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It's nice-- I was heading back to the open-ended transactional working group page to find my student's wonderful essay when I came across something I wrote in 2006 about "staying in the game" as a metaphor for learning -- in that case, science learning.   It's at:

/local/scisoc/elemsci/lesnick.html

The relevant part is below, but in some ways more relevant is the idea that in this case Serendip is the game and it's interesting to think about it as a game that enables the kind of open-ended continuity (paradox there) that we seem to be talking about.  

Re: your post, Anne, about legal reasoning, could we see this as, at its best, the part of life whereby we need to hold with/to a particular working story for a while? 

"In thinking about the first meeting of this group and how to make it useful for everyone, I thought I'd share a few thoughts and also a few of the vantage points from which I offer them. As a third grade teacher during the 1980's, I stumbled into an inquiry-based approach to science as a way through a science fair my class was required to participate in. As with other things I got to do as a schoolteacher (drawing and dribbling a basketball come to mind), teaching science allowed me to recover a way of knowing and doing and asking questions that had gotten away from me for fear that I lacked sufficient mastery or talent to stay in the game."