Thank you so much for letting this powerful light shine out from you and your blog. As I got to the end I was looking at the word 'ludic' and seeing 'lucid' which sent me to the OED and the word 'eludicate'. The word has come to have an unhappy teaching context for me. It means to shine a light on something, but its original Latin sense is "late L. ēlūcidāt- ppl. stem of ēlūcidā-re, f. ē out + lūcidus bright." I see elucidation as an inner act, a drawing forth of the inner light that we all have. It is not what I do as a teacher that matters so much as what our learners do, how they shine. Insofar as I determine that with tech and systems and testing, then I am not teaching, I am not helping my learners shine their own lights and light their own ways in the world. I really believe that in my shared learning spaces. It makes me crazy and ill sometimes when I fail. Really crazy, but it seems like I am in good company here.

When I taught secondary school for ten years, the metaphor that ruled my attempt to be a counterveiling force subverting this instrumental status quo was the parallel track. In my classes I was laying down a set of parallel tracks next to the existing ones. My tracks didn't go anywhere. They were a respite, a haven from the stormy madness of testing and grading and all that lot. It was a respite, but I do believe the assertion that in a sick system no one is well. I see this growing all the time at the university level. The saddest part of this is that the students come to me programmed to be strategic instead of ludic. They all but tell me, "Just tell me what to do." They hate the idea of play in the classroom. Hate it. It is a flat miracle that some of them unlearn this when they realize that I won't punish them for playing with the work.

the triumph of instrumentalism, of the schizophrenic idea that learning can serve both fear and joy. It can't.

Now this is dangerously playful idea. And what we want is high functioning empaths. It is a dangerous place to live for empaths. In fact no matter how much we want to play, there are those authoritarians who keep demanding that we put up our legos as childish things. I think that play is connection: genetically, neuronally, socially, and pragmatically. To adapt Rousseau, humanity is born free to play, but everywhere they are chained.

I agree that collaboration can be play, but is it necessarily so? I have had some pretty unpleasant drudgery that was a colabor.

Do you wonder that this instrumentalism, this idea that learning is a tool is just as much a worry that learning is behaviorally and technologically determined? Maybe that is what you are hinting at in your title?

Is play2learn a separate entity to be developed or is it integral or even a core 'crystal' from which all good learning grows. The lesson from children is that play is at the core of language and physical movement.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYqvGWBkiBc

Can we use tech to be playful and free? I can and I do, but if I couldn't and it didin't then I shant.