Socratic Arts: What we do and why we do it.
Socratic Arts provides the following services, detailed below:
- Curriculum Redesign
- Course Design
- Course Construction
- SCC Design Workshop
- Innovation Related Services
- Just-in-Time Learning Systems
- Dynamic Knowledge Management
- New Collaborative Writing Systems
- Knowledge Transfer and Technology Licensing
- Certification and Degree Programs
- High Schools and Other Education (Elementary, Middle School, Community College, etc.)
- Mentoring for Engines for Education Courses
The problem in education, at every level from kindergarten to corporate training, is that our notion of how people get educated is based on both outmoded delivery methods and outdated conceptions of what it means to know. Even when educators realize that lecturing or assigning reading about how to perform doesn't really change performance, they continue to educate in this manner because they don't know what else to do.
Socratic Arts is dedicated to creating a new style of educating: one that is based on learning by doing, storytelling, reflection and exchange of ideas about complex issues, and lots of practice. There are many ways to deliver this new kind of education -- e.g., in person, remotely, independent, team-based -- but we believe there is only one kind of education to deliver: one that helps people do things better.
Socratic Arts offers a curriculum redesign consulting service. We look at how courses have been offered before -- in schools, corporate universities, or anywhere else -- and ask fundamental questions about who is being taught, why they want to learn, and what the desired outcomes are upon completion of the course. We then prepare a plan to change the current offerings to be more oriented to active learning and more aligned to meet both the needs and expectations of the students enrolled in them. We ensure that learners leave the course having used what they learned in a relevant and realistic context. By using the knowledge and skills in situations that are similar to those the students will encounter in the real world, they are more able to retain the learning and information when they need it on the job.
What we do: We create high-level designs of entire curricula that enable us to create meaningful educational experiences.
What we don't do: We don't help people pass multiple choice tests. These tests are the problem and we will not help continue the kind of meaningless memorization that these tests entail.
We design new courses based on client needs, and we also often change existing classroom training into learning-by-doing courses hosted on a website. (We really don't like to call them “courses” however, because typically the word leads people to imagine the kind of instruction we don't think works.) Quite often, clients prefer to use face-to-face interaction instead of delivering courses to remote participants. Our course designs accommodate both online and in-person delivery. The design is essentially the same. Socratic Arts creates project-driven learning that usually entails small groups working together with a mentor to produce deliverables within a certain time frame and scope.
What we do: We produce high-level design documents to guide the development of courses that make learning meaningful and fun.
What we don't do: We don't take your existing course and put it online. Your existing course was designed for another medium and another way of looking at education. Your course needs to be radically re-thought, taking everything into consideration.
Socratic Arts builds courses, preparing student and mentor websites that house all the materials necessary to run a remote or in-person course. We design and build experiences that are meant to help people practice new skills. We build them in a team that includes people who are employed both by Socratic Arts and the client.
What we do: We build and deliver course materials for students and mentors.
What we don't do: We don't keep our technology and methodology a secret. We build courses together with your team members, and they ultimately learn how to do what we do. The process involves both art and science, so our clients typically find that they gradually become more comfortable working independently over several projects.
Socratic Arts is happy to teach companies how to do what we do outside of work on a specific project. We offer workshops on how to design training using our approach (called Story-Centered Curricula or SCCs). Our designers lead these courses (lasting a week and sometimes longer) and offer students practice in designing learn-by-doing courses for their companies. We use the sponsoring company's real learning-related problems as examples. Students work in teams, and we mentor them in designing and developing SCCs.
What we do: We hold the hands of clients who want to learn to create effective learn-by-doing designs.
What we don't do: We don't talk at students while they passively listen. Students do all the work. This is not an easy experience, but that's what it takes for the students to be able to radically re-think how to approach course design.
Talk on Innovation in Business
Successful innovation in business takes more than a good idea. Through a stimulating one-hour talk by Roger Schank you will how to think about and approach innovation differently. See Roger Schank discuss the Business of Innovation on CNBC.
Two Day Workshop
We will conduct a workshop on how to come up with new ideas that address your particular business problems. This 2-day event at the venue of your choice will be led by Roger Schank. It will follow a rigorous process which is guaranteed to spark the flow of energy required to bring innovative ideas to the forefront. This workshop will require a series of prerequisites, including a detailed interview of the event's sponsor.
Study and Consultancy of Your Business
We will conduct a one-week study of how your business operates and Roger Schank will offer his expertise on how you can make your business more innovative.
Continued Help on Particular Problems
Innovation is a process that takes time. Roger Schank's continued help as you work through a particular problem will help ensure that your business doesn't just talk about being innovative, but makes changes to solve problems in an innovative way.
What we do: We lead a group through a process which stimulates the flow of fresh ideas to solve particular business problems.
What we don't do: We don't give you ideas, since we don't know your business; we listen really well though, and ask you hard questions.
In the fast-moving corporate world, it often doesn't make sense to put people through training courses to impart knowledge and skills to be remembered in case of some potential future need. Working professionals often know when they need to learn something to accomplish a goal, and in such cases they should learn it “just in time.” As people work, they should have access to a system that can provide just-in-time help, advice, and, perhaps most important, access to the experience of others who have done that work within that company (and the world at large). The work that people do needs to be supported by a system that knows about what similar work has already been done and can offer to provide that knowledge when it is likely to be useful.
Drawing on a compilation of documented past experiences, people can learn about how to do something they are trying to do by looking at what was done by others in similar situations. For years our Socratic Arts team has been building just-in-time learning systems that integrate a story-centered database with a performance support system to help people at time of need.
