Major Fun speaks

You wouldn’t think it and neither would I: an app, as in a thing you’d put on your Smart-thing, that isn’t really a game, but is all about fun, and for fun – a collection of fun things, as a matter of fact, for you to do with the kidlets and the kidlets to do with you – anywhere. From Sesame Street, and TinyGames.

With kids at a doctor’s office? On a road trip? Cooped up inside? Sesame Street Family Play turns your transitional time into play time. It’s easy – just tell the app where you are and how many people are playing, and Sesame Street Family Play will give you the perfect game to play with your kids.

Designed with a parent in mind, it’s simple, educational and entertaining for absolutely everyone. And thanks to power of play, every game will help your kids build key developmental skills.

There’s no screen time required. This app helps parents lead games, like Cookie Monster Tag, for any number of kids in all kinds of settings.

There, in the very midst of my personal playful path, I found a small, yet salient poop offering. I walked on, playfully, as is my custom, awash in the humor and yet unplumbed significance of it all, only to discover that my path had directed me back to the poop, and to the trash can beyond, wherein, fortuitously lay a swath of clean newspaper just ample enough for semi-sanitary poop-handling.

So, paper in hand, I returned to the poop, as we all must do. I laid the paper over the poop, and wrapped it, o so assiduously, and let the path take me playfully back to the receptacle of anonymous waste, wherein I somewhat gleefully surrendered the poop.

Thereafter, the path returned me. I passed, with something like smugness, the now reclaimed pooplessness of it all, musing lightly on the goodness of my deed.

Approximately 50 metric yards thereafter, I found myself facing a far more profound test. For there, actually smack in the middle of my resumed path, lay a far more profound and expressive offering of canine nonchalance.

Nearby, as it happened, walked a dog-walker, who, by the kind of happenstance that happens when you’re standing on a playful path, had upon her wrist a dispenser of poop bags. I directed her attention to my new self-evident duty, and suggested to her that she might want to donate a poop bag towards my mission. And she, uncannily, gave me two.

Thanking her with a perfusion of thanks, I effused my way back to my newfound poop pile, and, charged with a sense of civic, shall we say, duty; I proceeded to engage in poop-removal-like behaviors, only to discover that yes, I needed both bags, and then some.

While I leave you to contemplate the uncomfortable consequences of the thensomeness of it all, suffice it to say that I accomplished the mission, dumped the bags, and wiped the residue on a secluded patch of grass, shortly thereafter resuming my blissful progress along my playful path, which had become, due to my diligence, doody free.

I didn’t reach the conclusion of this particular episode until the next day. ‘Twas another lovely day, and my path beckoned  to yet further adventures in playfulness. This time, I began with purpose. I marched myself towards the thoughtfuly-provided poop-bag dispenser for civic-minded dog-walkers, and sought out the roll of sanitary poop bags as advertised therein. I couldn’t help but notice that the bottom section of the dispenser had been apparently repurposed to function as a receptacle for used tissues. And so (I’m about to get to the point of this entire conceptual perambulation), and so, I reach into the top half of the aforementioned dispenser, only to find that it, too, had been repurposed by a vagrant gang of wasps.

Wonderful to see such imagination. Perhaps not so much safety-awareness. But these playgrounds most definitely look like fun.

Amplify’d from playgrounddesigns.blogspot.com

bathtub

There are a series of urban playgrounds in Singapore surfaced with square mosaic tiles more reminiscent of bathtub than a playspace; a unique material I haven't seen applied anywhere else quite in this way.

To celebrate these unique places, the Little Drom Store made playground pins depicting the distinctive structures (I love this idea...the world needs more playground jewelery!)  There's a tiny mosaic dragon, and an elephant, a pelican and a watermelon....all available on their website.  

Read more at playgrounddesigns.blogspot.com

I love how necessity is mothering such playfully functional social conventions - human microphone, now silent cheers and boos.

Amplify’d from www.nytimes.com

The others in the group respond by raising their hands and wiggling their fingers. This is a silent cheer, and I cannot tell you how well it works. You can also boo silently by pointing your fingers down and wiggling them. Why have they never used this in the presidential debates? Rick Perry could be standing there explaining his immigration policy while Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum point to the floor and wiggle like crazy. So much more civilized. Once again, youth has shown us the way.

