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.

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.

August 30 1997

Has the media pounded this topic into the ground yet? Do you remember what happened today in 1997? Do you remember what you were doing?

I remember because it changed the way I tell stories. And probably served as a role model for the way others tell stories, too.

Mark Hertzberg broke the news via an email discussion group for the National Press Photographers Association. I was a member and when his email popped up around 8:30, I read with great interest:


Subject: AP/Princess Di accident and Paparazzi
From: Hertzberg
Date: 1997/08/30
Message-ID:
Sender: NPPA Discussion List
Comments: ********************************************************
Reply-To: Hertzberg
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.nppa-l
One posting, two subjects, to save bandwith:

1)
>I had a hiatus from daily PJ'ing for a few years, but back then AP paid us
>for submissions. Is this still the case? or only for freelancers and not
>newspaper staffers? Some photogs say yes, others say no. All I know is that
>I ain't getting paid for stuff I send from my paper.

The policy varies from state to state. Wisconsin does not pay. Contact your
local bureau photographer or bureau chief to find out more.

2) It's about 8:30 p.m. central time and CNN is reporting a serious
accident involving Princess Diana in a tunnel near the Seine in Paris. The
gentleman she has been recently romantically linked to was apparently
killed in the crash. A bodyguard/chauffeur was apparently killed, as well.
What is going to be interesting for us to follow in our profession
is that the CNN anchors are questioning tourist eyewitnesses about the
possibility of paparazzi on motorcycles being in the area. They want to
know if they were indeed following the princess, and, if so, if they have
have been the possible cause of the crash. An American tourist says a
photographer with a "professional camera" was on the scene in "five
seconds."

Mark Hertzberg

In the aftermath, the idea of paparrazi and photojournalists being one in the same created an opportunity to tell a story about life as a daily photojournalist working in a community newspaper.  The result was Behind the Viewfinder - A Year in the Life of Photojournalism.  The photojournalists, through me as editor, wrote journals — early blogs — about their daily work and life.  These increbly talented individuals brought digital storytelling on the web to a never before seen level.

Later this year, the site will include a recorded interview of the people who participated in the project.  The interview, recorded in 1999, has been reedited from it’s original public radio broadcast.

A Year of Living Generously

Okay, it’s a 15 year old reference to a Mel Gibson movie, but I think it works. A Year of Living Dangerously is the Peter Wier directed story of Guy Hamilton (Gibson) in his first job as an international correspondent.

Sigourney Weaver is Gibson’s co-star and the story paints international journalism in a very romantic light. I suppose having Sigourney Weaver on your next shoot would even paint the “ladies of the D.A.R. potluck” assignment in a romantic light, but that’s the subject of anther column.

Billy Kwan, the photojournalist in the story (played by Linda Hunt) tells Hamilton, “We’ll make a great team, old man. You for the words, me for the pictures. I can be your eyes.”

And they set out to tell an important story. One they hope will change the world in 1965 Indonesia. It’s a romantic notion, using your skills to make a difference. Photojournalists often hope that something they do with make a difference. The Year of Living Dangerously is the stuff war stories are made of. Our own site, the Digital Journalist is filled with some pretty intense stories - both of the subjects shot by the talented people here, but also the behind the scenes stories of what it took to get the photos. The “dangerous” makes the story seem even more important.

But if you read the title of this piece - and have been patient enough with me to read this far, you can change your focus from dangerous to generous.

2001 is going to be a year of living generously for some producers and photojournalists I know. They are giving back to people in need by working with a non profit organization called “New Media for Non Profits” http://www.nmnp.org/. New Media for Non Profits grew out of some conversations with a number of people - and much of it connects to the columns I write here. The interesting thing about a non profit like NMNP is that no one “owns” it. It’s a collaboration of talents that has a board of directors who govern it, but the work produced is directed by need rather than profit, commercial appeal, or shareholder greed. (Don’t get me wrong, profit, commercial appeal and greed are all good in their right time and place, NMNP just isn’t one of them.)

So living generously this year is a way of saying these producers and photojournalists are giving back, working to make a difference with the images, words, and stories they tell.

Donald Winslow is my fellow producer and co founder of NMNP. Both of us have been extremely fortunate in our careers and by coincidence were in a position to devote some time and energy to getting this non profit started. In his words, its time to help other non profits do a better job of telling the world who they are, “This is why we founded NMNP.org, to better help the people and non-profit organizations of the world who work hard to make life better for those who can’t help themselves when they need help the most, and to help those organization’s whose goal it is to improve our society, our culture, and the environment.”

NMNP will be securing grant money, foundation support, and other funds to make it possible to fund new media and traditional story telling profits on behalf of charities in the world. Charities that need to tell their story and producers and photojournalists that are looking to tell stories are coming to the group. NMNP will be the place that helps bring the two together, and find reasonable budgets to fund quality work.

People who are able to give their time and talents are donating some of the work being done. Some of the work is paid work at fair rates. But it’s through the generosity of producers and photojournalists like you that the real work will be done. Generosity in the form of a donated print, generosity in the form of bringing a creative mind to a project, and generosity in the form of taking the time away from vacations to shoot a project that makes a difference in someone’s life.

2001 is my year of living generously. I hope that by the 2002, we can all look back at something we’ve done this year and seen that we have made a difference.

Learn your skills. Find your passion. Make a difference.

PS: There are literally hundreds of people who have been instrumental in getting this rolling. I can’t thank each of you here, but if you’re reading this, you know who you are and thank you.