Play Manifesto is a social platform for sharing the importance of rediscovering and integrating integrating Play into our lives, our schools, and our work.
Play provides a sense of purpose, mastery, and fulfillment – motivating us to innovate and thrive in both educational and business environments.
Unfortunately, most educational systems and businesses believe that Play is the opposite of work, and should be driven out (rather than integrated).
Play Manifesto is driven by thinking that is backwards – it says the exact opposite is true: we should be celebrating Play, not eradicating it!
“If you really want to know what society is going to be like in 20 years, don’t ask a technologists like me: ask kindergarten teachers. They are the ones that know what society is going to be like in one generation”. —Clifford Stoll
Bestselling author, political advisor and social and ethical prophet Jeremy Rifkin investigates the evolution of empathy and opens the way to end our enthrallment by outdated concepts and half-baked beliefs in what our human nature is supposed to be.
Adapted from a talk given by Sir Ken Robinson, world-renowned education and creativity expert and recipient of the RSA’s Benjamin Franklin award. There is more information on Sir Ken’s work at: http://www.sirkenrobinson.co
You can be happy and not know it. Listen to Robert Thurman explain how true happiness occurs exactly when we are not even able to think about it. Check out more on Robert Thurman, Professor of Buddhist Studies, Columbia University; President, Tibet House U.S. at: http://bigthink.com/robertthurman
At the end of yet another jaw-dropping TED talk education scientist Sugata Mitra makes a this “guess”:
“Education is self-organizing system, where learning is an emergent phenomenon.”
He says that this should take a few years to prove, experimentally.
Yet it is worth the try.
In the meanwhile, his “Hole in the Wall” experiments show how in the absence of supervision or formal teaching, children can teach themselves and each other, if they’re motivated by curiosity and peer interest.
It seems all we might need for quality learning might be to keep our natural interest in the world — the one we are all born with — alive.
Pretty simple stuff.
And then you need your grandmother. No, really, just follow this method that has already proven to be one of the best for learning – the method of the grandmother. What is that?
“Well, what you’ve got to do is stand behind them and admire them all the time. Just say to them, ‘That’s cool. That’s fantastic. What is that? Can you do that again? Can you show me some more?’”
This is what is being built now. They’re called SOLEs: Self Organized Learning Environments. Children are sitting in front of big, powerful screens, big broadband connections, but in groups. They can talk to each other as much as they want. Actually talking to each other is imperant that they do that. And if they want, they can call the “granny cloud”.
Here is the news. We are just one billion children, 100 million mediators, 10 millions SOLEs, 180 billion dollars and 10 years away from. Do you believe we could change everything?
They are a product of “liquid networks”. New ideas are truly born out of chaos, actually, chaotic environments, like those of London’s original coffee houses.
They also have notoriously long incubation periods, like Darwin’s theory, for example, which Steven Johnson calls his “slow hunch”.
Learn here how innovation happens. You will find out, “Chance favours the connected mind.”
