Posts Tagged ‘Learning’
Stats for the Changing Game
Thursday, December 4th, 2008Improvising Higher Education
Tuesday, May 27th, 2008Item #1: The headline in today’s business news reads: “Wake Forest to Drop Standardized Tests in 2009.”
Item #2: A professor at Stanford complains to me recently that “Today’s students are institutionalized grade-making machines.”
Item #3: The person I know with the most money in his bank account does not have a college degree.
Item #3A: His wife has a PhD., he reads like a maniac, and they strongly support one another in every way imaginable.
Item #4: One of the most brilliant and creative people I know enrolled in college at the age of 14 and has never gotten a degree. He describes himself as a ‘serial dropout’. There is, it seems, always a lot of self-designed drama accompanying his dropping out. He says, ‘The ritual and circumstance with which I drop out creates far more value for me, in terms of building awareness for my personal brand, and in terms of the lasting relationships I make with the faculty as part of this dropping-out process than any degree possibly could.” (more…)
What Viola Said
Friday, May 16th, 2008
Viola Spolin is the godmother of modern improv. Her landmark development — with her mentor, Neva Boyd — of ‘theater games’ during the height of the Great Depression in the 1930s laid the foundation for everything that has happened with improvisation in the 80+ years since, including the theories and practices of GameChangers.
It’s by a quirk of genetics that we have come to associate improv so strongly with comedy. Spolin’s son, Paul Sills, introduced her techniques to Second City, which he co-founded with Bernie Sahlins in 1957. At its roots, however, improvisation is still about what Spolin created — a technique for building environments that foster learning and communication, that hold the potential for what she called ‘spontaneous explosions’ of creativity. (more…)