And pretty much every time I read something on the Duarte blog I have a new door opened!

This week I was introduced to Dan Roam, how did I miss him is what I am wondering?

Dan is all about the thought process.

What is clear to me as I walk back into my University classes this week is we as teachers need to be doing more to conceptualize how our students think.

Honestly I am not sure I have given the thought process much though.

Well Dan has started me down a path that is sure to get very interesting fast!

Check out this video and tell me it doesn’t make you ask a few questions about your own approach to thinking.

Click here to view the embedded video.

There has been exceptional growth and there has been an exceptional reset.

But there is no question in my mind that Dubai is a very interesting case study of success.

Of course the term success is open to many different definitions.

And of course there are imperfections, blemishes, with any success story.

But when I sit down and look at Dubai I still marvel at the change that has taken place and the ability of the public policy process to very quickly adapt and change with the evolving circumstances.

It was interesting to sit down and have a conversation with Mark Beer the Registrar of DIFC courts and the former Chairman of the British Dusiness Group.

It was interesting to hear Mark’s take on the success of Dubai as a brand and as an idea.

What I found particularly interesting, in my conversation with Mark Beer, was the idea that Dubai really needs to embrace the knowledge economy.

Yes there are free zones dedicated to ideas and yes there are many government and private universities in Dubai, but does that equate to an investment in an knowledge economy?

And if a knowledge economy is to be successful, in the long-term, it is going to have to be locally anchored.

But the question of local is problematic in a country with 80% of the population originating from elsewhere.

It is my feeling that if the knowledge economy is to be championed definition of local has to be expanded to include those expatriate that are here as well.

If you are working on ideas for Dubai but are the citizen of Canada, in my case, my ideas are local to Dubai not Canada.

Yet there are segments of society that would suggest my ideas are not local even thought they are fueled by the local experience.

Mark and I had an interesting discussion that I think frames Dubai in a different light to that we are becoming accustom to reading about in the broadsheets.

And the idea of the knowledge economy is particularly interesting.

Not that the whole process is broken, but it does need a serious renovation.

So where do we start?

I think the starting point is a huge issue.

We have old school administrators looking at the problem with old school tools and to craft an old solution.

1st we need to admit that we have got it wrong!

Here is a nudge from TED.

So what do we do next?

The hard part is looking at the problem and not falling back into the old ruts of funding, training and building design to make things right, or better.

What we need to do is have a community conversation.

Parents, teachers, employers, higher education and the students!

We need to ask what is working and why!

We need to ask what is not working and consider why.

The start may be as easy as a little Facebook time!

I really do believe that the way we teach is an issue as is the physical building!

School is to removed from reality and that has to change.

We need to radically rethink teaching and the place we teach.

FastCompany asked a similar question and here is what came back.

The best part are the 13 ideas!

13 Radical Ideas from FastCompany to Fix Education

How would you spend $100 million? the answers are as varied as the edu-experts we asked.

Radical Idea #1

Radical Idea #2

Radical Idea #3

Radical Idea #4

Radical Idea #5

Radical Idea #6: Rethinking Teaching

Radical Idea #7

Radical Idea #8

Radical Idea #9

Radical Idea #10

Radical Idea #11

Radical Idea #12

Radical Idea #13: Build a Better Classroom

So how do we start now?

Here is another idea.

One day of each month we create a reverse mentoring scheme, a work study of sorts but the idea is not that the student learn from you but that you also learn from the student. A conversation takes place. What are you seeing that the student is not seeing? How did what you do get to this point?

Every student KG through  High School  goes on a reverse mentoring assignment each month!

The format will change to suit the student but the theme is the same.

We are making education real and we are making it work based on the environment!

Is the start easy?  No but it has to happen!

Maybe we need to think of the reverse mentoring in terms of the Tinker School format?

The reality is we need to start NOW.

And that will mean throwing a little caution into the wind.

I think we need to think big and think now.

We have talked enough now lets do.

What are your thoughts?

In communication, well journalism, we are constantly teaching and being told to think about objectivity!

Good advice if you are a journalist but bad advice if you are looking at your organization and trying to manufacture change.

We need to literally wear 2 hats in almost everything we do today, the objective do and be good hat but also have the me or subjective hat ready to put on.

As Kolko makes a good point about a skill that I think we spend too little time working at perfecting, sense-making.

