I just read the latest from Jon Udell, entitled “Conceptual Barriers.” I must have grokked it through the noosphere before reading it, as Jon’s central emphasis in this post has very powerful connections to the sort of thing I’m wrestling with in the post below. Indeed, of Jon’s many wonderful posts, I’d say this is one of his most important. He correctly intuits that the conceptual barriers are the hardest to overcome, and that the technical barriers are so far distant from the conceptual barriers that once the conceptual barriers are overcome, a rush of social progress might well follow.

That’s an Engelbart-size goal and one I want to support in any way I can.

Now, about those conceptual barriers, two quick thoughts. One is that school ought to be the place where we help our students think conceptually, think about conceptual thinking, and grow skilled in the bootstrapping process of improving ways of overcoming conceptual barriers (this would be level “c” in an Engelbartian schema). Notice the words “conceptual barriers,” words Jon has chosen very wisely. We in education like to talk about critical thinking, but often what we mean by “critical thinking” has more to do with overcoming or becoming sensitive to biases of one sort or another. Of course this is an extremely important element of education, but the larger issue has to do with imaginative and conceptual limits, for those limits mark the difference between what Illich would describe as “schooling” rather than true education. My second thought is that if Illich is correct, and conceptual operations have a certain gamelike quality, then one powerful way of overcoming conceptual barriers is to encourage playfulness of one sort or another.

One of Cyprien’s presentations at Faculty Academy 2006 touched on this aspect of Flickr. As I think about it, sandboxes for community playfulness, or simply a playful nature to certain aspects of the interface, characterize much of what I think of as Web 2.0. Not just interaction, but also playfulness of one sort or another, perhaps something as simple as Amazon‘s “statistically improbable phrases” (SIPS, now apparently defunct) or their “surprise me” feature on some “search inside” pages, or the little decorations that Google uses for its logo. Or Martha‘s Halloween theme for the DTLT community site she built a couple of years ago. Something gratuitous, i.e., gracious. Something gamelike and deeply playful.

How playful is the CMS your school is using right now?

Play is a perpetual motion machine that generates and uses energy simultaneously and about equally, at least until we get to what Emily Dickinson calls “The manner of the children, who weary of the day, / Themselves the noisy playthings they cannot put away.”