Frank Starmer
From CharlestonWiki
Frank Starmer grew up in Greensboro, N.C. where he learned from his father that life without curiosity was pretty dull and boring and that one's life was really a life of solving problems. His entire life has, in many ways, been driven by a curiosity and passion to understand what was going on around him in order to solve problems.
He attended Duke University where he graduated with a BS and then MS in electrical engineering, studied for a year at Rice University in the EE department and finished his Ph.D. at the University of North Carolina. He returned to Duke as the first PhD faculty member in the Department of Medicine, a position created by E. A. Stead Jr (see http://easteadjr.org). He served as a hyper-curious learner on the Duke faculty for 32 years and retired in 1997 while holding joint appointments as Professor of Experimental Medicine and Professor of Computer Science. He then moved to Patras Greece for 6 months where he was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Patras. He then accepted a position at MUSC where he served in the Provost's office developing an Internet-centric learning infrastructure. After 8 years, he and his wife, Ellen, moved to Singapore where we was part of the start-up faculty at the Duke-National University of Singapore Graduate Medical School.
Over his career, he and Stead explored ways to make learning and problem solving more fun than anything else. They were motivated by observing the erosion of curiosity in their grandchildren. They viewed Internet-accessible resources as a tool for restoring the joy of learning. They were equally concerned about the educational process and viewed search engines such as Google as the gateway to learning and extending their memory. They fully believed that the days of the traditional just-in-case learning would, over time, be replaced by just-in-time learning. The rational was that both Stead and Starmer's understanding of the forgetting process. They knew from their own activities that infrequently used material, memorized in the past, would soon be forgotten. What Google and the Internet brought to the table was a mechanism for using Internet-accessible resources as an extention of their memory, thus freeing effort traditionaly spent remembering and providing more time for learning, thinking and problem solving.
He may be best known for his curiosity-driven documentation, via photo essay segments, of the building of our biggest bridge: the Arthur Ravenel Bridge, and the associated demolition, or un-building as he calls it, of the Grace and Pearman Bridges. He realized during a visit to the S.C. Aquarium with his grandchildren that he could share the building progress of the Ravenel Bridge with his grandchildren via a web page. It was not long before High Steel, who provided the structural steel for the mainspan and backspans, contacted him, requesting he add over aspects of the building process to his web page. Soon after, PBC, SCDOT and Freyssinet enabled him to get closer looks at the building processes and clarify many of the technical approaches used in building modern cable stay bridges.
Joined by Sparky Witte of Mt. Pleasant, Frank and Sparky tracked the progress of the Ravenel Bridge project and as it was ending, questioned whether there was life after the Ravenel Bridge. The unbuilding of the Grace and Pearman Bridges injected new life into their venture. For them, their web-based photo-essays reflected not only their curiosity of building and unbuilding, but also was an experiment with using the Internet as a way to share with others what they learned. One of the many highlights of their unbuilding adventures was connecting with Mickey Rogers and Ken Tully and discovering the science of implosions.
The hallmark of their web-based characterization of building the Ravenel Bridge and unbuilding the Grace and Pearman Bridges was the use of learning links: a tool to ignite the curiosity of young South Carolina learners as they questioned why this or why that. As with Gene Stead, they were passionate about conveying to others the joy of learning and leading a curiosity-driven life.
