Stephen Downes

Good choice of reading material: "Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience" by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Good discussion, too. Some thoughts. First, 'flow' is what Papert and others today call "hard fun". Also, a lot depends on the width of the 'flow' channel. Third, the edges of the flow channel are fuzzy and variable depending on time of day, hunger, sleepiness, and more. And finally, the 'flow' channel is different for each individual student in a class, which makes designing for that channel for a class tricky, if not impossible, which is why you want to personalize experience.