanism shared across all collective learning environment. The coordination mechanism includes market exchange, conflict resolution, patent office, and media publishing channels. This coordination mechanism motivates participants to govern their collaborating and competing teams, to plan and coordinate the application of resources, and to demonstrate their individual creativity in a highly networked digital society.

XLP addresses the following needs in modern learning environments:

1. CONTENT RICHNESS / SUBJECT INDEPENDENCE: Every XLP-based exercise is a part of a continuous digital publication process using a set of public-domain digital learning tools (such as MediaWiki) to capture learning outcomes. This generic digital publishing process may support a wide range of courses and allows for highly specialized technical content to share the same information technology infrastructure. XLP asserts that publishable results and the meta-data produced through the publication process are concrete evidence for both group and individual learning. 2. COMMON COORDINATION MECHANISM: Every XLP-based program is managed by a set of customizable social protocols. These protocols include technology transfer services, conflict resolution procedures, asset exchange protocols, and social media publication etiquettes. All participants are informed their rights to utilize these protocols to acquire resources, so that they can conduct their desirable tasks. A legislative procedure to modify these protocols is considered as the learning mechanism for improving XLP on the method-design level. 3. DIGITAL ACCOUNTABILITY: Every XLP participants, and the teams organized within an XLP program are given a universally unique , secure digital identity. This identity can be used to track contributions and violation in the learning process. Participants should learn to respect and protect their own digital identities by acquiring skills and knowledge about information security and behavioral habits. Through XLP-based digital publication activities, skills and practice of information security should allow independent ideas to be published more freely and therefore expand the horizon of learning potentials at large.

Based on these three key features, XLP establishes a crowd learning operating system that enables humans and machines to co-create content across space and time.

XLP’S OPERATIONAL FRAMEWORK

As a design methodology for learning activities, XLP shifts the governance model of educational services from the model of centralized administration to distributed crowd participation. It is at once a “gamified” training ground for developing a range of professional skills, a crowd-learning operating system, and a large-group intervention. These usages of the term can be briefly described as follows.

Gamified training ground for professional skills

First, XLP serves as an interdisciplinary and intercultural training ground for all participants, to challenge and try out various interactions as they execute the mission they have been given. These challenging missions are presented as a game, with various scoring and penalty mechanisms, in the forms of technology transfer, conflict resolution judgements, market exchanges or media exposure. These emulated functions of a real society should help participants develop a mixture of competences that is expected of global professionals and leaders, including team building, communication skills, intercultural competencies, project management skills, leadership skills, information literacy, lateral thinking, and creative capacity. One of the reasons why XLP makes for such a powerful testing bed is that it brings together participants from different cultural backgrounds who represent a variety of professional and academic disciplines. XLP crosses boundaries by involving a diversity of students, teachers, and ‘hackers’ from various places, disciplines, and age groups. XLP also welcomes and integrates practices that originate from a variety of academic fields, including information system design, law, and communication. It is through such interdisciplinary interaction that XLP participants can discover the unique skillset that they bring to the group. Consequently, the diversity within teams and the group as a whole will lead participants to greater self-awareness of their own talents as well as of the capabilities of the team and the group.

Large-group intervention

An XLP stands for an experience-driven large-group intervention in which participants need to engage with others as they tackle a set of open-ended tasks. The mission, not the contents, is driving, and product development is an integral part of the experience. XLP can therefore be regarded as an exponent of hacker/maker education, which finds its roots in the wider maker movement in China and elsewhere, sharing its thoroughly collaborative spirit.

Although the number of teams may range from four to forty (and more, if physical space allows this), typically ten self-organizing teams of eight need to muster all the skills and tap all the talents of the group in order to rise to meet the demanding challenges they have been set. These tasks are defined by the ‘challenge designers’ and are tailored for each intervention, which can span anything from an intensive four day immersion event to a continuous four year process (and why not an entire lifetime).

OPERATING SYSTEM

XLP as an operational framework for learning organizations provides access to and enables data-driven experiential learning based on threaded cognitive learning mechanisms (‘ecorithms’ ). These can be described in terms of step-by-step procedures and protocols for sourcing, evaluating and processing information. (fig. 2)

Figure 2. XLP as an operating system

As long as the learning environment is rich enough and the goals clear, learners will personally develop and progress along a path of targeted benchmarks in accordance with these ecorithms. In order to detect learning, it is highly important that all meaningful content in a given XLP event is systematically recorded in digitized forms. Modeling the various types of social transactions in XLP will facilitate this effort. Figure 3, for example, provides a model of the market trading performance of a given team, using the notation of category theory. The collection of data allows continuous feedback to all participants, stimulating self-directed group behavior. Over time, patterns of changes will emerge and present themselves for further analysis and interpretation.

Figure 3. Conceptual model of trading in XLP for a given team

As the participants conduct their mission and address the problems they encounter along the way (designing a physical object or developing a new service or modifying an organizational rule), they need to apply concrete and abstract thinking. As illustrated in Figure 4, this heuristic process requires that problems are first stated in a concrete, measureable way and possible solutions are considered in the abstract, before a solution can be delivered in the concrete. This method can be applied as a powerful learning method in XLP, as it allows to link changes at the concrete level (measured as the difference between the original situation and the solution) with abstract processes (e.g. through notes on the inventive principles that were considered and implemented). The 4 forces of architecture, market, law, and norms (see below) make up the contextual factors that create the contradictions from which problems first arise as well as open the doors that reveal pathways for resolving them.