Sensemaking is about the interplay of action and interpretation rather than the influence of evaluation on choice.” Cognitive psychologist Robert Hoffman describes sensemaking as “… something different from creativity, comprehension, curiosity, mental modeling, explanation, or situational awareness… sensemaking is a motivated, continuous effort to understand connections (which can be among people, places, and events) in order to anticipate their trajectories and act effectively.”

Hopefully as we move towards change we are able to make some synthesis of ideas, I think we fail at this becasue we are being trained to be objective in every aspect of our lives.

But maybe we have gotten the whole art of synthesis wrong?

As Kolko points out, “synthesis requires highly eclectic designers empowered to embrace their biases”, yet we discourage this way of thinking.

Maybe we need to stop, look, think, reflect and do the opposite of what we think is the right thing to do when it comes to organizational change.

The sad reality is too many professors prepare for the coming year using the tried and true techniques and resources they became familiar with in grad school.

I am sure I could ignite a debate about what makes a good teacher and what makes a good resource at the post secondary level but the reality is we need to be teaching to tomorrow and not yesterday. Too many of the case studies and resources we turn to, out of comfort, are old, geo specific or simply not applicable.

I find myself increasingly turning to publications like FastCompany when I am thinking about what and how I am going to approach almost every topic in my field study, communication and media sciences.

Take this article for example it talks about design thinking and business, but I think it has a whole lot more to do with the education process.

1. Empathize: Like any good design project, your business is about the people you’re designing for.

2. Define: Are you focused and open to what your team needs in order to thrive?

3. Ideate: It’s time to brainstorm. “This is the most fun part of the process,” Kothari says. “It’s the stage where you don’t block any ideas and embrace all your wildest ideas — there might be a small piece of it that could be integrated in the final product.”

4. Create a prototype: Can you physically build a prototype using Post-Its or popsicle sticks that can help you answer some questions?

5. Test your prototype: Take your prototypes out for a spin in the real world. Ask strangers what they think of it. Failure is okay—it can be built upon.

These 5 steps in are all about the thinking to action process and apply to theory as well as practice.

The greatest problem faced by students and teachers alike today is that they think of everything in too narrow a context missing great ideas and inspiration.

Think large read odd things and look for the connections because they are there, we all really think, talk and research about variations of the same things.

What if each class activated this 5 point plan on a monthly basis?

If we did this, applied design thinking to our teaching, and there was no recognisable benefit at least the context of the learning environment would become a whole lot more interesting, .

I had the pleasure of meeting Ian Gilbert about a year ago.

I instantly knew that Ian had a story to tell and many people with ear plugs in need to listen and hard!

We have a global education crisis today because bureaucrats, CFO’s (chief failure officers), accountants and academic leadership in general has failed to do what needs to be done!

Maybe we all need to listen a bit closer to what Ian Gilbert is saying?

And maybe those education leaders who are failing our youth need to either stand up to the challenge or step aside!

Ian Gilbert Live at TEDxDubai 2009.

The mud on the wall method of delivering content, if some sticks it is ok approach, is simply not good enough.

Again and again I return to Michele Miller and Wonder Branding.

www.wonderbranding.com is a great site!

What makes this site really useful is the amount of material available to think about how you are marketing to women, over 1/2 of the global population is women remember!

But what is really interesting is Michele herself.

So, when it comes to education, public policy, marketing… how much time to do we soend thinking about presenting the ideas to women in a way that appeals to them?

Exactly!

Time to begin thinking differently.

Food for thought from Michele Miller.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Business schools do not talk to design schools who do not talk to education schools who do not talk to IT schools and nobody is talking to the cooking schools.

Well, if the core elements of our education system are not relating to each other what chance do you and I have when we leave the ivory tower?

I try to keep up with Tom Peters (and others see the blog-roll on his site for a start) to be grounded in business think, TED to see how the divergent converge and I think it is working.

What we really need to remember is trust in ourselves, we never trust we have anything figured out.

Tom Peters talks about a few people who made trust and circumstance work for them, give it a watch it is very good!

Click here to view the embedded video.

So, what is stopping you from starting that thing?

Today when you say the word design and then the word thinking, and then say it again fast, it is likely that you will also say the name IDEO!

Ideas, thinking and design are no longer singular or able to be compartmentalized.

