Breakthrough ideas have never been more important than they are now in education and training because current practices are simply inadequate to the task of preparing for the future. You can expect a lot of resistance to change – on many levels up and down the academic hierarchy – including from your cohorts.

Sometimes blind faith is more important than academic logic when it comes to breaking new boundaries and this is an example of why experimentation and breaking boundaries are so important if we are to reinvent learning.

As promised in this blog entry, it looks back at almost five decades of careers and of alternative approaches to learning.

Every personal journey is a preparation for the next and here I try to share with the reader those learning strategies and experiences that have helped me in the past and which I expect will support me in the future. I've written this in the hope that it might provide some context and perhaps guidance or ideas for those new to the field who face uncertain career paths.  If there is anything to be learned, it's that we can't always predict what skills we might need but that creativity and planning for continual personal transformation seems a sound approach for the 21st Century.

In this post, the author further expands on the core characteristics need to transform learning in formal institutions.

Assuming that a revolution in educational institutions is not only necessary but inevitable, key practices that can be designed into new learning frameworks must be open, flexible, and customized.

Rather than simply throw new technologies into the mix, it essential to transform the methods we use today. This means a complete reevaluation of what works and what doesn't work. It's everyone's responsibility to be fully prepared for the future and that demands we acknowledging the urgent need for radical change in all our learning communities.

Standardized core competencies provide an explicit benchmark defining the content and level of expertise that should be evident throughout an educational or training regimen. They not only provide a framework for developing curriculum and courseware but also guide the instructor when he or she is planning, organizing and presenting the content of individual lessons and tasks.

Autodesk Inc. has made considerable progress in improve this situation through the development of instructional standards for their flagship animation applications, Maya, 3dsmax and Softimage. Intended for those applying for Instructor certification, they are extremely useful for everyone teaching and training these software products and for others in the educational sector.

This short post demonstrates the use of low cost high speed video recording as a method for improving the recording and analysis of animation reference.  Results using two CASIO EXILIM cameras are discussed and links provided to recordings made at 210 frames per second.

The issue I want to raise this time is about the relationship between demonstrable creative production and the digital environment’s pressure for “quick and dirty” solutions for generating new ideas.   The pressure to demonstrate high quality skills is at the core of a show reel – to show what we can do and to distinguish one’s work from the competition.  This weighs heavily on the student and the learning institution and it’s tempting to find short cuts when we need to stand out from the rest.

Creativity is at the core of our personal and collective evolution – whether as individuals or as teams.  Yet creativity behavior is poorly understood and commonly misinterpreted – often for historical reasons.  It’s frequently seen as something difficult to define, a mysterious phenomenon and an ability that some people have and others do not.   The facts are different. Creative ability is well understood, can be clearly explained and everyone is capable of creative effort given well-designed training, experiential exercises and reflective practice.

Our task as educators is to restore the sense of inquisitiveness, curiosity, playfulness and creative invention that we had as children.

This post introduces the skills we need and describes why education programs that develop creative skills must be contextual and culturally relevant. 

In this post I describe the development and evaluation of a prototype training school in China that was the result of frustrations with formal education systems around the world.  Four key principles were used to formulate the program design, curricula and learning process - enhanced learning through rapid iteration, ubiquitous critique and feedback, critical and creative thinking and professional mentorship.

A training school was developed and ran for two years based on optimizing these principles and the results made available for evaluation and review.