In a room surrounded by machines at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab, a group of students and professors is sharing a deeply human moment. On a video screen Amanda Baggs, a 26-year-old woman with autism, is flapping her arms, rocking, sucking on a pen and scratching household objects, part of an 8-minute film lifted from video-sharing website YouTube.

"Far from being purposeless, the way that I move is an ongoing response to what is around me," says the robotic voice that narrates her typed words. The class reacts emotionally - not out of pity but in response to Baggs's proud and moving appeal for viewers to recognise "the existence and value of many different kinds of thinking".

It is precisely the value of Baggs's kind of thinking that has drawn this novel class together. By combining research into autism with the technology of sociable computing, which ...