CCK 12

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.

: to teach is to model and demonstrate, to learn is to practice and reflect. Both teaching and learning consist of talking about and of doing. Theorizing and practicing. Abstracting and making concrete. Nothing new there, but what is key is the attitude we take as we understand that to learn is to emulate an entire organizational state and not merely to possess a simple set of facts.

A community relates to its constituent members in several ways. In is the environment within which a person experiences, practices and learns.