F.R. “Fritz” Nordengren (beta)

Educause and the New Media Consortium released The Horizon Report 2007 Edition back in Spring. The 2007 report included six “key trends”, seven “critical challenges” and six “technologies to watch” and their projected adoption periods.

As I looked back through this report what jumps at me are these items and how they potentially impact us at DMU.

Two of the reports “Key Trends” include:

Information literacy increasingly should not be considered a given. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, the information literacy skills of new students are not improving as the post-1993 Internet boomlet enters college.

In my review of student writing, I see regular evidence of this lack of critical thinking. This affirms the need for more research like that led by Ann York and Teri Stumbo that blends the evidence based practice ideas with critical thinking skills. I think their work is on the cusp of creating a new Evidence Based Information Literacy curriculum that will be a cornerstone of new education models. The acronyms EBP and EBM may very well morph to become EBPIL as we work more in this cross disciplinary learning environment. Librarians are going to become even more central to our education pedagogy.

The notions of collective intelligence and mass amateurization are pushing the boundaries of scholarship. Amateur scholars are weighing in on scholarly debates with reasoned if not always expert opinions, and Web sites like Wikipedia have caused the very notion of what an expert is to be reconsidered.

There is a time and place for group think, and there are times when a group can be more intelligent than any of it’s independent members (see some of Francis Galton’s work in Nature from the early 1900’s). It’s also interesting to note that the Horizon report lacks traditional citations to studies and instead relies more on the group approach to it’s findings. The links considered and resources are shared both through del.icio.us and the Horizon Report Wiki . The report is a demonstration of both of these key trends in both it’s context and delivery format.

NMC and Educause highlight this as a “Critical Challenge”

There are significant shifts taking place in scholarship, research, creative expression and learning and a profound need for leadership at the highest levels of academy that can see the opportunities in these shifts and carry them forward.

The report goes on to suggest that

needed changes in faculty reward, promotion and tenure processes will almost certainly not occur without visionary leadership.

This one is not only critical, but self evident. If you review the curriculum offerings at the Doctorate level, the education technology and leadership programs are aimed at k-12 leadership. There are minimal programs designed to build a new base of technology grounded, higher education leaders who are prepared to lead graduate study in the next 20 years . This is not a criticism of the current leadership, but a vacuum for the future. There is no one doing what Scott McLeod is doing at CASTLE (now located at Iowa State) for the 12- 20 years. The focus remains k-12. There is the beginning of a new focus in education based on a K-20 model. But for those of us in higher ed, we’re the weak link in the chain and don’t have a strategy to develop our next generation of leaders who are prepared to address the significant changes in scholarship identified in the report.

Finally the report suggests “Adoption Windows” for new technology.

I find the suggested adoption windows offered in the report interesting, but not meaningful. Having the ‘diffusion of innovation’ and adoption theory of Iowa State’s Everett Rogers beat into me all through under grad, the idea that some campuses will be on these tools earlier than others is not surprise and some campuses will never adopt some of the tools.

What is interesting is the report considered “100 technologies” and then boiled their findings down to 12 and then 6.

In the next learning partner update I want to focus on the most overlooked aspect of this report. A skills gap that combined with a lack of information literacy, creates a dangerous zone of mis information.

From the last 12:10 Conspiracy lunch and learn, here is the Michael Wesch video Information R/evolution. In the producer’s words:

This video explores the changes in the way we find, store, create, critique, and share information. This video was created as a conversation starter, and works especially well when brainstorming with people about the near future and the skills needed in order to harness, evaluate, and create information effectively.

At the request of faculty who could not attend the November 12:10 lunch and learn, the 12:10 Conspiracy lunch and learn presentations will be present via podcast. You can subscribe to the podcast with your podcast client (ie: iTunes) or play the file from this site.

 

 Social Networking in the Class(room) [47:34m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Wednesday’s 12:10 Conspiracy lunch and learn will share examples of social networking sites and how they can be used within classes and education. They are popular, remember, if MySpace were a country, it would be the 7th largest in the world. But just because they are popular outside of the class, doesn’t mean they work, or are popular inside the class.

That logic hasn’t worked since you said to your mother, “but mom, ALL the kids are doing it.”

There are some blurred boundaries and labels: social networking, web 2.0, digg, technorati, tagging. Some are concepts and some are tools, and the goal of this lunch and learn is to give you the information you need to understand how these work and for you to decide when and where it would be beneficial for students.

Trivia.quiz I hope you’ll join us and I promise to share more proof that there is a true 12/10 Conspiracy based that now extends into college football! Need proof? What was the score of the Iowa - Iowa State football game (the one in 1977) that re-ignited the intra-state rivalry? People who email me the correct answer are placed in a for a drawing for lunch at Palmers! This quiz closes Wednesday December 5 at noon!

Background: The 12/10 conspiracy is a CHS effort to introduce college faculty and staff to 12 new web based tools in 10 months. Some of the tools are described in blogs, others are featured in lunch and learn presentations that begin at 12:10 (coincidence or conspiracy?) on the last Wednesday of each month.

Okay, here it is: A record company executive, an educator, and a cell phone executive all go to a meeting in at the Venetian in Macau….

Clearly by now, you’ve figured out the joke: educators don’t have a travel budgets that let them go to Macau. So the educator wasn’t there! So instead, we rely on media and blog reports of the event.

Media Post, MacUser, a PC World staff blogger, and Slashdot picked up the quote from Warner Music Group CEO Edger Bronfman about their company’s mistakes in understanding content and consumers.

Take it from us music industry folks. We used to fool ourselves. We used to think our content was perfect just exactly as it was. We expected our business would remain blissfully unaffected even as the world of interactivity, constant connection and file sharing was exploding.

And of course we were wrong. How were we wrong? By standing still or moving at a glacial pace, we inadvertently went to war with consumers by denying them what they wanted and could otherwise find…and as a result of course, consumers won.

Today there’s a new consumer war being waged on the mobile front. And the perceived wisdom that consumers are “complacent” or that the “stickiness” of mobile services—established billing relationships, breadth of network coverage, brand loyalty—is enough to grow or even preserve your subscriber base without continually providing compelling consumer experiences, will prove to be wrong, dead wrong.

Bronfman’s corporate mea culpa was urging the mobile phone industry leaders not to imitate the failed business model of the recording industry. When I substitute “higher education” for “music industry” and “lifelong learners” for “consumer” or “customer”, and I see amazing parallels and similarities to what we do.

A group of my colleagues were involved in an email exchange over the weekend which included a citation that is similar to my earlier blog on EDUCAUSE Connect about the “producer” role of faculty. My colleague shared this from Lynch’s The online educator: A guide to creating the virtual classroom.

“To use a theater analogy, the traditional instructor serves as the lead actor- the one who must carry the show, even though there is allowance for other characters to interact. In contrast, the online instructor is more like the director- one who ensures that all the characters play their part and that the show moves smoothly from beginning to end, adding his or her expertise only when the actors seem to need assistance”

As educators, much of what we do is the creation of knowledge (content) and the delivery of knowledge (content). Whether the new role of the educator is director, producer, or some new iteration, there is significant strategy to learn from the missteps of the music business.

If you like, you can grab a .pdf version of Bronfman’s speech directly from Warner Music Group’s web site.