Learning can be playful–and the playfulness, the experimentation, the “oh wow” isn’t that cool factor–that’s what makes learning “fun,” not someone at the front of the room entertaining us. But someone at the front of the room who likes to play with ideas. Elementary schools seem to understand that better than other grade levels, sometimes.

I heard a law librarian speaking at the Internet Librarian conference and she was saying that when attorneys hear about some of these tools, like social networking, they sometimes dismiss them out of hand because they associate them with something their children are doing “for fun” so they don’t see the point in them and think they are frivolous.

Frequently in workshops you hear teachers expressing that it’s a waste of time if they are having fun…because they could be doing something else. (but maybe that is “forced fun” and that’s different than spontaneous fun??) Maybe we just take ourselves too seriously? Maybe we forget how to play?

Anyway, love this post and the notion of silliness that we can learn from. I also might add that fun/silliness/play build community. That’s part of the fun of learning in a twitter network for me.

Thanks for the enlightening post

Seriously, though, I have watched many ustreams, read blog posts and visited websites where I have learned so much and it would never have been possible if I didn’t tweet.

You’re silly.

My whole experience with twitter, of hearing about it early on and dismissing it because my initial glance (from the outside) was, “This is the most stupid thing I ever heard of! How would take the time to bother informing the world of what they ate for breakfast, watched on TV, scratched their knee, etc… and why am I reading it?”. Coming back to it after checking out some ideas from other colleagues, looking at it from the inside. took me on a curve I called the “Twitter Life cycle”, and it became the center of my presentation I call “Being There…” http://cogdogroo.wikispaces.com/Being+There

The issue is that with things like Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, we look at what looks like inane content there rather than looking more closely at the affordances, potentials it provides- like dismissing the usefulness of the circuits in our television sets because of the crappy shows we see there.

So for those that dismiss them from the outside because of a knee jerk reaction of “that is silly”, we need to find ways to look deeper, to examine such things from the inside, and most of all, increase the amount of signal (Good uses of tech) to the visible noise (the inane content). We need more signal!!