What we do: We build the performance support that is made available when relevant to a worker's task.
What we don't do: We cannot generally take information that has been compiled for some other purpose and simply re-purpose it, nor can we manufacture relevant experience when none exists.
Twenty-five years ago, Roger Schank wrote a book called Dynamic Memory. In it, he explained how computers could learn by storing new information in the same sorts of memory structures and using the same sorts of retrieval mechanisms employed by people. The book was very well received but quite a bit ahead of its time. We are now ready. Interestingly, the problem has changed. In those days the problem was seen as making computers smarter (Artificial Intelligence or AI). But actually, with the ubiquitous use of computers in business, the problem is not how to get computers to be smarter, but how to get businesses to be smarter – how to provide a corporate memory organizing and providing principled access to all of a company's information, experience, and knowledge when the company is so big and diverse that one part simply doesn't know what its other parts know.
Socratic Arts builds systems that organize corporate memory dynamically, constantly changing what is remembered and how it is organized by tracking the goals of the organization and the people within it. The system can then help people to locate knowledge that they didn't know was available by linking that knowledge to the goals they are pursuing, thus enabling search in terms of what they are trying to accomplish, how they are trying to accomplish it, and problems they are having.
What we do: We help organize the knowledge your company has with respect to goals and plans to achieve those goals of the various actors in the company. Information can then be readily found when it is relevant to the goals of a particular worker.
What we don't do: We do not build intelligent problem-solving systems capable of independent action. Rather we build memory systems to support human problem solving by providing intelligent access to information, experience, and knowledge when it is relevant to achieving a person's goals.
The monolithic, linear documents typical of most corporate communication are written as a compromise of the needs of a variety of readers. Rather than organizing information in this way and forcing such compromises, the Institute for the Learning Sciences, which preceded Socratic Arts, developed ASK systems to provide flexible access to information in response to individual needs and interests. An ASK system uses hypermedia technology to provide flexible organization and access to smaller units of information by indexing those units in terms the range of questions that people accessing such information might have. Via a simple point-and-click interface, an ASK system provides the feel of a question and answer dialog with the providers of information.
By empowering different readers to ask different questions and, thus, to navigate different paths through information, an ASK system more directly meets their needs without compromise. We are now employing the ASK methodology to help companies communicate more effectively.
The idea is that too much information is being produced in forms that are hard to find and exceedingly hard to use. Google search of thousands of documents is a poor solution; eighty page reports are rarely, if ever, read. We can help people produce a new kind of writing, one that is automatically indexed as it is written by using a system that prompts you about what to write in relation to what you or others have already written – in anticipation of a range of readers' questions – and then organizes what is produced to satisfy the diverse needs of those readers. This ASK WRITE technology is a product of Socratic Arts that can be adapted to the needs of any organization.
What we do: We supply an ASK WRITE system customized for use in a company by understanding how people will use the information that is being authored and representing those uses as prompts that guide the writing process, ensuring alignment to readers' needs.
What we don't do: Socratic Arts does not take over authoring or managing a company's information.
Socratic Arts has developed a set of software tools that make the building of online courses easier. These tools are used to manage the creation of Story-Centered Curriculas (SCC) and to track the students' progress within an SCC. Socratic Arts is happy to work collaboratively with clients to design and develop training programs, teach clients to design and build SCCs (through collaboration on projects and the SCC Workshop mentioned above), license our development tools so clients can build SCC websites on their own, and coach clients downstream.
What we do: We identify clients' needs relative to training development and work collaboratively to satisfy them. If desired, we train clients on our SCC development process and the use of our development tools. We license these tools to clients who have worked with us and learned to use them.
What we don't do: We do not license the tools to people untrained in building an SCC.
Socratic Arts works with universities and other institutions to develop certificate and degree programs. These programs do not contain traditional courses, and we do not attempt to simulate classroom instruction in any way. We look at the career or skill-related goals of the students and ask how we can best simulate the work environment they are about to enter, or the environment in which they will use the skills. We then design a sequence of projects within a cohesive and comprehensive story in which students practice the skills they will need in a logical progression. The duration of these programs is as long as they need to be to accomplish the intended objectives, whether that is a week, a month, a year, or more.
What we do: We design a curriculum as a progression of projects, working in collaboration with the faculty of a university or other institution. We work with the institution to train teachers to mentor students working on the projects.
What we don't do: We do not run the curriculum; the sponsoring institution does. We design it, build it, and train the mentors who will be teaching it.
The non-profit arm of Socratic Arts is Engines for Education. Through that arm we build high school curricula meant to replace the existing high school system. We have also built elementary and middle school curricula, and courses for community colleges. Socratic Arts teaches teachers to be mentors to students in a Story-Centered Curriculum of our design. Socratic Arts also advises high schools on how to help students attain workplace and life skills rather than academic skills.
What we do: We develop curricula for educational institutions, mentor teachers and advise superintendents and principals.
What we don't do: We don't focus on test preparation. Our focus is on getting students to practice using relevant skills and knowledge in motivating and realistic contexts.
While schools will typically provide their own facilitation and mentoring for these curricula, Socratic Arts may also provide these services if requested. There are educational situations such as homeschooling, rural schools, and others where the provision of mentoring will either be unaffordable or impractical. Socratic Arts has access to teachers and subject matter experts who would be glad to play these roles, and can step in to provide these services where needed.
What we do: We supply facilitation and mentoring resources to schools and parents who are in need.
What we don't do: We don't leave you high and dry with our new high school curricula.
© Copyright 2008, Socratic Arts