F.R. “Fritz” Nordengren (beta)

It’s been a quite week in Grand River, Iowa, my home town.  Work continues on that cabin south of town at the Two Mile ranch.  It’s been a bit of a conversation piece since that fella boght the ground a few years back.  It was fall about a year ago he build a deck, a big deck, but didn’t build anything else.  Some of the old timers got to talking about it one day over coffee, wondering if it was some kind of stage for music shows.  But come spring,when he began putting the foundation for the cabin in, it was pretty clear he was building a place to live.

He works on it, off and on, and spent most of the summer and fall and winter building on it, a little at a time.  Driving by you could watch the progress, a floor, then some side walls, a roof, and by Thanksgiving, it was wrapped up in that white building paper with the big words on the side, sort of like a Christmas present.

The delivery trucks drop off building materials and they sit there, on his deck, like they are ripening in the sun and just about the time he clears the boards and sheets off the deck, a truck comes within a week or so and puts more building materials out to dry.  And then, almost like little buds on a plant, the windows, the windows began sprouting on the sides of the cabin.

But this week, he had a different delivery, one of the flat bed semi trucks from the big building supply stores in the big city paid a visit. You know the kind, a long truck that has a fork lift riding piggy back on the end, to make it easy to load lots of materials.  The semi truck parked in the driveway and the man from the big city story lowered that fork lift to the ground and began scurrying new pieces for the cabin:  a shower stall, a refrigerator, sheets of siding and lattice, and some other pieces.  The delivery driver, carefully drove the forklift over the ground about a football field long and then gently placed the load on the deck.  Back and forth he drove, carefully placing each new load in its place.

As he was finished, the owner Fritz Nordengren, a Scandinavian, shook his hand and drove off, and the deliver driver loaded his forklift and headed back to the big city.  Or so he thought.  As he pulled forward, the tires on that semi began to spin in the mud.  As they did, the treads became filled wit mud and water and all hope of traction was lost.  He called Fritz on the phone.

When Fritz returned to Two Mile, he found the truck and the driver, about halfway across the field, stuck.  It was the only time he’d seen a truck get stuck on the property, although he knew visiting fishermen had occasionally pushed their luck to far and had been stuck before.  SO first they tried to put some boards, some left of OSB sheets from the siding of the cabin, they put these scraps on the round to see if the truck could drive on them and gain some traction.

The truck driver gave the truck the smallest bit of power, and the wheels spun in the mud and the muck. This truck was stuck.

“What do you think it weighs?” Fritz asked the diver

“I figure about 50,000 pounds” he replied.

Fritz crossed the farm yard and headed to get his tractor.  He stepped up into the cab of Ol’Red.  Old Red was a 1965 Farmall 706.  A tractor that was run by a simple gasoline engine that when it fired up, had the throaty sounds of a serious man’s machine.  Fritz pulled the tractor around and backed it up to the trailer of the buried semi.

He climbed out of the cab and wrapping a towing strap around the draw bar of the tractor — a metal bar designed for towing implements, and then around a welded bar on the back of the trailer.  He wrapped the strap twice, and then clipped the ends to a hitch pin.

He climbed into the tractor and fired up the motor.  He shifted into low and then, he slowly let out the clutch.  The big tractor tires dug into the ground and the tractor slowly moved forward as the slack disappeared from the to strap and the tug of war began.  For a brief moment, everything stopped as man and machine concentrated on the path ahead and then, as if it surrendered it’s grasp, the earth let go of the semi and the whole group started to inch forward.

The tractor engine revved and sounded more confident and the tractor, trailer and truck began to make the 50 yard trip back across the field and onto the gravel covered driveway..

Slowly it inched across the mud ruts where grass once lay sleeping through the winter frost.  Deep ruts, filled with water, where the truck had sunk into the soggy ground.  At last, back on the level and drier gravel, the tractor stopped and Fritz crawled out and un connected the straps.

The driver drove the big tuck out the driveway and parked it on the paved highway…then ran back to fire up the forklift and drive it out to the waiting truck.

Fritz, got in his van, and headed out of the ranch, too, thinking to himself, Two Mile, where the tractors are strong, the women good looking, and the cabin is almost done.

During the November 12:10 lunch and learn, one of the topics we discussed was Flickr, an example of a photo sharing resource on the Web.  Educause Learning Initiative (ELI) has a additional resource for you to review to get a better understanding of Flickr and it’s potential for you in the classroom and in your research and personal lives.

Quoting:

Although Flickr is ostensibly for photos, the site might more aptly be described as a venue for sharing experiences and building relationships. The site provides the tools, but the value derives from the contributions of the user community — photos, comments, ratings, and organization — and the connections that the site facilitates between individuals.

