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Blowin in The Wind, Old Farts in the Heartland » Blowin In the Wind ! Old Farts in the Heartland.
Blowin In the Wind ! Old Farts in the Heartland.

 The four of us  Cliff Knapp, Tom Smith, Karl Rohnkke and Tom Lindblade have all ended up retiring around the stateline between Wisconsin and Illinois.  Doesn't seem like outdoor adventure guys would end up here, but the little known fact is that we live in the midst of some of the most amazing scenery in the midwest.   Karl lives near Gelena in the northwesten tip of Ilinois.  Galena is a little known gem of a former lead mining town set in the southern edge of an area that didn't get squashed flat by the last glacier, The scenery there is off the charts!  Cliff lives in Oregon Illinois on the Rock River another of Illinois best kept secrets.  Oregon is everyone's favorite fall drive because the combination of fall colors, the river, and the famous Larado Taft Blackhawk statue on a bluff just north of town.  Tom lives in Geneva Wisconsin on Lake Geneva which has been one of the best known summer destinations in the midwest for 150 years.  The lake is one of the largest and most beautiful in Wisconsin and still has many of the huge old Ninteenth century mansions along its shores.  I live in a wonderful older neighborhood in Rockford Illinois.  Rockford is an old industrial city on the Rock River, and we get to take advantage of a central location between Madison and Chicago, they are both about an hour away.  Rockford is small enough that We can still get accross town in 15 minutes at rush hour, a huge improvement over the Chicago suburbs.

So, that is where we are.  About three  years ago, Cliff realized we were relatively close to each other, and suggested we get together occasionally, and we have been doing that ever since.  We have done several paddles together, you can see a video of the last one called "Old Fart Olympics" at <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBnR2hXIfrQ>.  Cliff Knapp, Tom Smith, and I all have profiles posted on the OFA page Karl Rohnke has yet to put one together.  I have a website at http://WWW.hauntedbywaters.com, with a lot of travel, paddling, and AEE videos.

Finally, with this blog, we hope to start a conversation between ourselves, and any readers we might acquire.  Each of us has a lot of years in the field, the total for the four of us is somewhere in the neighborhood of 130 years, and all of us continue to teach, present, write and volunteer.  We are passionate about experiential education and a lot of other things, and hope to write about most of them.

Tom Lindblade
Rockford IL
1/7/08

Posted 12-07-2008 10:50 PM by Tom Lindblade
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Comments

Tom Smith wrote re: Blowin In the Wind ! Old Farts in the Heartland.
on 12-08-2008 9:33 AM

Well, this is the trial to join the Old Farts blog.  It is cold-cold here in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin today --- a good day to be inside and trying to do some computer work.  So, let's see if we can add this to the list.   More later if it works.

Cliff Knapp wrote re: Blowin In the Wind ! Old Farts in the Heartland.
on 12-10-2008 11:57 AM

Tom Lindblade's comments about a new metaphor for experiential education has me thinking. First, are we talking about a metaphor for what we do, or simply a descriptive label for a professional field? I've thought a lot about labels for our field and have seen them change with time. Having written this, I also see how some labels have stayed around for a long time. One example of this is "outdoor education". L. B. Sharp started to use this term in the literature in the early 1940s. Others followed and the term became well-established in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. Then the term, "environmental education" seemed to take its place in some programs. This website uses the term, 'outdoor education" and seems to take in a variety of professional interests. Why is this a clear label that has survived almost 70 years? Is it any clearer than Experiential Education? I don't think so. Perhaps we need to do a better job of understanding the term, experience, and then explain it better to others. We can define the term through a description of its purpose or purposes and through some clear examples of what it means to us. I'm not sure that the terms, "leadership" and "challenge" are really that clear by themselves. We still have the job of explaining how we are going to promote leadership and present challenges to the groups we service. Thanks Tom for the thought provoking introduction to an important topic.

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