Dr Magnus Ramage

Professional biography

I have worked at the OU since 2000, always on teaching and research relating to aspects of systems thinking, always in academic roles (lecturer and senior lecturer), and always based in the same office. I have been blessed to work with some brilliant colleagues and in an institution with a real commitment to high-quality learning and social inclusion. It is this sense of mission that makes the OU special. Through that time I've been formally located in a changing set of departments and faculties due to successive reorganisations.

I have worked for several years on EDI (equality, diversity and inclusion) projects for the School of Computing & Communications, with a particular focus on equality/justice work around gender and ethnicity, both through Athena Swan and through our current work on awarding gaps. I led the successful Athena Swan Silver award submission and was school EDI lead for several years. I have been an elected member of the university Senate since 2014.

I hold a PhD from Lancaster University in Information Systems. 

Teaching interests

I am module chair of TM353 IT Systems: Planning for Success (first presentation October 2015).

Author and/or chair on several previous modules on information systems and systems thinking, including TBXY873 Co-designing interventions with systems thinking in practice, TB872 Managing change with systems thinking in practice, TM255 Communications & Information Technology, T219 Environmental Systems 1, T215 Communications & Information Technology, T853 Information Systems Legacy & Evolution and T205 Systems Thinking: Principles and Practice (chaired T853 in production & presentation, T205 in presentation).

A number of these modules have drawn upon my past research and/or fed into scholarship projects. I am interested in the scholarship of teaching and learning around the decolonisation of computing & IT education; and on what it means to teach systems thinking from the margins. 

Research interests

I carry out research on the history of cybernetics and systems thinking, and on the nature of information.

My research on the history of cybernetics and systems takes a biographical form: my colleague Karen Shipp and I led a project to identify and discuss 30 key thinkers in the field of systems. We read their work thoroughly, and secondary sources about their lives and work, and synthesised the results in a book, Systems Thinkers, that forms a collective biography of the field. We subsequently revised the book thoroughly (while keeping to the same 30 thinkers) for a second edition.

For ten years, I co-chaired The Difference that Makes a Difference (DTMD), a series of workshops from 2007-2017 on the way different academic disciplines understand of information, which drew in scholars from social science, technology, physical science, philosophy and art, and led to a number of edited publications. Since 2017 the research group which grew out of this work has been known as the Critical Information Studies group, with a focus on taking a critical approach to information artefacts and their impact on society, through perspectives of race, gender, class, politics and others.

I have combined these two broad areas of interest in a number of publications looking at the links between cybernetics and information, enhanced by my work for four years (2012-2016) as editor-in-chief of the long-standing international journal Kybernetes.

Related to the work on information, and to my work in EDI, I have been involved in scholarship around the decolonising of Computing & IT education, as part of a substantial project which in particular had a survey of students in our school. 

My PhD topic was the evaluation of collaborative information systems, within the broad field of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work. I have also carried out action research on tools for scenario planning in groups and organisations.