Blog Archive
Chilling Out
One of the important lessons of play is to take a break. Sometimes fun is just kicking back and not doing anything. As the summer lingers and the fall term approaches, we have been taking time to do just that--relax! We'll be back with regular posts and lots of cool...
The Playvolution
by David Thomas The other day this popped up in a student assignment: “I also agree when you spoke in the lecture about how there is ‘Play Shaming’ in education. I have always been told to never say ‘play, or playing with an iteration’ and instead use ‘experiment,...
Definitions: Play to Save the World
by Lisa Forbes I’ve been pleased and inspired to find more and more people talking about play and interested in how to use it in higher education. But the more I hear people talk about play, the more I realize we might not be talking about the same thing. And,...
All Work and No Play
by David Thomas Do our students want to play? Do they want to have fun in class? Maybe. In the movie The Shining, Jack Nicholson plays a writer who hauls his family into the mountains of Colorado to caretake for a massive, seasonal hotel. His ideas is that while...
My Learning Disability Made Me Do It
by Lisa Forbes Someone recently asked me: “what makes you a different kind of learner?” I am a different kind of learner because I am a disabled learner. The way that formalized education approaches teaching and learning never worked very well for me. I struggled to...
Preparing to Play
by David Thomas The summer term starts next week. And I’m not ready. Oh boy. Even though I study fun, publish about fun and am teaching The Architecture of Fun this summer, I’m really worried that I won’t be, or the class won’t be, or the students won’t have...
The Wall
by Lisa Forbes Let’s talk about the wall. Not the Pink Floyd album but the metaphorical wall that represents what stands between us and some type of change. I’m a mental health counselor so this topic could quickly get into talking about our shame and childhood...
Lecture Breakers
If you have not heard of Barbi Honeycutt's Lecture Breakers Podcast, you are missing out. Dedicated to providing resoures to profs ready to break away from the iron grip of the lecture, her posts and podcasts manage to balance high quyality content with an...
De-Educating Play
by David Thomas I’ve changed my mind about what it really means to be a professor at play. It starts with how natural it is to play, travels through higher education’s participation in the de-education of play and ends up with me seeing a new mission in my teaching....
Emotions and Brain States LOVE Play
Emotions and Brain States LOVE Play by Lisa Forbes Before becoming an educator, I was first a mental health counselor. One of my very first counseling jobs was in an inpatient psychiatric hospital. The patients were struggling with severe mental health concerns –...