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.
