The article investigates sustainable development from the holistic perspective, taking into account the complex nature of the world and the dynamism of the socio-economic systems. The study is interdisciplinary, as it addresses the issues of economics, mathematics and physics with the main focus on the modern perspective of sustainable development…

From their very beginnings, the community colleges have demonstrated a commitment to their founding principles of access, affordability, and quality. However, following February 2009, when President Obama set forth the agenda for U.S. postsecondary education to have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world by 2020, priority shifted…

This concise survey of the vast literature currently available in field-of-systems thinking and cybernetics discusses the areas of systems philosophy, systems analysis (mathematical systems theory), empirical systems research, and systems engineering, and outlines contributions of selected scholars. A bibliography of 148 books and papers is…

Offers two illustrations of how newspapers can plan and organize a systems approach to streamline their circulation departments. (RL)

Identifies information specialists who employ systems methodology and discusses the modern systems movement, its role in the changing world view of science, disciplines (cybernetics and operations research) that have contributed to its development, and distinctions between General Systems Theory and other approaches to the study of systems.…

An often-quoted Nigerian proverb holds that it is the responsibility of the whole village to teach a child. This paper argues that this goal might not even be possible, given the complex educational system of the 1990s. The paper provides a framework for effective change based on an understanding of the complexity of the educational system. It…

This paper explores the use of a series of heuristic models that identify the interrelated components of the broader educational process. This heuristic schema was designed so that educators can examine the purpose and limitations associated with models and subsequently enhance their ability to guide changes within their own institutional setting.…

Chaos offers educational communications and technology new systems' tools and ideas; i.e., it provides the system with a deterministic "I don't know" state within which new activity patterns can be generated. Previous characterizations and paradigms of systems stated that simple systems behaved in simple ways, complex behaviors implied complex…

To address the question of why newspapers tend to become more and more fragmented internally and to propose a model of the interrelationships between the newspaper and its "operating environment," this paper draws on recent work by organizational theorists. Beginning by examining the central goal of newspapers, the first section suggests that the…

Educational change is a process occurring through time, a systemic and dynamic phenomenon in which every action leads to reactions in related areas of the system, and a multidimensional phenomenon requiring examination from the perspective of several disciplines. The success of an innovation depends on how the change process is managed, how the…

The relational concepts developed in mathematics and psychology are used in this paper to explicate the needs and responsibilities of dramatic acting and theatre research. A parallel is constructed between the emergence of the mathematical concept of function, the awakening of psychology to the concept of relationship (especially regarding family…

Guidelines to facilitate the assessment and development of educational leadership decision-making skills are presented in this paper. Included are a review of traditional and contemporary concepts of the decision-making process, identification of appropriate techniques, and an analysis of four contemporary decision-making models by Thompson,…

This paper, which updates and expands on a paper by Twelker and others that identified and described five instructional development (ID) models, presents a taxonomy for classifying ID models, comments on the limited degree of testing to which most ID models have been subjected, reviews 13 models, and provides a selected, annotated bibliography of…

Provides a summary of a series of research and development projects which investigated the reasons for failure in educational technology-based systems of instruction. Develops a new approach to the design of such systems and their subsequent implementation and control. A 17-item bibliography is included. (Author/CHC)

Although most models of connected discourse are strikingly similar in the types of relationships they describe, they are strikingly different in two areas: the unit of analysis and the dimensions on which cohesion versus coherence are described. Common systems for analyzing written text use the sentence, T-unit, clause, or proposition as the unit…