THE SPONTANEOUS EMERGENCE OF LEARNING

Here is an inspiring example of what children are capable of when they are left alone to figure things out for themselves. Because we know that instrinsic more than extrinsic motivation is really what drives successful and sustained learning, I would have liked to ask Mitra: what motivated the girls who taught themselves genetics in English?  Or for that matter the Italian kids wishing to find out about Pythagoras.

I am also intrigued by Mitra's parting insight: Education is a self-organizing system in which learning is an emergent phenomenon. But as those nifty Games of Life applets demonstrating emergence reveal, self-organization proceeds from particular initial conditions in a system, it doesn't spontaneously self-organize. So what are the conditions that enable and catalyze the self-organization from which learning emerges? Here, I think, are some: the discovery of purpose, a pleasurable sense of engagement, the availability of scaffolding. How could one create a Game of Life model of learning where these conditions are present to varying degrees, and which one can run to see how it self-organizes for learning to emerges from it.