I get the concept of 'flow' as described in this article: activities that are too easy will be boring, and those that are too difficult will be discouraging, so to achieve maximal educational success, it's best to aim for that medium middle where 'flow' can occur. As diagrammed. What I'm not so good with is the idea that this can be programmed for the student by a teacher or an artificial intelligence. Cale Birk writes, "if we can get learners into the 'Flow Channel'... we can truly engage them in the process of learning and executing the skill that we are teaching." He uses a ski hill to make his point, and it's a good analogy. But imagine the chaos is the ski hill operators tried to manage the hill-selection process! It would take dozens of staff to do the assessments and direct skiers to the right hill, and then you'd still have large numbers of people hot-dogging on the bunny slopes and breaking their legs on the black diamonds. Now if people select their own hill? Well, it's not perfect, people still make mistakes. But all in all, they do pretty well without the management. That is the lesson that should be applied to education.
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