Read more at www.nytimes.com

Amplify’d from www.racialicious.com

But even though at first I didn’t know what to do while I was at Liberty Plaza I stayed there for a few hours. I was generally impressed and energized by what I saw: people seemed to be taking care of each other. There seemed to be a general feeling of solidarity, good ways of communicating with each other, less disorganization than I expected and everyone was very very friendly. The whole thing was bizarre yes, the confused tourists not knowing what was going on, the police officers lining the perimeter, the mixture of young white kids with dredlocks, anarchist punks, mainstream looking college kids, but also the awesome black women who was organizing the food station, the older man who walked around with his peace sign stopping and talking to everyone, a young black man named Chris from New Jersey who told me he had been there all week and he was tired but that he had come not knowing anyone, had made friends and now he didn’t want to leave.

And when I left, walking my bike back through the streets of the financial district, fighting the crowds of tourists and men in suits, I felt something pulling me back to that space. It was that it felt like a space of possibility, a space of radical imagination. And it was energizing to feel like such a space existed.

This is important because I think this is what Occupy Wall Street is right now: less of a movement and more of a space. It is a space in which people who feel a similar frustration with the world as it is and as it has been, are coming together and thinking about ways to recreate this world. For some people this is the first time they have thought about how the world needs to be recreated. But some of us have been thinking about this for a while now. Does this mean that those of us who have been thinking about it for a while now should discredit this movement? No. It just means that there is a lot of learning going on down there and that there is a lot of teaching to be done.

I have never blocked something before actually. And the only reason I was able to do so was because there were 5 of us standing there and because Hena had already put herself out there and started shouting “mic check” until they paid attention. And the only reason that I could in that moment was because I felt so urgently that this was something that needed to be said. There is something intense about speaking in front of hundreds of people, but there is something even more intense about speaking in front of hundreds of people with whom you feel aligned and you are saying something that they do not want to hear. And then it is even more intense when that crowd is repeating everything you say– which is the way the General Assemblies or any announcements at Occupy Wall Street work. But hearing yourself in an echo chamber means that you make sure your words mean something because they are being said back to you as you say them.

And this is the other thing. It was hard, and it was fucked up that we had to fight for it in the way we did but we did fight for it and we won. The line was changed, they listened, we sat down and re-wrote it and it has been published with our re-write. And when we walked away, I felt like something important had just happened, that we had just pushed a movement a little bit closer to the movement I would like to see– one that takes into account historical and current inequalities, oppressions, racisms, relations of power, one that doesn’t just recreate liberal white privilege but confronts it head on. And if I have to fight to make that happen I will. As long as my people are there standing next to me while I do that.

Read more at www.racialicious.com

FIRECRACKER-CATCHING?!?!!!???!

Amplify’d from news.xinhuanet.com

"The matches are fantastic. This sport is much more interesting than soccer," said Luo, referring to the firecracker-catching event, a medal event in the on-going 9th Chinese National Traditional Games of Ethnic Minorities Groups held in Guiyang, capital city of Guizhou Province in southwest China.

Read more at news.xinhuanet.com

what a wonderful concept! what a great way to learn about shapes and patterns, abstract and everywhere!

Amplify’d from playgrounddesigns.blogspot.com

The Geometry Playground, a traveling play exhibition funded by the National Science Foundation, includes a  maze-like gyroid, corkscrew tunnels, and an anamorphic hopscotch court.   Visit their website for the tour schedule, or to request a visit to a museum near you.

Some time ago on the blog I lamented the loss of 'real things' on the playground--decommissioned fire trucks, factory machines, and jet planes that used to allow children to to absorb the workings of a gear assembly or the nature of a riveted skin while they played. Mathematical functions are 'real things' too, and portraying them in solid form provides an interactive learning experience and gives artificial climbing structures a reason for being in a marketplace that is increasingly disenchanted with the same old poles and platforms.  Playground manufacturers should take note.

