F.R. “Fritz” Nordengren (beta)

The (Hand)writing on the wall

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 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.

On the Horizon - a year ago

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.

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.