Hello, and thank you again for attending my program. I very much enjoyed your group. And I am happy that you are here at this Web page.
As I said at the program, unless you review the material presented, you will forget. I hope you have gone over your notes since Friday? Click for some information about the Curve of Forgetting.
The more ways you work with the material, the stronger will be your learning and the longer will be your remembering.
As we discussed, here are some ways to learn and remember what you hear in a presentation:
- Listen
- Write parrot notes (write just what you are hearing in a talk)
- Write notes, plus your thoughts & reflections about the content
- Discuss with others
- Use the content
- Teach the material to others
- Draw the ideas*
- Review the material after the program
*Click for information about using drawings to enrich your thinking and learning.
I want to stress again that the more of these you do, the more you will learn and remember.
Now click to watch a TED Talk by Stuart Brown, a play expert I mentioned in my program. I recommend that you watch it because he has much to say about the value of play. Recall that Dr. Brown says, "The opposite of play is not work, it's depression." Click to read the article from
The New York Times that he mentions at the beginning of his talk; the article is titled "Taking Play Seriously."
Click to watch a TED talk by Sir Ken Robinson in which he tells the story of Gillian Lynne, the dancer. I told her story in my presentation. As you may remember, Gillian's counselor told her mother, "Your daughter is not sick, she's a dancer." If you are interested in education and creativity, I highly recommend this talk. A bonus: Sir Robinson is very funny.
I mentioned TED talks in my program; all of them can be viewed here. It is a goldmine of information on many, many topics. One posted this month is "Let's simplify legal jargon!" by Alan Siegel.
Now here is some more information about topics discussed in our workshop . . .
In this review (Creative Liberty) of Dr. Brown's book Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul, you will find the list of the properties of play that we looked at during my talk. From the review, play:
- Is purposeless and done for its own sake.
- Is voluntary.
- Possesses an inherent attraction—you don’t play to reach some other end, it is an end in itself.
- Frees the player from the ordinary consciousness of time passing.
- Lowers self-consciousness.
- Holds improvisational potential—at least some outcomes and strategies in play are not pre-determined.
- Is marked by a distinct desire to continue the playful activity.
We also discussed the eight play personalities. They are described in this article "Experts say play time can relieve stress in bad times" (USA Today) in a sidebar. The article names the personalities a bit different from how I presented them. For example, what I called "Kinesthete," the writer calls "Moving." The list from the article:
- Joking.
- Moving.
- Exploring.
- Competing.
- Directing.
- Collecting.
- Storytelling.
- Creating art.
See the article sidebar for an explanation of each of the personalities to review what we talked about last Friday.
Please e-mail me if you have any questions. And, once again, thanks for being such an engaged and creative group.
For my future blog posts on play, go here. Please check back frequently at that link.
Note: On a somewhat related topic, here's an article I wrote titled "Don't Deck the Clown: Inviting Humor into the Law Firm."
Comments