Figure 4. Effecting change through moving between concrete and abstract

In the abstract, XLP constitutes an operating system for running group learning activities. It provides an operational framework to guide people and utilize resources to address a generic set of problems in a project-based approach. The central workflow of XLP can be envisaged as a project that consists of a series of activities conducted by teams through time (Figure 1). For every component in this workflow we can define the inputs and the outputs, and these outputs can in turn be evaluated in view of the desired outcomes. Hence, the XLP program can also be represented as a logic chain (input – activity – output – outcome) at both its generic and specific levels (see below, Figure 5).

Figure 1. Operational framework of XLP

Like any operating system, XLP provides authentication and access control, scheduling and process management, and file and device management (Figure 2). In the concrete, XLP requires participants to execute tasks by using a set of common digital tools that differ in function and granularity. Once the XLP universe is called into being by granting a digital identity to the participants, they arrange and monitor their activities through a web-based project management and collaboration tool. File and device management is regulated using digital tools for capturing random notes, file sharing, and digital open source publishing. These tools should be standardized, and all XLP participants must learn to use these common tool sets in one unifying workflow.

WHAT IT INVOLVES

roles and tasks

There are two main roles for participating in XLP: the role of challenge designer and that of challenge taker (also referred to as ‘mission executors’). The work for the challenge takers coincides with the intervention proper as they form their teams, carry out the tasks they have been set, and report on their accomplishments. The challenge designers, on the other hand, take up responsibilities before, during, and after the event. There is no implied hierarchy between challenge takers and challenge designers. For instance, challenge takers can include executive MBA students who take up challenges that were set to them by high school students. Regularly the challenge designer team also includes temporary ‘hackers-in-residence’ who enrich the team with their expertise, be it artistic, cultural, physical, spiritual, technical, or other.

Before the intervention the challenge designers set up the workflow (that is, a set of behavioral protocols and sequenced activities), often using GIT to expedite data sharing. In effect, they design a micro-society that is built around the social forces of architecture, law, the market, and norms. In order to support the learning process, new software technologies are introduced and integrated in the XLP architecture. The challenge designers develop the tasks (or ‘challenges’) for the teams against the backdrop of a coherent story line which draws on real situations, addresses genuine needs, and is told with an authentic voice. During the intervention the challenge designers constantly collect feedback in the form of operational data. To the extent that the feedback is analyzed and acted upon in real time, the challenge designers can modify aspects of the workflow during the intervention. Otherwise, the challenge designers refine the workflow afterwards in view of future interventions. Throughout the process the challenge designers communicate with each other through a web-based project management and collaboration tool (e.g. Teambition).

the 4 stages

As they alternately bring the challenge takers inside and outside their comfort zone, the four stages embody the global ecorithm of an XLP event. Each of the stages constitutes an essential step in the psychological journey of the challenge takers. In the first stage participants start off in a winning mood and experience early success to boost motivation and increase self-confidence. In stage 2, nicknamed “fail early, fail safe”, expectations are set so high that team members experience some frustration and realize that they will need to step up their learning and break across boundaries. Stage 3 emphasizes convergence as each team discovers that they completed just part of the tasks and that it takes collaboration across teams to finish the job adequately. Stage 4 is about demonstration: everybody presents their stories, deliverables and outcomes based on the XLP experience and extending into a personal enterprise plan. In the case of an 80 hours’ orientation event, each of these four stages would correspond to one day of the experience.

the 4 forces

The XLP workflow is defined as a set of formal protocols or ecorithms along the axes of four forces that enable, encourage, and constrain participants’ behavior during the event. These forces are architecture, law, the market, and norms. Each force is represented by its own social transaction in XLP – respectively, the offering of new technology, suing, trading, and applying for patents. The force of architecture refers to the pre-given elements of the environment in the widest possible sense, including the spatial-material environment, the technological environment (including natural and artificial ‘languages’), and the organizational environment (e.g. interaction mechanisms). The force of law regulates how participants may deal with any infringements they observe. In XLP this force takes the shape of a court with procedures for arbitration and sanctioning violation of the rules of the game. A currency is introduced to make the force of the market more tangible, with specifications of the practices of buying and selling goods and services in the marketplace. Finally, the force of norms refers to explicit and implicit ways of instilling of what is good and bad in a particular XLP through the media or other communications. These four forces do not operate in separation; rather, it is the dynamic interaction between the forces that can be said to define the given culture of a particular XLP.

Figure 5. Logic chain for the market force in XLP

The four social transactions, representing the 4 forces, are articulated as ecorithms. Figure 5 represents the ecorithm for the market force in XLP as a logic chain. The ‘activity’ of trading on the market is made possible because of various market-related ‘inputs’: the provision and availability of currency, the definition and installment of trading mechanisms, the distributed knowledge and skills required for trading, etcetera. The activity of trading results in certain ‘outputs’, above all the digital recording and collection of all transactions in Git. The anticipated ‘outcomes’ include that teams can demonstrate they have created added value as a result of their trading. On the part of the challenge designers, the optimization of market protocols would be considered a desired outcome of the event. In addition, the figure also illustrates how the market force is interdependent on the three other forces in both inputs and outcomes. In this way it is possible to develop a coherent and formal logic chain vocabulary across all four forces, resulting in a further refinement of the XLP workflow.

Typical XLP Activities

So far XLP has been tested in undergraduate as well as graduate education, at universities, vocational schools and high schools, in different formats such as the 4-day (80 hour) Orientation Program, the 8-week Lab Exploration Program, and the 16-Week Global Manufacturing Strategy Program. Participants have included students, scholars, and ‘hackers’ from Asia, Europe, and North-America. As an innovative methodology for designing learning activities it can be universally applied, both in- and outside educational settings, with participants of all backgrounds.

Honors and Awards

Refers to websites, pictures, videos that talks about XLP.

References

An incomplete guidebook on XLP is available on Gitbook [1].