“The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” William Blake, Proverbs of Hell, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

The road of cool can lead there too.

It doesn’t hurt to be a little skeptical of the oh-wow, gee-whiz, how-cool gadgetry with which we’re surrounded, or by the same responses to information technologies and the latest-greatest therein.

But it may hurt to be a lot skeptical.

Sometimes we should take a look, maybe even try something risky, just because we think it’s cool. “Cool” taps into a moment of wonder, surprise, pleasure, delight, and intrigue that can lead to all sorts of encounters, with ourselves and with others. As Donald Norman very persuasively insists in Emotional Design (a very cool book full of pictures of very cool things), the pleasure we take in design need not be fleeting or superficial. Instead, that pleasure can be the foundation for deep, purposeful cognitive activity, an agent of lasting engagement.

Cool can be something to run toward, not away from. Seeking out cool need not be a sign of immaturity. Rather the opposite.

I was talking this blog idea over with my wife, a children’s librarian, who gave me the crowning story and urged me to post it. (Very generous of her, seeing as how she has her own venue–but she’s got lots of stories, so I don’t feel too bad about taking this one with her permission.) She told me of a storytime in which a young child, just learning to toddle, had obviously found his new walking powers to be so cool he just couldn’t stop ambulating around the story circle. He did his toddler walk. He did a Frankenstein’s monster walk. He demonstrated to everyone in that story circle just how cool it was — to be able to walk! As my wife pointed out, that moment of cool was an essential moment of maturation, one propelling that child into a lifetime of wonderful destinations. She spoke as well of young babies finding their hands for the first time, sensing their power to grip, to throw, to flex, to drop, again and again. How cool it is to have a hand!

Things of beauty, grace, power, and agency surround us. Some of them are built in. Some of them we find. Some find us. Some we share with each other, as we watch our faces light up in shared delight. From these moments we step forward, together. On the road.

Postscript: Don’t miss the William Blake Archive, one of the cooler sites I’ve discovered lately. In fact, I discovered it when I went to write this blog. I’d like the site’s words of welcome to be inscribed above my office and written all over my classroom walls:

“We are pleased to offer its resources to you for pleasure, study, or intensive research.”

Cool.

I will use Twitter to teach me what I can use Twitter for.

I understand that logic doesn’t scale, and that one cannot explore everything all the time in self-directed recursive learning (although now that I think about it, that’s not a bad way to imagine Paradise). But having learned another lesson from the kind of contact Twitter enables, I thought that in my heady state I’d be bold and provocative. Blame it on the altitude.

So what did I learn? Well, I was in an SAC session on gaming in education with the redoubtable Rachel Smith of the New Media Consortium, and the discussion in the room turned to the differences between games and simulations. (That question proved much more interesting and tricky than I’d imagined–nice, and very shrewd of our facilitator.) At one point, as Huizinga’s Homo Ludens popped into my head, I spoke up and said, “We play games. But we don’t play simulations. What do we do with simulations? What’s the verb there?” No one in the room, including me, had a ready answer. It’s always a cool moment when no one has a ready answer.

I had Twitter up in another window, so I put the question to my Twitter friends. I’d had such good luck with the streaming video question that I had great hopes for this inquiry. I got my answer, all right, and fast–fast enough to share with the group and continue that moment of shared inquiry. But that’s not the most interesting part of the story.

My answer came from a fellow blogger named Claudia Ceraso who teaches and learns in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She responded that the Oxford Dictionary of Collocations said “carry out” or “run” were verbs typically associated with “simulation.” (She also expressed some amusement that my question required her to consult a paper source first.) I’d never heard of the Oxford Dictionary of Collocations. I immediately looked it up on Amazon and learned that it’s a reference work devoted to helping non-native speakers of English speak more idiomatically. This extra bit of information sparked my imagination in several ways. First, I thought “what an interesting reference work.” Second, I thought “what a great way to start a conversation about language with native speakers.” Third, I thought “I’ve never heard the word ‘collocation’ before.” So I did a Google search on “define: collocation” and got this back:<!–