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If you look at some of the descriptors of a complex adaptive system, these are certainly not the descriptors of traditional, formal higher (or lower) education. Emergence, self-similarity, self-organization… doesn’t sound like the usual notion of college, does it? Indeed, it’s hard to conceptualize just how a complex adaptive systems model of education would be implemented at all. But perhaps that’s an indicator of failed thinking — must we think of education as something to be implemented? Or is it something that happens? Whatever the case, the authors argue it’s just such a system that is needed to support environments where learning by doing takes place and where engagement happens both inside and outside of a classroom.

education is an ecosystem, full of dynamically-connected multiple agents that move in a web of interactions that ultimately change the course of the system itself over time.

Our Santa Fe Institute and SRI Inc. research is attempting to model educational subsystem behaviors through the lens of complex adaptive systems to better conceptualize the current educational ecosystem.