F.R. “Fritz” Nordengren (beta)

The Horizon Report - the skills gap warning

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.

Information R/evolution Video link

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.

Did you hear the one about the educator, the recording executive, and the cell phone executive

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.

On Posters, Flickr, and Learning Technology

Learning partners,

I hope by now you have subscribed to the Learning Partner Update (this email) by RSS feed; it keeps your inbox lighter and lets you review the content on your terms and schedule.

This month, I’ve added posts about RSS and some left over notes from the presentation on finding images for presentations and using Flickr™.

In the hopes of encouraging interest and engagement in both our 12:10 tools and the upcoming College of Health Sciences Research Day, I want to share a feature within Fickr™ that can turn a static image into a great working discussion tool . Flickr™ has built it tools that lets viewers draw a box around part of an image, and the type a comment. Keep in mind, as we shared in the presentation Flickr images can be public to the world, or controlled access to limited people.

So, build your poster for presentation, take a photo, post it to Flickr™ (or if you build it within a software tool like PhotoShop®, Illustrator®, or PowerPoint®, you can output it as an image to upload to Flickr, and colleagues can review and add comments. This Fickr™ image is one example of how this is done.

Nervous, want to try it before you use it? You can follow the link to a sample poster I upoaded from PowerPoint® (thanks Carla) by saving it as a .jpg file and then posting it to my Flickr™ account. You can see both the poster and comments. While you are there, make a note or comment (they are two different things).

This week’s drawing will be from all the folks who
put comments or notes on the image.

As a final note, I found this entry in a blog by C. Wess Daniels, a doctoral student at Fuller Theological Seminary. He discusses his work on a Education Technology committee for the school after it received a grant to put technology in the classrooms.

Even deeper is the issue of whether technology aids or harms learning. People will take their sides quickly on this issue. Should we allow computers in the classroom? Should we make all the professors learn powerpoint? Should all classrooms be wired for the web? One thing to keep in mind is that technology has ordering power. A majority of fundamental questions now revolve around whether technology is useful or not, it orders a majority question and decision we make as educators in the Western world.

One thing we discovered in this discussion about pedagogy and technology was: Technology often times controls the pedagogy, rather than the pedagogy controlling the way technology is used. (emphasis his)

When bad titles meet (good) presentations

In reviewing submission guidelines for some conferences, I am struck by some obvious advice: the title needs to be catchy. And who among us hasn’t at times written a poor title for what was probably a good presentation?

But even good advice is sometimes overlooked, or goes unheeded. That became clear to me after the last 12:10 Lunch and Learn about new ways to access and use images in presentations, the title didn’t live up to the topic. Several of those who chose not to attend, later told me said “we know how to put an image in powerpoint”. Opps. Bad title.

The October 12:10 conspiracy was to help discover and explore item 11 on the 12/10 list: exploring Flickr. And along with that we explored that the old difficult way of finding images to use in presentations has some free and better alternatives.

So as a brief recap, here are some of the key points.

The old way — of buying stock image disks, looking through pages of stock photo albums and directories, and considering whether the use of an image constituted a violation of copyright law have evolved.

The new way includes the use of tools like flickr™ (www.flickr.com) or Picassa™ and searching for images on nearly any topic or theme.

These resources make use the images shared by millions of people and the idea of tagging - a friendly folksy way of labeling content. This blog makes use of tagging and the resulting tag cloud on the right of this page. Tag clouds are intuitive for many people.

Flickr also makes it possible to only search photos licensed under Creative Commons, a new way to look at the sharing and restriction of use of intellectual property. Now, authors, publishers, researchers, scholars have a way to allow some use of their work without involving detailed licensing agreements, or disputes over ownership.

November’s 12:10 will be a very brief introduction to using audio online and in presentations.  I still have half a month to come up with a good title.