It’s STEM Tuesday. The brain is an amazing thing.   Water, neurons, and fat. About 60% fat.  There are about 100,000 miles of blood vessels in the brain and no pain receptors.  Light never reaches the brain, yet we perceive light and dark. We think, we learn, we emote, we remember, all because of that three-pound organ.

I saw this Ted Talk a couple of years ago. It’ll take you about 20 minutes.  Hang in there for the first 8:08 minutes. I think Sugata Mitra and his studies will blow you away.

[tweetthis]I love the idea of using the “Method of the Grandmother” to teach children.[/tweetthis]

Mitra, Professor of Educational Technology, Newcastle University in the UK partnered with Nokia to put his theory into global practice. He calls this method of learning Self-Organizing Learning Environments (SOLE.) “Our minds are our greatest strength and our gravest danger,” says Mitra.  “We need to understand the mind, the brain, and consciousness.  We need to find out not just how we learn, but why we learn.”

Mitra started School in the Cloud to facilitate his University in the Cloud. This video takes a hour!  OMG!  You probably want to save it for later, or break it into pieces.  It’s worth it, just to find out what happens with a statistical analysis of digitalized version of Beethoven.

I often wonder what sets us apart from other animals.  It’s not that we can solve problems.  Even a squirrel can solve problems. It’s not that we pass on our history. A butterfly somehow passes the history of flight route from one generation to another. I’ve seen it in my own back yard  I think it’s because we love to solve riddles.  We constantly ponder. We delight in sharing what we learn. We are capable of awe. We hunger for more. Is that not a self-organizing system?