What's FUN Got To Do With...Parkinson's?

In my last blog I asked people to take my What's FUN Got to Do With It Survey. The Survey collected a list of "World Problems" we could explore. From the responses my younger sister Nancy's entry was chosen. She was recently diagnosed with Parkinson's which is a  serious neurological disease that affects more people than Alzheimer's. Maybe you have heard that Michael J Fox has had Parkinson's for over 15 years and recently Linda Ronstadt announced she has Parkinson's and can no longer sing. This is a significant life changing disease without a known cure at this moment.


I realize that this is a frightening subject to tackle. How could we have fun with such a serious subject. Michael is taking this subject on in his new show where he is a former star newscaster with Parkinson's who has decided to go back to work. The show features his challenges and hopes we can laugh along with him .  

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What's FUN Got To Do With...
 ____________________?
 What problem should we tackle?

This is a character I found that personifies for me the confluence (?) where a Big World Problem meets FUN.
Can we turn seriously scary things into something we  
can play with to reach new conclusions or solutions?
Link to Prezi of Explanation of Project
This is a link to a Prezi presentation that explains 
HOW we plan to develop this idea and another link to 
a short SURVEY asking what Problem we should tackle.



Note about Prezi: This is an experiment to see if you can open and use this presentation software. Click PRESENT and it should show a circle with a title in it. At the bottom you will see an arrow pointing to the right. Hit this arrow and the presentation moves through the slides and ends with a link to a a short SURVEY. 

 

                 

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What's FUN Got to do with Creativity, Innovation and Change 

This is my experimental BLOG that is part 

of a massive open online course MOOC from Penn State titled  Creativity, Innovation and Change. It explores this subject with videos, exercises and projects. Online 

forums allow the 128,000 people who signed up to exchange ideas if they want to.

https://www.coursera.org/course/cic   Link to Course

We are at Week 4 so I will try to post past assignments and exercises. I will use this space to share the "fits and starts" behind the assignments as a lot of my effort has been in finding tools to use to collaborate online and to find "my voice" for sharing the process. I drew this cartoon of me as a moderator as one idea of how I might  blog about the Project.

My... Our Project: 

What's FUN Got To Do With World Problems? 

Rationale: 

Several years ago I was sitting in a meeting where a nonprofit was bemoaning

the lack of success they had had with a charitable project of bringing water to a village in Africa. I came from 18 years working in the toy industry and I found myself asking "What's fun got to do with this problem?"  Everyone was so serious that I felt reluctant to say this outloud.

I have always wondered if this might be a good way to look at problems so now I thought  we could choose this as the Project for this MOOC. 

Team:

Ray, a high school classmate, and my sister, Julia, joined the team from the first day. 

We are asking for help from anyone who would like to PLAY with us. First we would ask

Players to answer this short Survey which asks "What your Big Problem?" .   

Project: Link to Explanation of Project

The Course asks each participant to start a Project by writing an Explanation of our

mission, challenges we may face and plans for executing our Project.