Read more at playgrounddesigns.blogspot.com

I don't actually want to believe this. Hard to accept that kids are changing - not as open, as creative. But, yeah, it makes sense. It doesn't at all describe my grandchildren, but it sure is a logical outcome of what has been happening in education and the rest.

Amplify’d from www.livescience.com

It sounds like the complaint of a jaded adult: Kids these days are narrow-minded and just not as creative as they used to be.

But researchers say they are finding exactly that. In a 2010 study of about 300,000 creativity tests going back to the 1970s, Kyung Hee Kim, a creativity researcher at the College of William and Mary, found creativity has decreased among American children in recent years. Since 1990, children have become less able to produce unique and unusual ideas. They are also less humorous, less imaginative and less able to elaborate on ideas, Kim said.

"It's not that creativity can necessarily disappear," said Ron Beghetto, an education psychologist at the University of Oregon. "But it can be suppressed in particular contexts."

The current focus on testing in schools, and the idea that there is only one right answer to a question, may be hampering development of creativity among kids, Beghetto said. "There's not much room for unexpected, novel, divergent thought," he said.

No child gets ahead

Kids also nurture their creativity abilities when they "pretend," said Sandra Russ, a psychologist at Case Western University in Cleveland, Ohio, who was not involved in Kim's study. Elements of insight, fantasy and emotional expression all go into this type of story-making, Russ said.

Russ found that, over time, imagination in the stories increased, with the stories in 1985 showing significantly less imagination than stories (created by different groups of kids) in 2008.

Read more at www.livescience.com

This is from Charles Eisenstien, in his "Ascent of Humanity." I like very much how he repositions play. I thought you also would

Amplify’d from www.ascentofhumanity.com

Perhaps the truth is something quite different. Instead of youth being the time for play, maybe it is play that keeps us youthful. Perhaps the boundless free flow of creative expression is what keeps us physically and mentally supple, as a child. When we attempt to control it, limit it, mortgage it to the acceptable and safe, then the bounds of that safety project themselves onto body and mind, subjecting both to a severely limited range of motion that hardens over time.

Because the creativity of play is spontaneous, unbidden, and impervious to any rote formulization, we must consider that it comes from a source beyond ourselves. We are the universe's channel for play, an aspect of a universal playfulness expressed through our minds and bodies, employing our mental skills of reason and expression but originating beyond them.

If we are to relearn from our children how to play, then we must not limit ourselves to the frivolous and puerile. We can, like them, have occasion to play very solemnly, with great dedication and commitment, with laughter or with tears; in short, we can play our way through the full cornucopia of life's experiences.

Another way to look at it is that we never stopped playing, but we have forgotten that we are playing. Every once in a while we run into people who are still firmly embedded in modern technological society yet who have cast off its hurried, anxious, alienated mindsets and adopted a more easy-going, playful attitude toward life. Often this happens after a major illness or other personal calamity reveals the vacuity of former ambitions and preoccupations. They say, "I stopped taking life so seriously," or "I came back to what's really important." Yet despite not taking it so seriously, they are not detached from life. They are not passionless or indifferent, but if anything more involved and more fully engaged in the moment, because it is precisely the anxiety of modern life that removes us from the moment, that makes us feel we cannot afford to "be here now" or to fully engage in whatever we are doing.

When recovering addicts share stories of incredible lost opportunities, torn families, ruined lives, and the destruction left in their wake, their regret is tempered by the knowledge that they have emerged somehow wiser. They tell of a breakthrough to self-forgiveness, which is nothing less than the knowledge that given who they were, they could have done no other than what they did. This parallels the inevitability I speak of. The horrifying course of human history was built into who we were, and through its passage we are becoming something different and greater. Collectively and as individuals, we are being born into a new self. The good news is that this will happen no matter what, as inexorably as a baby is born when gestation is complete. The bad news is that we nonetheless have the power to delay our birthing indefinitely, even to the point where both mother and child must perish. The purpose of my writing is simply to tell everyone not to resist the inevitable! The gig is up. The game is over. It is time to wake up and play something else.

