Clive Holtham
Bayes Business School, City, University of London
Biography
Professor of Information Management at Bayes Business School, City, University of since 1988. His background is in accounting and technology, latterly with active development of arts-based engagement in management studies. He has led large EU and UK funded projects on technology, knowledge and management education. Director of the Bayes Learning Laboratory since 2003, this has involved many initiatives and collaborations in educational innovation, including reflective journaling for leadership, learning by wandering around (the dérive), and novel learning spaces: physical, virtual and imaginative. His interest in roleplay simulations began with paper-based, which has evolved through VLE- based into generative AI based simulations. With colleague Martin Rich, in 2018 Clive won a “most innovative pedagogy of the year” award from the International Management of Organisational Behaviour Teaching Society for the dérive. He is co-founder of the Centre for Creativity for Professional Practice at City, which created the unique multi-disciplinary Masters in Innovation, Creativity and Leadership. The Worshipful Company of Information Technologists is the City of London’s 100th Livery company, and Clive is a founding liveryman and was a member of the Court. He is author of a large number of publications, and lectures, broadcasts and consults in the UK and internationally.
Sessions
Learning an outlook – Beer’s neglected contribution to reshaping higher education in an AI-infused world
The author has engaged with the work of Beer since 1971, and subsequently with the wider Beer community. Key aspects of Beer's educational thinking are reviewed, then interwoven with the author's personal pedagogic journey. The recent journey helped uncover a seminal concept of Beer's educational insights, namely the importance of 'learning an outlook'. An outlook is personal, lifelong and continually updateable, so education should not be entirely focussed on knowledge and skills. The concept was included in Beer's unfinished autobiography, written in 2001 and published in 2009. Yet there is no citation to this concept in either the cybernetics or education literature. It has been overlooked. The presentation revisits the author’s own experiences of innovations in management education, to illustrate how existing active learning methods may, in retrospect, have supported 'learning an outlook'. Beer's concept can provide support to practical educational changes already overdue to address the higher education polycrisis. However, conceptual development is still essential to interweave Beer's focussed educational thinking with complementary pedagogic research. A key challenge now is to design educational experiences that explicitly support learners lifelong to evolve and reconstruct their outlooks.