After much planning, we are happy to announce our third Professors of Play Playposium. Since we started Professors at Play it’s been our dream to bring people together face-to-face, in person to play and plan and produce the ideas that will help transform higher education. The stars have aligned and with the help of Arizona State University’s Shaping EDU team, we are happy to say that dream is coming true.
You can find all details and register on the Playposium 2024 site.
What is most exciting to us right now is how important this event is to the Professors at Play mission. When we started the group listserv in June of 2020, we just wanted to stay in touch with what, at the time, we thought were the handful of play-oriented professors interested in what we were interested in. We quickly discovered that we were far from alone. And as the group exploded, we set about to organize the community into a form where we could find each other and start learning as much as we could from our global community. That lead to a pair of virtual Playposiums and the Professors at Play Playbook. And while we couldn’t be more proud of what we have all accomplished together, we know it’s only a start.
Higher Ed faces some strong head winds: Increasing cost, public opinion of education in decline, mental health issues on the rise, mission creep and increasing questions about the value of a formal degree from the academy, to pick some of the big issues. But where others see issues, we see opportunity. It’s a mess to be sure. But we think that play has a place in finding the soul of higher education, helping reform how we teach and howstudents learn. Thorugh play we believe we can demonstrate, once and for all, that higher education is about positive personal transformation.
Seem like a pipe dream?
Remember, a few of years ago Professors at Play was nothing more than a mail list with 6 people on it. Today we are almost 800 strong and growing every day. We are a vibrant and connected community that brings play to our classrooms, our learning designs and our departments on a regular basis. This coming February, a bunch of us are going to get together in LA to have a blast and make plans to change our institutions for the better. If we can make it this far in a little over 3 years, think what we can do in the next 10. We hope you are dreaming big, because we are too.
We hope to get to play with you at Playposium 2024!
David & Lisa
Professors at Play