Read more at www.ascentofhumanity.com

I did my best to mark those paragraphs that I thought conveyed the spirit of this post, but would still encourage you to read the whole thing. It was a difficult task, since the post is extremely rich in common sense profundity. It challenges much of what has become standard practice in learning and in business and industry.

Amplify’d from chronicle.com

I want to suggest a different way of seeing, one that's based on multitasking our attention—not by seeing it all alone but by distributing various parts of the task among others dedicated to the same end. For most of us, this is a new pattern of attention. Multitasking is the ideal mode of the 21st century, not just because of information overload but also because our digital age was structured without anything like a central node broadcasting one stream of information that we pay attention to at a given moment. On the Internet, everything links to everything, and all of it is available all the time.

Unfortunately, current practices of our educational institutions—and workplaces—are a mismatch between the age we live in and the institutions we have built over the last 100-plus years. The 20th century taught us that completing one task before starting another one was the route to success. Everything about 20th-century education, like the 20th-century workplace, has been designed to reinforce our attention to regular, systematic tasks that we take to completion. Attention to task is at the heart of industrial labor management, from the assembly line to the modern office, and of educational philosophy, from grade school to graduate school.

When we gave a free iPod to every member of the entering first-year class, there were no conditions. We simply asked students to dream up learning applications for this cool little white device with the adorable earbuds, and we invited them to pitch their ideas to the faculty. If one of their professors decided to use iPods in a course, the professor, too, would receive a free Duke-branded iPod, and so would all the students in the class (whether they were first-years or not).

 In the iPod experiment, we were crowdsourcing educational innovation for a digital age. Crowdsourced thinking is very different from "credentialing," or relying on top-down expertise. If anything, crowdsourcing is suspicious of expertise, because the more expert we are, the more likely we are to be limited in what we conceive to be the problem, let alone the answer.

The real treasure trove was to be found in the students' innovations. Working together, and often alongside their professors, they came up with far more learning apps for their iPods than anyone—even at Apple—had dreamed possible. Most predictable were uses whereby students downloaded audio archives relevant to their courses—Nobel Prize acceptance speeches by physicists and poets, the McCarthy hearings, famous trials. Almost instantly, students figured out that they could record lectures on their iPods and listen at their leisure.

We used a method that I call "collaboration by difference." Collaboration by difference is an antidote to attention blindness. It signifies that the complex and interconnected problems of our time cannot be solved by anyone alone, and that those who think they can act in an entirely focused, solitary fashion are undoubtedly missing the main point that is right there in front of them, thumping its chest and staring them in the face. Collaboration by difference respects and rewards different forms and levels of expertise, perspective, culture, age, ability, and insight, treating difference not as a deficit but as a point of distinction. It always seems more cumbersome in the short run to seek out divergent and even quirky opinions, but it turns out to be efficient in the end and necessary for success if one seeks an outcome that is unexpected and sustainable. That's what I was aiming for.

I had the students each contribute a new entry or amend an existing entry on Wikipedia, or find another public forum where they could contribute to public discourse. There was still a lot of criticism about the lack of peer review in Wikipedia entries, and some professors were banning Wikipedia use in the classroom. I didn't understand that. Wikipedia is an educator's fantasy, all the world's knowledge shared voluntarily and free in a format theoretically available to all, and which anyone can edit. Instead of banning it, I challenged my students to use their knowledge to make Wikipedia better. All conceded that it had turned out to be much harder to get their work to "stick" on Wikipedia than it was to write a traditional term paper.

One of our readings was On Intelligence (Times Books, 2004),  a unified theory of the brain written by Jeff Hawkins (the neuroscientist who invented the Palm Pilot) with Sandra Blakeslee. I agree with many of Hawkins's ideas about the brain's "memory-prediction framework." My own interest is in how memories—reinforced behaviors from the past—predict future learning, and in how we can intentionally disrupt that pattern to spark innovation and creativity. Hawkins is interested in how we can use the pattern to create next-generation artificial intelligence that will enhance the performance, and profitability, of computerized gadgets like the Palm Pilot. The students and I had been having a heated debate about his theories when a student discovered that Hawkins happened to be in our area to give a lecture. I was away at a meeting, when suddenly my BlackBerry was vibrating with e-mails and IM's from my students, who had convened the class without me to present a special guest on a special topic: Jeff Hawkins debating the ideas of Jeff Hawkins. It felt a bit like the gag in the classic Woody Allen movie Annie Hall, when someone in the line to purchase movie tickets is expounding pompously on the ideas of Marshall McLuhan and then McLuhan himself steps into the conversation.

