Socratic Arts offers the following services to clients:

1.We design courses for clients

We listen carefully to what clients say their problems are and we attempt to build, within the parameters given to us by the client, well-designed courses that will allow trainees to learn how to do their jobs better. These courses are typically in the form of a learning by doing course within an overall cover story that allows trainees to practice the jobs they must perform in reality in a much safer setting. We use mentors for these courses to help trainees understand how to learn from their mistakes. These courses are built on the web but can be delivered face to face or delivered entirely online, depending on the needs of the client. A typical course lasts a few days or a few weeks. We do not build one hour courses, There isn’t much you can learn in an hour. Learning requires practice in realistic settings.

2. Re-design of current education offerings

Socratic Arts is keenly interested in reforming the education system of the world. We believe that people learn by doing and not by listening to lectures and taking tests. We believe that academics have hijacked the educational system to produce courses that are oriented towards research and theories rather than towards building useful skills in students. John Adams, the second U.S. President, said that school should teach us how to live and how to make a living. We heartily agree with those sentiments.

We work with schools and universities to redesign their offerings, building practical programs that produce students who are ready to go to work  in their chosen field and are ready to think deeply about the issues in their chosen field. We are not interested in filling students with academic knowledge in readiness for research careers which is the (often unstated) vision of most universities.

We have had success in redesigning masters degree programs in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University and at a number of other schools. We are currently building a new experiential MBA program for La Salle University in Barcelona.

3. We build Dynamic Memories for specialized areas of knowledge

Any company knows a great deal collectively. A company consists of individuals who have  experiences that are very important to the company’s success. Years ago when you wanted to know who had knowledge about the Smith account, or how a certain product offering was working out, you just yelled down the hall. But those days are over. The person you want may be in Malaysia and you may not even know his name (or how to pronounce it). Or he may be long gone from the company.

Today, companies don’t know what they know. Corporate Memory is a lost art. They attempt to fix this with Knowledge Management systems which are usually just elaborate document retrieval systems.

But, what people know, the really important stuff, is not likely to be in a document at all. What is more likely is that the stuff that matters is a story told late at night about interesting experiences expert practitioners have had.

Socratic Arts collect those stories and puts them into dynamic memory. Then those stories are indexed by their ideas and can be delivered to someone who needs those idea at their time of need, either on a computer or on a hand held device.

How can we do this? The theory for it was written in a book by Roger Schank in 1981 (Dynamic Memory). Years of building systems to test out the ideas expounded there has resulted in a new kind of performance support system that can be built for any company that has a great deal of knowledge about a specific set of subjects and have a serious problem getting that knowledge to the right person at the right time.

4. We teach you how to do it

A company founded by a professor has a built in problem. We like to teach. So far from keeping our knowledge to ourselves we frequently hold workshops for clients who want to build e-learning offerings that like the course  that we build: solid learn by doing experiences rather than page turners. We run these course building workshops when asked to do so by any organization.