A colleague and I are signed up for an adult education course to learn Adobe InDesign software, which we’ll be using when we work with Tom’s publisher, Dorling Kindersley, on a set of spin offs (the Brits say “spin downs”) of Re-imagine! Show up at the computer lab last evening. 12 students. 10 females. 2 males (me and my colleague). Teacher a female as well. It gets you thinking. Our friend Dan Pink (Free Agent Nation) is working on a new book titled A Whole New Mind (coming in February from Riverhead Books) and one of his points is that the M.F.A. (Master of Fine Arts) is the new M.B.A. People who are learning the design technologies are the ones who will be creating the visual images (thus stories) of our culture. And I realize I’m basing this on a ridiculously small (statistically irrelevant) sample, but, still, you gotta wonder.
One other thing. The teacher told us how glad she was to be teaching people who really wanted to be there. Because her day job is as a corporate trainer where she’ll ask her students why they’re there and she’s actually heard people respond, “I don’t know, my manager told me to show up.”
Talk about not-Wow.