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It was a pleasure describing the StageLens automated assessment technology to the IFIS attendees. I found the questions and conversation to be fruitful and I look forward to follow-up opportunities to dive deeper.

It was interesting to engage with an informed audience around dynamic skill theory and the Lectica assessment model. Discussion around the lenses people used to evaluate the order of statements in the exercise was rich and helped to illuminate how any kind of ordering we do in trying to understand phenomenon is subject to the lens we use to perceive and make meaning of the phenomenon. As well, questions helped to illuminate the boundaries within which such assessments can be useful and contexts, focal points or conditions under which it might not be adequate.

Normally I am quite sceptical concerning hybrid and new technologies for communication and prefer the classical set-up with people in front of me I can interact with. But this was surely a very good example to the contrary. I would have never thought that it is in fact possible, even fun to have a good colloquium via internet. (It’s possible to have one, but whether it is good is another question. This one I found was good.) I have done that once previously and found it very tedious, because there was always the odd glitch. Now it worked perfectly well.

Resilience – a useful "one word answer" to the recent increase in crises?
An integral approach

The above presentation during the IFIS Online Colloquium on November 30, 2016, was part of my ongoing reflections within the frame of my postdoctoral lecture qualification.

Meta-studies are integrative endeavours.  But when does the search for integration and integral become a colonising endeavour?  Where are the boundaries that distinguish a holistic integration from and a totalising meta-narrative?  

Why is there an outpouring of energy for democracy and freedom in the Middle East, in Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan, Yemen? Trying to explain this is difficult and there are obviously many factors at play into what has led up to the public demonstrations against undemocratic and tyrannical governments throughout this region. An integral meta-studies approach is useful in providing an analysis of these explanations because it flexibly employs multiple lenses and is conscious of the limits on the range of theoretical lenses it can use to develop explanations of complex social events.

I expect that, in the wake of the Luxembourg Symposium called "Research Across Boundaries: Advances in [meta]theory Building", there will be the beginnings of a new climate around the whole notion of developing integral and integrative big pictures.

As well as having an eye and an ear for the minute, the mundane, the morsel of gossip and (sometimes unfortunately) the modicum of truth, we humans also have an instinct for developing big pictures, big stories and big ideas. There are many different types of big pictures and they can arise from any area of personal and cultural activity.