I just spent part of my morning playing on Twitter with my friends from Massachusetts, Egypt, and France. Yeah, I still get jazzed at that, a Kentucky boy living in the hills and hollars near Mammoth Cave National Park. It got me thinking about how ‘play’ has infiltrated my working world. It is part of the infinite game of life that James Carse goes on about. If you ain’t playin’, you ain’t livin’. For example, the Twitter conversation referred to above is captured in the Storify below.
But this has been the tip of the iceberg of late. I have played with shared annotations in Diigo, remixing with Zeega, collaborative Vine stories, and more all the time. Sometimes the play has been solitary, but more and more it is the connected play over fibre-optic transatlantic cables that has got me jazzed.
And it is all about improvisation and play. Play will be a substantive part of my syllabus, but it will never be written there. Play will be part of my shared projects with my wife and family. Play will be a part of the online MOOCs and courses that I am a part of. Play will become a vital part of every assessment, rubric, and feedback I will consider. And play will be the ultimate feedforward into the emerging future that all of this will become. Thanks friends for now and then and ever forward.
Let’s play to the jazzed soundtrack of Trombone Shorty and Orleans Avenue playing “Hurricane Season”