Find the pdf report on Flickr at the ELI site 

For all of the discussion of technology, there is room to find perspectives about the low tech and no tech tools for learning. Vanderbuilt University professor Steve Graham published a study which brings to mind something we’ve all seen, and maybe experienced ourselves. The importance of handwriting, even though our penmanship skills may be diminishing.

But what Graham’s study shows seems to be a relationship between the quality of penmanship and the quality of work provided by students. Coincidentally, and perhaps only vaguely related, is the rise of online discussions surrounding the use of paper journals and other low tech devices as a replacement for the personal digital assistant (pda). There are some things that can be done with paper and pen that are just not easily accomplished with a pda, laptop, or software.

So the Moleskines are flying off the shelf at Barnes and Nobel, Borders and Amazon, hipster pdas pop up on college campuses, and there is a slight renaissance in handwriting. (disclosure: after suffering from poor handwriting most of my adult life, and recently being embarrassed by a poorly handwritten noted given to a professional colleague, I’ve taken to practicing handwriting again in my own Moleskine.)

And practice is what Graham advocates. The penmanship curriculum of the turn of the 20th century was 45 or more minutes a day. That has been reduced by the beginning of the 21st century to less than 10 minutes. Graham related that speed and fluidity in handwriting are critical during our K - 4 years as young students have not separated the process of physical writing and thinking.

Which is why promoters of handwriting shared this in a recent Newsweek article:

Emily Knapton, director of program development at Handwriting Without Tears, believes that

“when kids struggle with handwriting, it filters into all their academics. Spelling becomes a problem; math becomes a problem because they reverse their numbers. All of these subjects would be much easier for these kids to learn if handwriting was an automatic process.”

The National Education Association quotes some grim statistics about the cost of poor handwriting:

• the health of at least 1 in 10 Americans is endangered by the poor handwriting of their physicians
• up to $95,000,000 in tax refunds are not delivered because of unreadable tax-forms
• $200,000,000 in time and money is lost because poor handwriting results in such problems as confused and inefficient employees, phone calls made to wrong or non-existent numbers, and letters and packages delivered to incorrect addresses — or not delivered at all

Finally, a study by Thompson Healthcare said, among other things, in a survey of 1,656 physicians

“more than 30 percent of respondents said illegible handwriting was the leading cause of miscommunication between medical personnel — a prime example of low-tech problems adversely affecting the high-tech world of medicine. “

The folks at NextGenWeb.org  and USTelecom asked for my thoughts on broadband and higher education and published this report.  Please give it a listen and share your thoughts.

In my last learning partner update, I shared the NMC and Educause Horizon Report from 2007. My post was a retrospective look at their findings nearly a year ago.

The report included key trends, critical challenges and technologies to watch, and I highlighted one of the urgent things to notice was a lack of information literacy. Combined with that is an opportunity to look at the skills gap identified in the Horizon report:

There is a skills gap between understanding how to use tools for media creation and how to create meaningful content. Although the new tools make it increasingly easy to produce multimedia works, students lack essential skills in composition, storytelling and design.

I don’t think it is being critical to point out this gap, nor do I think it is limited to students; most faculty lack the same skills and lack the time to learn to be a journalistic storyteller, a visual artist, or a writer for new media. What results is both a lack of information literacy on the user’s part and a lack of creation skills to create meaningful content on the presenter’s part. A lecture which can be a brilliant communication experience, does not become good video simply by turning on a camera.

Many of your have seen or heard of professors moving lectures to Open Courseware at MIT or ITunesU. The New York Times featured Professor Walter H. G. Lewin, age 71, in a feature on December 19. Sure, his lectures are popular; sure he’s bringing lots of PR and potential students to MIT. But the real point that every faculty member and administrator needs to see is buried three quarters of the way down the page in an almost throw-away paragraph:

He said he spent 25 hours preparing each new lecture, choreographing every detail and stripping out every extra sentence.

And also, if you watch his explanation of the pendulum lecture you’ll also notice this is both well edited and multiple cameras were used in the production.

This lecture series adds an example of one additional key trend described by Horizon:

Academic review and faculty rewards are increasingly out of sync with new forms of scholarship. The trends toward digital expressions of scholarship and more interdisciplinary and collaborative work continue to move away from the standards of traditional peer-reviewed paper publication. New forms of peer review are emerging, but existing academic practices of specialization and long-honored notions of academic status are persistent barriers to the adoption of new approaches. Given the pace of change, the academy will grow more out of step with how scholarship is actually conducted until constraints imposed by traditional tenure and promotional processes are eased.

Wow. No adoption estimate was given in the Horizon report for this one.