Flow and Education

Rob linked to this article about flow and education ages ago, but I wanted to save this quote:

"The implicit hope has been that if we discover more and more rational ways of selecting, organizing, and distributing knowledge, children will learn more effectively. Yet it seems increasingly clear that the chief impediments to learning are not cognitive in nature. It is not that students cannot learn, it is that they do not wish to."

It's all about motivation, relevance, connections to others, meaningful networks and authentic tasks. These words all seem like the opposite of traditional education.

Radiators on the Web

You wouldn't expect e-learning innovation from a twenty-year-old company selling automotive radiators. Well, maybe it's not exactly e-learning (or innovation). When you select the make of your car at radiator.com it opens a "conversation" page where you type the model and year, which starts a simple chat with a live radiator expert. For people like me who tend to hate telephones, this is a wonderful use of the web. Perhaps there are lots of companies doing this already, but I hadn't seen one.

I'm trying to see what the application of this model might be in education. Virtual career counselling, homework help, tutoring...I suppose it's all being done like this already.