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Lots of things, as always.  But what particularly sticks out in my mind/brain are issues of classroom dynamics, and community dynamics generally.

Deb and Jill challenged me on my handling of several occasions of conflict in our conversations, wondering why I hadn't been more active in resolving them.  It reminded me of students in my courses who get impatient with the comments of other students, and would prefer that I just get "on with it."

And this, I think, connects to Wil's AH HA moment, when it occurred to him that a classroom/community might be likened to the distributed cognitive unconscious with the teacher as the ... story teller.  And that in turn connected (in my mind/brain at least) to the essay that Bharath wrote following one of our conversations.  In it, Bharath offered a "balance of stories" model of classroom/community, in contrast to "one story" and "infinite stories" models. 

"On the balance of stories model, the readings and the perspective of the teacher provide an initial story for the class. Call this the base story. The teacher lays out the base story as a way of introducing the subject to the students and to have a common vocabulary amongst the teacher and the students ...

[This model] draws a line in the sand at the beginning of the class with the teacher presenting the base story to the students. But unlike the other models, it acknowledges that the classroom is ultimately a place of change, transformation and growth, and that a good class is one which changes through that development. Thus through the oscillations between structure and flexibility, the individual and the social, and teaching and learning, the teachers and the students together erase the line in the sand as the class proceeds ..."

the teacher can’t focus only on the base story all the time because that will curtail the students developing their own interests in the subject. But the teacher also can’t let every student depart wildly from the base story because then the students will find chasms between them when they try to share their interests with each other. Thus as the class develops the teacher must discover through experimentation which interests and the number of interests which best work for the particular dynamic of students she is dealing with ...

the teacher and the students becomes more like colleagues, more like friends, and more like fellow people engaged in a common pursuit of knowledge and a good life."
 

Bharath's balance of stories model is indeed the way I have come, largely unconsciously, to think of my own classroom, and it is indeed, as Wil suggests, a way of thinking that not only involves a lot of interacting brains but also an overall organization that is itself much like a brain, with interacting diverse "boxes" including a story teller who draws from and returns syntheses back to the other interacting elements ... a story teller that "must discover through experimentation" what stories work and don't work in the particular case at hand. 

What additionally amuses me is that I have written about all this in the context of community in general (see The Brain, Story Sharing, and Social Organization), but hadn't myself made the explicit connection to the classroom.  So yes, Joyce, there will be a new incarnation of bbi next year (as there always is), one that gives greater attention to classroom dynamics (and hence, of course, less to some other "content"). 

Maybe more importantly, for me at least, is that I'll be forced myself to take more seriously the differences between a brain and a classroom.  A brain has only one "story teller" whereas each component of a classroom (or any human community) consists itself of both a cognitive unconscious and a story teller.  What that suggests to me is that a classroom/community should optimally be organized so that everybody becomes not only a better shaper of their own story but also a better contributor to the shaping of collective stories.  Maybe its because of that intuition in my unconscious that I sometimes don't play as much of an organizing role in classroom dynamics as some people might prefer?  I have in mind that the task is to have experiences that enhance the ability of individuals to recognize that they are responsible not only for their own stories but for the emergence of collective ones as well?

To think more about.  In the meanwhile, thanks to all for contributions to my evolution along those lines, and lots of others.