Serendip is an independent site partnering with faculty at multiple colleges and universities around the world. Happy exploring!
Evolving Systems
Welcome. This page provides a continually updated lists of links to materials created in connection with the Evolving Systems project. Feel free to browse and comment in the associated online forums. For more information about the project itself, please see the project home page and the overview.
Literature Across Deep Time
Evolving Systems
January, 2010 Core Group Meeting
Background, Summary,
and Continuing Discussion
Literature Across Deep Time
Evolving humanity: an abstract and its evolution
I've been doing a lot of thinking recently about conversations associated with the Evolving System project, and their implications for individual and collective stories of selves (mine included) and of what it is to be human. In mid-December, I started trying to crystallize that thinking in the forum of an abstract to be submitted for a possible talk at the 2010 Metanexus meeting. The abstract in turn led to further conversations, one of which is excerpted below as an illustration of the interpersonal and social character of individual story evolution. For a different but intersecting view of the evolution of the abstract, see Ev
Evolving humanity: towards a "third way"
Rationality and social wisdom/cohesion clearly play important roles in inquiry, in education, and in human affairs generally. But there are problems with relying on either alone, and with the two in combination as well.
Cause and affect: intentionality as first mover?
The Emergence of Form, Meaning, and Aesthetics
Evolving Systems:
Open Conversations
Cause and Affect: Intentionality as First Mover?
Doug Blank
3 December 2009
Evolving Systems: November 2009 Core Group Meeting
The Emergence of Form, Meaning, and Aesthetics
November, 2009 Core Group Meeting
Background, Summary,
and Continuing Discussion
Dealing with uncertainty: from the I Ching to heaven?
The Baldwin Effect: Intentionality in Biological Evolution?
The Emergence of Form, Meaning, and Aesthetics
Evolving Systems:
Open Conversations
Organic Evolution (aka the "Baldwin Effect"): Intentionality in Evolution?
Greg Davis
19 November 2009
The Classification Problem: Implications for Intentionality
The Emergence of Form, Meaning, and Aesthetics
Evolving Systems:
Open Conversations
The Classification Problem: Implications for Intentionality
Wil Franklin
5 November 2009
(to be continued 12 November)
Evolving Systems: October 2009 Core Group Meeting
The Emergence of Form, Meaning, and Aesthetics
October 27, 2009 Core Group Meeting
Background, Summary,
and Continuing Discussion
The I Ching and the Emergence of Form
Background (Ben, excerpted from a longer .pdf):
Deep Time, Deep Space, Deep Play: Writing (to) the Future
Deep Time, Deep Space, Deep Play:
Writing (to) the Future
Anne Dalke, for the Open Conversations
on Evolving Systems
October 22, 2009
Introduction to Evolving Systems: Beyond Emergence to Agency
The Emergence of Form, Meaning, and Aesthetics
Evolving Systems:
Open Conversations
Introduction to Evolving Systems: Beyond Emergence to Agency
Paul Grobstein
8 October 2009
Reconceiving Inquiry: Againstness and Non-Foundationalism
Paul Grobstein
Evolving Systems Core Group
22 September 2009
Notes for session
(see here for background, session summary and continuing conversation)
"being" is an unstable state, it is provisional and experimental ... Mark Lord
Evolving Systems: September 2009 Core Group Meeting
The Emergence of Form, Meaning, and Aesthetics
September 22, 2009 Core Group Meeting
Background, Summary,
and Continuing Discussion
Working Without Mirrors, Glassy Essences, and Indubitability:
From the Subjective/Personal to the Objective/Inter-Personal and Back Again
Evolving Systems: August 2009 Core Group Meeting
The Emergence of Form, Meaning, and Aesthetics
August 18, 2009 Core Group Meeting
Background, Summary,
and Continuing Discussion
Background (Paul's version):
From homes and perches to the cosmos, and back again
Alice and Paul work together in several venues, including the Evolving Systems project and a manuscript in progress integrating biological and social perspectives on education. Over lunch one day, Alice offered that she (and other human beings?) appreciates, even needs, "perches" in addition to "homes" as resources for living the way she likes/hopes to live.
Evolving Systems and Education
Teaching Shamanism:
A Conversation About Education, the Unconscious and Stories,
Community Dynamics, and Life
The Taoist Story Teller and Culture: Do We Still Need Truth, Reality, and/or God?
The 2009 Metanexus meeting, plane rides to/from Phoenix reading Raymond Smullyan's The Tao is Silent and Ann Harrington's The Cure Within: A History of Mind-Body Medicine, conversations last week with Bharath Vallabha (see Truth and Power in Education), Alice Lesnick, and Ben Olshin, and discussions in our K-12 summer institutes all seem to bear on the above question(s), and suggest an interesting approach to them.
Relections on openness and structure in education
The following was written by Bharath Vallabha, following a session on emergent pedagogy in a summer session for K-12 teachers in which Bharath participated. It is relevant a well to current discussions of the Evolving Systems group about its own organization and, more generally, to issues of human community organization generally.
I. Three Aims in Education
Here are three aims for a classroom: