Pat Kane discusses the Power and Potential of Play

Play ethicist Pat Kane recently spoke at the Learning Teaching Scotland's conference on "Play and Active Learning."

He offers some profoundly pithy pointers (alliteration is often a portent of playful pondering). My favorite: "play is taking reality lightly."

The presentation is brief (16 slides) and replete with thought-provoking insights about the nature of play. As you click through his slides, don't be fooled by all the cleverness and cuteness. Pat has been thinking deeply about play for a very long time. His thoughts, like a good piece of candy, are rich and chewy - worthy of much delightful rumination. Be sure to check out his brief write-up where he includes a valuable collection of links to some of the sources he used in preparing his presentation. He shares his slides on his site, and I on mine.

Pat Kane: The Power And Potential Of Play

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To get a better feel for Pat, and the experience of his presentation, here's a moment from Pat himself:

"I took an idea of his [Stuart Brown] from the book [Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul] a CEO who gave his employees the permission to fire sucker guns at him for a quarter of bad performance - and twisted it around: I asked them all to make a 'projectile' while listening to me (as crude as a scrunched-up ball, as artful as origami), and then surprised them at the end by getting them to throw it at me in the centre of the room if they approved of what they heard. We had a 'deep fun' moment, as you might say - a space at the centre of the room covered in everyone's particular paper construction, some covered in slogans, some amazingly intricate."

from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith