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indeed create considerable turbulence within classrooms, schools and districts. From the perspective of
complexity theory this is as it should be. Indeed, there is a concept taken from chemistry called the "molecular
clock," which refers to a condition of turbulence when molecules in a substance change, all at once.[Prigogine
& Stengers, 83]. I contend that one way the Web is altering our experience of learning and of education is
through our adaptation to the frequent transformation of images and text that we witness on the computer
screen. It is as if we were witnessing and participating in multiple "molecular clocks" each time we are online.
In another learning environment, an amphitheater lecture hall on a California State University campus, where
the students sat at a 60 degree angle to me, I witnessed the dynamics of transformation similar to those in the
Internet training, albeit minus the Web. The course was Aging as Lifelong Learning, where 40 students
participated in face-to-face lecture and conversation and 130 participated via one-way audiotapes of the inclass
proceedings. Students could email, leave voice messages, fax or use the US postal service. I responded by
voice, fax, email and US post.
I contend the transformation of learners was similar because the message of learners as knowledge creators was
the same. The common thread between the K12 Internet training and the amphitheater, audiotape course was
the intention of presentation and of the readings; Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of
Chaos[Waldrop 92] and We Are All Self-Employed[Hakim, 96]. The intention being the pursuit of authentic
dialogue accompanied by explicit admonitions to students to understand their own internal conversations as the
self-referencing of interdependent, adaptive persons participating in the creation of knowledge about the world
and about their own futures.
Similarities between these two distinct teaching experiences resonate with lessons from complexity theory to
listen to and observe the learning, the self-referencing, the knowledge-creating of students, and, by so doing to
honor them. Transformed by the honoring intention, students experience themselves as active, interdependent
participants in the world...with a keen sense of responsibility for what they do with the thoughts they are
building and refashioning. They learn to value and to attend to their own thinking processes.
This image of learning and teaching is not new. It is continuous with the history of education in Western
Civilization, from Plato to Rousseau, to John Dewey, Martin Buber and Paolo Freire...along the way are Maria
Montessori, Jean Piaget and Sylvia Ashton-Warner and Reuven Feuerstein, to name only a few. Learning
proceeds through experience and doing and through knowing thyself, in relation to the world.
In short, the World Wide Web, as well as many practitioners of global distance learning, [Bensusan,95],
[Perrin,95], [Lane,94], [Hiltz,94], actualize the dialogical education and mediated learning experience that
philosophers and educators have been describing for centuries because the Internet as Web and as real time
interactive conferencing software, are quintessential information processors. In the language of complexity
theory this is what complex adaptive systems do....they process information with their environments in terms
of their own characteristics. So, interdependence is continuous self-referencing of different sets and kinds of
information. The magic of the Web, and the interactive capacities of the Internet, what make them so
compelling, is their capacity to engage our self-referencing. It hooks us precisely because it is so familiar, so
much like what we do as we coexist, coevolve with our environments and with one another.
This similarity in activity or play is one explanation of the prolific work of the MIT Media Lab, and an
argument for high technology industry to adopt schooling as a giant test bed, contributing to education as a
form of corporate R & D. This, in turn, brings us back to the construction of knowledge issue, to the creation
of knowledge as we learn, on the edge of chaos, where we remain poised to unlearn what we may know best in
order to learn new things that will make the system better.[Waldrop,92] John Holland speaks of this feature of
complex adaptive systems and of the recombination of building blocks (eg. public-private partnerships
between schools and industry) as systems self-organize with changing environments. [Holland, 94]
The language of complexity theory can sustain the employment of knowledge workers as it helps educators
come to terms with our transformation from being sources of knowledge to acting as facilitator, guide, docent,
colearner and researcher. As the boundaries between teaching and learning dissolve educators become more
like participant observers, coming to terms with the interdependence of our own theories and praxis with
where, when and what we observe. At the same time new praxis emerges around teaching as honoring when
we learn the "world is a matter of patterns that change, that partly repeat, but never quite repeat, that are
always new and different."[Waldrop,92] Or, in awe, we approach each class, each colearner as one approaches
sacred text: anticipating new insights and understandings, to be read each time as if for the first time.
References
[Bensusan,95] Bensusan, Guy (1995). Interactive Instructional Television: The Bensusan Method. ED,