Education Leaders Program / James Kinney
James Kinney
Toronto, Ontario
School affiliations
Websites
"Let us put our minds together and see what life we can make for our children."
— Sitting Bull
Jim Kinney teaches art and design at George Brown College — with a special twist. He has owned and been a partner in businesses that, from 1987 on, have pioneered the use of new hard and soft technologies to provide leadership in design services, computer graphics and animation, publishing, web development and e-commerce, training simulation, branding, and interface design. He has also been involved in applied education and corporate training since 1989, focusing on the integration of technologies to enhance teaching and learning.
In 2004-2005 he attended the McLuhan Centre for Culture and Media, where he explored the effects of rapid technological innovation and obsolescence on the classroom. From this exploration, he developed a Rapid Integration of Skills and Knowledge (RISK) teaching/learning method. It employs collective narrative processes to facilitate crowd-sourced knowledge creation and curation as an adaptive response to rapid and pervasive technological change.
Kinney has been mentoring students on the co-creation and curation of knowledge resources. He uses the infrastructure and know-how he derived from research done for Apple Computer on mobile learning. He is currently creating a Perpetual Beta Lab for his students to introduce them to collaborative techniques and let them experiment with beta-level technologies. It will pair them with a client to solve a problem where, ideally, the solution uses the new technologies they are exploring.
Kinney holds an undergraduate degree in the Biological Sciences from the University of Waterloo and a master's of Theology from the University of Victoria, University of Toronto.
