This is the second paper in a series that aims to start a debate on issues involved in university-level system dynamics education. The first paper argues that the field has not experienced growth that one would expect from its potential and identifies several issues that need to be addressed by the system dynamic community, before the field can proliferate in universities. The second paper tackles some of those problems. More specifically, the paper discusses the academic definition of system dynamics: What is the academic core of system dynamics? What other objects are immediate relevance and importance with respect to this core. The paper offers answers to those questions. The second issue that the paper deals with is the problem of terminology. I discuss different types of terminology problems, the most significant being system dynamic, the very name of the field. System dynamics having an established meaning in mathematical and engineering sciences, does not convey the specific meaning that we wish to attach it. I discuss various potential problems caused by this situation. I then offer a short list of alternative, more specific names for the field. I conclude that, once the academic issues are rigorously tackled, the university-level system dynamics education should experience growth, which would be a major step toward activation an exponential growth process in the field in general.

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Date created

• 1994

Type

• Document

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• Processing documentation available at: https://wiki.albany.edu/display/SCA/Processing+Ingested+Digital+Files

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• Creative Commons BY-NC-ND Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International

  
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fe35db792b573af835d96e6eba4759cd

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c060552994c1527f70693734935660f1

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Collection

System Dynamic Society Records

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Collecting area

• This collection is part of the University Archives