In fact when we think about where our nations are going, where our lives are going, even where our education is going it is really necessary to think in terms of design.

Paul Bennett joined me for a conversation about design and the change we are confronting today.

A conversation with Paul Bennett of IDEO.

I was reading today in the TimesOnline that 6^th form students in the UK are facing the very real prospect of not being able to enter a University to continue their education, because the demand for seats is out striping the availability.

Is this a bad thing?

I am not so sure it is bad at all that students may have to wait to get their University education or look in a different direction for training, in fact it might be the best thing to happen to a student.

I suspect many students globally, like it or not, will now have an opportunity to go out and get their hands dirty, maybe even as a volunteer, in the work world and maybe even stumble upon a vocation they love!

Maybe, just maybe, our high school students will get a bit of focus before they enter the ivory tower and this can only make a better student and a better University.

What makes me sit up at attention is the possibility that our Universities are letting us down, letting the students down.

My worry is that the modern University is rushing off madly in all directions as it tries to match its courses, Colleges and curricula to a changing world and I am not sure any University, even the Harvard’s, Stanford’s and Cambridge’s have taken a good look at themselves and asked, “why are we doing any of this?”

The simple problem with the University today is that it lacks focus beyond educating for the sake of educating.

Sure there are trades such as medicine and accounting but even with them the focus is missing and it is generally hoped that in the end the student will figure out how all the courses come together.

I sat down with three of my colleagues and we imagined how the global University education complex could actually work and work well.

This is our manifesto.

Universities are re-conceptualizing their curriculum and revising their course offerings.  It is our view that we need to focus our efforts beyond short term ideas about what it will take to properly educate future professionals.

What we know for certain is media is undergoing fundamental change in how it is produced, managed, distributed and, importantly, consumed. The New York Times has more online than hard copy readers.  Online content of all major publications now has dedicated staff. Content is richer, not only in words and images, but also in its use of what are referred to as social tools. This ranges from simple interactivity to the latest, and possibly even short-lived phenomenona like Twitter. We also know that internationalism has morphed into globalization because media has the ability to erase borders printed maps use to create our frame of reference about other places, people and cultures.

Current thinking about the future of university programs is attempting to catch up with, and train students for, these existing realities. But another component of globalization of media is reflection about the effects of a much bigger, but much more homogenized,  world. Localism and community are becoming sought-after qualities in a world that is becoming increasingly larger, anonymous and remote. In fact, individualism is the direction toward which the world is moving:

MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, 50 million individual blogs increasing at an estimated rate of two per second. Individuals are using these tools to create a sense of community in a world that is increasingly impersonal and asocial. Are our University programs keeping up?

The real potential of communication tools today is individual empowerment. Reconceptualizing  programs of study are not taking into account this local, communal, individual phenomenon emcapsulated within the “global reach of ideas.”

Whatever the area of study you are engaged in, we need to consider where the world is going, not where it is now. The present is the past. Current is outdated.

We need to train our students in a curriculum offering skills that will be useful in the emerging world. If we focus on the present or popular ways of educating  students, we are simply putting window dressing on what we have been doing for 10 years and what schools around the world have been doing for much longer. We are going where we and everyone else has been.  As Nikita Khruschev, himself a peasant, once famously said: “You can put lipstick on a [rabbit], but it is still a [rabbit].”

We are suggesting that each one of us focus on the where education is going so we can all collectively ask and answer “What is any University curriculum doing beyond training students for a variety of traditional  jobs? Why are we putting forward a particular program?” Then: “This is what we should do and this is why we should do it.”

We need to consider some basic facts about the nature of today’s students: Who are they?  What will they need?  Where will they work? They need skills and ways of thinking that will enable them to act locally in building the future for their nation.

So, we ask that every one who is engaged in education today to consider going where no other program is going or has ever gone. We ask that every one of us considers a curriculum that will truly focus our program on the idea to create, inform and inspire community.  ” Rather, we propose that we educate our students in the thinking and doing  skills that will enable them to function locally to craft the community, the nation and the world that is their future, not ours.

Yes, we also should want our students to be entrepreneurial, but intrapreneurial as well.

We are suggesting educating and training our students not to work in local, alternative or mainstream environment, but allstream environment. The skills needed to create community and a mainstream environment are identical. But the conceptual focus is different and more authentic given the nature of our students today and the world in which they will live and work.

Your thoughts?