Creative Transformation: Learning for the Conceptual Age

Five or six overlapping career paths and 49 years later, the reason I am so committed to new and non-traditional ways of learning is that, for the most part, it’s the path I chose and for me the rewards of alternate forms of broad and primarily informal learning have outweighed the benefits of formal education. I realize it’s not for everyone.

If we are to build learning activities and skills that can sustain us (and our students) during coming decades, they must model professional practice as well sustain life long learning. They need to be creative, flexible and enduring. This post provides a preliminary list of transformational elements of authentic learning environments.

This post describes and link to a new set of Autodesk’s Media and Entertainment Instructional Standards (MEIS) for three software products; Maya, 3dsMax and Softimage. These standards cover thirteen topic areas and toolsets and provide a ruich resource of theory, applications and exercises for teachers and trainers in animation and vfx.

This article argues that we need to seriously examine the relationship between genuine creative activity and the mashup culture. The pressure to produce competitive show reels and creative work can easily result in derivative results that try to short circuit the effort needed to master the core skills and personal style that distinguishes the best artistic work.

Creative transformation means doing it differently! This post describes a two year experiment in designing and implementing a training school based on four key principles that enhance the learning process. Based on core competencies, it used a range of novel methods to motivate and develop professionally related skills in an accelerated system of feedback loops and rapid iteration.

Delving into specifics programs, curricula, institutions and methods, it’s important to review the breadth of the issues we face. Every progressive, generative and future-focused learning framework (whether personal, corporate or institutional) MUST be designed, build and assessed as an interdependent system of connections among people, the environment and the process of acquiring skills and knowledge.

This post, together with the last one, is intended to elicit feedback and comments from institutions and companies interested in exploring standards as a framework for further development and to promote discussion on standards development. It describes a simple standards system for discussion.

The use of standards serves to free educational and training organizations from unnecessary duplication of effort in curriculum development, makes them accountable for quality of instruction and learning, and frees them to concentrate on the development of story, art direction, character performance, cultural and personal expression and the ability to create globally competitive content