Companies need a valid, reliable, unbiased and efficient screening method by which to evaluate the performance standards of job applicants.

Educational and training institutions should be able to guarantee that graduate skills meet predictable, industry-accepted standards of performance to employers and to their graduates.

How do we best prepare ourselves, and those we train, mentor and educate, to acquire life-long learning skills for the Conceptual Age?   When imagination and creativity are more critical than facts and theories, the rapid evolution of our technical and conceptual environment demands that we rethink how, when and where we are to best acquire competencies that will sustain us in the coming years.

 

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.

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.

Sad to say, today’s colleges, universities and many private institutions are dramatically outdated when it comes to providing contemporary learning experiences and environments that adequately prepare graduates for the realities they will face in the future. In short – formal instruction is badly broken.  Too many schools are deeply routed in19^th and 20^th Century practices based on antiquated and outmoded industrial models. This blog identifies many of the major problems plaguing formal education and invites the reader to face today's institutional short comings so that we can move forward to more creative solutions for learning in the 21st Century.

Creative transformation means re-visioning the learning environment by adopting a set of principles that enable authentic learning experiences.  Traditional teaching techniques are no longer appropriate in a world of rapid technical and conceptual change. Successful learning practices need to be flexible and individualistic but also capable of mirroring professional practices at their best.  This post details a preliminary list of principles designed to establish a set of transformational practices that create and support authentic 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.