F.R. "Fritz" Nordengren

The real work of academia is done by research assistants:  those hardworking, underpaid, never thanked, graduate students; hoping to make a name for themselves, pay a few bills, and somehow keep it all balanced until they graduate.

Our university doesn’t have a formal research assistant program for our scholars, so last year I  put together an internship in leadership development.  To date, I have been blessed with some very talented and gifted interns who have made my work and life immeasurably easier.

The original posting reads like this:

Health care administrators and managers are often key individuals in leadership development roles.  Leadership development courses and talks are often offered via human resources classes, retreats, conference presentations, and other formal and informal channels.

This internship  combines both research and practical application of leadership development.  It is especially designed for those students who want to include leadership development in their career path, but not necessarily as a college-based faculty member.   Students will research and develop their own skills in creative thinking, virtual team leadership, change leadership, and storytelling as a leadership tool.

I should explain that our Master’s program has just over 200 active students and my personal advisee list is just over 40 of those students.  Out of our best students, I am fortunate to hand select 3 or 4 each year who work with me in this Administrative Internship.

The first intern in this concept project is still working with me, developing a focused segment of our Change Leadership Seminar on the role of journaling and coaching employee change.

Another of these gifted scholars took on the creation of a presentation to a state wide quality conference on the natural conflicts which exist between the ideas of  quality and quality improvement.  I’ll present the results of her work again in April.

Interns are not reqired to fetch coffee - but it is always greatly appreciated. Photo Copyright 2008 by Jim Frazier

Working with me now, on the creation of an introductory lecture to our leadership skills,  is another of my Interns who is also a dual degree Podiatry student and a military officer. This scholar also took on the difficult challenge of working with me in the classroom during the Storytelling in Health Care Leadership Seminar held in the last few weeks.

And while the ongoing projects continue, new work begins in March with a new Intern as she completes her MPH practicum with Walden University.  She will be instrumental in the organization, review and selection of additional reading resources for “We Are What We Eat: The nutrition, policy and public health of America’s diet“. This new addition to the team will be working remotely from New Mexico, and will be helping to develop an iTunes U version of our course as a pilot.

I also confess (with pride) there are moments when I review their collective CV’s  and marvel at what  each has accomplished to date.  I am fortunate that they chose to share their strengths — and my mentorship — as they round out their graduate study.

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.

Our 12/10 goal is to explore tools to understand what they do and how they shape the current use of web tools in social and learning environments. Not everyone will like, or see a need for, every tool, but this tool represent a cross section of technology in use in student’s lives.

43things.com is a simple idea and a terrific way to learn about two concepts: social networking and tagging.

First, some background on 43 things. If you are a person who makes a list of goals, or dreams, or things you would like to do, 43 things is a place on line where you can do that. What’s gained from the social network is that if your goal is the same, or similar, to someone else’s goal, the you can see who else on the 43 things web site listed that goal.

Unlike other social network sites, like MySpace, or FaceBook, where you are linked by who you know, on 43things you are linked by what you want to do or achieve. For example, if you want to learn to speak Spanish you can add that to your list and instantly see that 1, 851 other 43things member want to do this as well.

You can view their profiles and see what other goals they have, you can send them encouragement, in the form of a “cheer”, and perhaps, you may find someone with a mutual interest you wish to explore together.

The second tool use of 43things lets you explore the concept of “tagging”. Tagging is a current trend in data collation. Unlike folders, or rigid categories imposed by others, as in the Dewey Decimal system, tags allow diverse groups of people to identify with a few works what a subject or photo or item is and how it should be grouped.

For example, I might tag, or categorize, my series to learn to speak Spanish as “personal improvement” and “language skills” or “foreign language” or “travel”. Now, I have a way of searching other goals people have that are similar to “learning to speak Spanish”. Perhaps someone want to “visit Spain”; I might find them while looking at those goals tagged as “travel”. Someone else may want to learn Portuguese, and I might find them by searching “foreign language”…Or perhaps they speak Spanish and want to learn English, and we may be able to pair up as pen pals, with me writing in Spanish and they writing in English.

43things is one way to begin to understand social networking (and the expectations our students have about how they can communicate via the web. (Students wold like to be able to “instant message” each other when they see a familiar person is also on the class web site at the same time)

It also is a visual way to help understand how folksonomy tools like tagging are changing the way we collate our information.

More resources:

http://www.43things.com/about/view/learn_more

My 43 things list:

http://www.43things.com/person/zenbasser