This is what my structured learning profile has looked like over the past 26 years.
Kindergarten to grade 12 full time, then straight to engineering for 5 years. Nothing for 3 years of full time work. Back to school for a year. Nothing during another year of work. Back to full school for a year. And now nothing while working again.
This is a frustrating shame.
When I’m at school, I have space to explore and move my knowledge forward, surrounded by inspired people on a similar path. It’s highly theoretical, which is at the same time liberating and frustrating.
When not in school, and working, I get to remain grounded in reality, and create real and practical solutions. But I’m burdened by efficiency, and lose the freedom to truly pursue knowledge and skills.
I’d like my education to look more like this:
More grounded and practical when I’m formally studying, and with ongoing structured learning when I’m not.
The old paradigm of school, college, grad school, work is ill suited to our current world. It batch processes us through learning environments that are isolated and often irrelevant in subject. And then it drops us in the ‘real world’ where we become crushed by the need for delivery.
So now I’m looking for new models and products that can add that progression of learning while we’re otherwise living our lives. I want them to capture some of the elements that make studying great: a network of people doing the same thing for support and inspiration, curricular guidance to push us, space to learn, access to resources, and periodic sense of accomplishment.
This is more than just badges for self-directed learning levels. This is a new range of products that understand the power or learning environments, and the factors that create them, and moves them to our daily lives.
B