My new grading method, which set off such waves of vitriol, combined old-fashioned contract grading with peer review. Contract grading goes back at least to the 1960s. In it, the requirements of a course are laid out in advance, and students contract to do all of the assignments or only some of them. A student with a heavy course or workload who doesn't need an A, for example, might contract to do everything but the final project and then, according to the contract, she might earn a B. It's all very adult.

But I also wanted some quality control. So I added the crowdsourcing component based on the way I had already structured the course. I thought that since pairs of students were leading each class session and also responding to their peers' required weekly reading blogs, why not have them determine whether the blogs were good enough to count as fulfilling the terms of the contract? If a blog didn't pass muster, it would be the task of the student leaders that week to tell the blogger and offer feedback on what would be required for it to count. Student leaders for a class period would have to do that carefully, for next week a classmate would be evaluating their work.

I also liked the idea of students' each having a turn at being the one giving the grades. That's not a role most students experience, even though every study of learning shows that you learn best by teaching someone else. Besides, if constant public self-presentation and constant public feedback are characteristics of a digital age, why aren't we rethinking how we evaluate, measure, test, assess, and create standards? Isn't that another aspect of our brain on the Internet?

Grading, in a curious way, exemplifies our deepest convictions about excellence and authority, and specifically about the right of those with authority to define what constitutes excellence. If we crowdsource grading, we are suggesting that young people without credentials are fit to judge quality and value. Welcome to the Internet, where everyone's a critic and anyone can express a view about the new iPhone, restaurant, or quarterback. That democratizing of who can pass judgment is digital thinking. As I found out, it is quite unsettling to people stuck in top-down models of formal education and authority.

Read more at chronicle.com

There's a lot more to this story than hand signals, but I loved how ingenious and useful the whole concept was - allowing people in a crowd to participate in some times heated dialogue in the middle of the night in a residential neighborhood without having to disturb the neighbors. You gotta love it!

Amplify’d from www.haaretz.com

Without microphones, another group is gathered discussing how to keep the tent city democratic in creating a list of demands. A strict system of hand signals is employed.

Agreeing, as well documented in the media, involves wiggling your wrists. Disagreeing is expressed by crossing your arms creating an X in front of you. If you want to add an informative point, you point alternatively with forefingers of either hand. If someone is going off point or is repetitive, you make rolling signs with your hands telling him to wrap up. This is Israelis having a discussion in the middle of the street in the middle of the night.

Read more at www.haaretz.com

This is culturally shocking - to think that there is a national education system that actually values its teachers and that delivers high quality education WITHOUT TESTING! How long have we bemoaned the impact of testing on our children? How insidious and pervasive its influence has been on everything we do - not just education, but business, and soon medical care. And to learn that there is a viable alternative. I believe the expression is: OMG!

Amplify’d from www.boingboing.net

On Salon, David Sirota interviews Harvard's Tony Wagner about his documentary, The Finland Phenomenon: Inside the World's Most Surprising School System, which looks at the way that the Finnish education system delivers consistent, high-quality education without testing, with long holidays for students, and with teachers who are considered national treasures.

Finland is rated among the highest in the world in innovation, entrepreneurship and creativity. It's not your grandfather's socialist country in any sense of the word.

There is no domestic testing except a very quiet auditing program to test demographic samples of kids; not for accountability, not for public consumption, and not for comparison across schools. The fascinating thing is that because they have created such a high level of professionalism, they can trust their teachers. Their motto is "Trust Through Professionalism." The difference between the highest performing school in Finland and the lowest performing school in Finland is less than four percent, and that's without any testing at all...

Read more at www.boingboing.net