Presentation given by W. Joseph King, president of Lyon College, at the University of Wyoming Summit: The AI Disruption of Work - Educational Responses on June 15, 2018.

1. The Creative Generation
W. Joseph King

2. Longevity
 Baby boom generation held almost twelve jobs
during their careers with an average lifespan
stretching into their late 60s.
 The student looking at colleges today will live to
almost 90 (20% will live to 100).
 With 2070 as the horizon, students are
contemplating careers with dozen of jobs,
movement between industries, lifelong learning,
and professional development, not to mention
entirely new industries and jobs that simply do not
exist today.

3. This and Coming Generations
 Previous generations relied on Lincoln Logs, Lego,
Monopoly, and Dungeons & Dragons.
 This generation has created vast structures and
machines in Minecraft, developed elaborate
strategies in Dota 2, and built surprising
complicated things using 3D printers.
 Like John Dewey prescribed a century ago, they
have learned by doing.
 Not just by doing, but by performing, making,
creating. They are not “Millennials” any more than
someone born in 1700 was an “18th Centurion.”
They are the Creative Generation.

4. Tinkering
“Yes, tinkering is now a pedagogy. Taking things apart
and putting them together — skills children used to
absorb in Dad’s or Mom’s workshop — has an
important role to play in learning…building something
new requires planning, trying and, yes, failing, and
then trying again.”
Jon Swartz
The New York Times
February 5, 2016

5. Good News / Bad News
 Engineering schools, traditionally focused on
making, creating, and innovating. They are
exceedingly good at it, within the confines of their
disciplines.
 Trade and technical schools, neglected, derided, or
completely forgotten in the United States for the
past half century, seeing a major resurgence.
 Liberal arts colleges, both freestanding and within
universities, are challenged to find their successful
path in this environment of longevity and
significantly increasing automation.

6. Empowering Creativity
 Twenty-year experiment at my alma mater,
Southwestern University, a liberal arts college in
Central Texas.
 Annual grant with awards ranging from a few
hundred to a few thousand dollars.
 Students have designed and built devices,
developed algorithms, conducted scientific studies,
sculpted, painted, sung, and danced.
 Graduates have gone on to be scientists, artists,
doctors, entrepreneurs, teachers, lawyers, and
diplomats, just to name a few of their
varied professions.

7. Creativity, Leadership, and Innovation
 Oberlin College – Creativity & Leadership program
was first established in the music conservatory and
grew into a college-wide program “encouraging
students to put their innovative ideas into practice.”
 Middlebury College – MiddCORE program was
established to support idea creation, design,
collaboration, strategic thinking, leadership, and
persuasive communication.
 Lehigh University – Mountaintop Initiative
provides both summer funding and a special space,
the former Bethlehem Steel Research Laboratory
atop South Mountain, to support creative and
innovative projects.

8. From Periphery to Core
 Most liberal arts colleges and universities have
begun embedded creative inquiry and experiential
learning into their core programs.
 At Hendrix College, students define their own
special project or program as a key part of their
college experience, and at Allegheny College, the
Gateway program “supports students as they
explore their interests, turn those interests into
experience, and then apply what they’ve learned.”
 Creative inquiry takes its place, along with critical
inquiry, as a keystone of liberal education.

9. From Majors to Careers

10. Lifelong Learning
 At DePaul University, alumni relations was moved
to enrollment management because alumni were a
significant target market for graduate programs and
other lifelong learning opportunities.
 Clearly, web-enabled delivery methods are going to
be a significant source of lifelong learning
opportunities in the future.
 Creative, innovative, and entrepreneurial skills are
cumulative and flexible, thus developing individuals
who are better at dealing with change.

11. Alternative Credentialing
“Badges can help speed the shift from credentials that
simply measure seat time, to ones that more accurately
measure competency…. Badges offer an important way
to recognize non-traditional ways of learning. They're a
way to give credence — and ultimately, credit — for the
skills learners and teachers acquire in a broader set of
learning environments, and a wider range of content.”
Secretary Arne Duncan
September 15, 2011

12. Design and Innovation
 Beyond undergraduate education, the rise of design
schools is an embodiment of creative inquiry as
skillset that is broadly applicable to many different
fields and jobs.
 Business schools focus on innovation and
innovation systems is a similar embodiment of this
philosophy.
 Corporate innovation systems (Disney, GE, Hughes,
etc.) have long concentrated on the need for
workers to become adept at defining and developing
new methods, ideas, and products.

13. Human-Computer Symbiosis
“The hope is that, in not too many years, human brains
and computing machines will be coupled together very
tightly, and that the resulting partnership will think as
no human brain has ever thought and process data in a
way not approached by the information-handling
machines we know today.”
J.C.R. Licklider
IRE Transactions on
Human Factors in
Electronics, March 1960

14. Future of Creative Work
 A.I. and automation are the greatest threat to
routine “intellectual” work that can be systematized
through nuance or brute force.
 Creative inquiry is an area that seems less likely to
be subsumed by technology than empowered in a
symbiotic fashion.
 Ultimately, the future workforce is going to need a
flexible skillset that is highly adaptable to change,
including a willingness to be lifelong learners.