A change in direction

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Two weeks ago, I quit my job at the University of Michigan Library after five great years. This week, I started a new life as a doctoral student at the University of Michigan’s Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education. This site was pretty dormant during my last two years working in library administration, so I’m not sure who reads it anymore besides the people who come for Creative Commons attribution guidance, but I figured it was worth documenting this life change here anyway. Especially since I expect to have all kinds of new and exciting reasons to post in the future. In my last position in library administration there wasn’t nearly so much that I could write about publicly, or that I thought would be interesting to the wider world. I hope that won’t be the case now that I’m a shiny new student full of wonder and excitement and ideas I’ll one day be embarrassed to have published on the internet.

All week in classes and at orientations people have been asking us to explain why we are in this program, and what our research interests are. I expect lots of people who know me already may be wondering the same thing. The answer I keep giving is that I’m in this program because I saw something that was broken in higher education – the system of scholarly and educational publishing – and I felt like I couldn’t fix it from my position as a librarian, approaching the problem one interaction at a time. I wanted to be able to approach it from a place where I might be able to make a bigger impact, at the level of organizational, institutional, and governmental policy, and to do that I was going to need to learn a whole lot more about universities, systems, incentives, statistics, economics, research methods, sociology, psychology, and on and on. I needed to go back to school.

So here I am. At the moment, I feel like an insect between shells. I was in Washington D.C. during the great cicada bloom of 2004, and I remember hearing on NPR that the cicadas are very vulnerable and tender (and delicious) right after they have emerged from their nymph skins, before their new exoskeletons have a chance to develop. That’s how I feel right now (minus the delicious). I’ve shed the safety of a profession I still identify with quite strongly, but I haven’t formed the comforting exoskeleton of the new one yet. The shared culture and language and practice of this new field is foreign to me. I have a pat one-paragraph explanation for why I’m here, but I’m hyper conscious of the fact that my interests are likely to change several times throughout the course of the program, and also, I’m not always convinced that my reason is not terrible (I appear to have mastered imposter syndrome right out of the gate). Being a full-time student again feels a bit like being demoted, especially in a college town where I’m still sometimes mistaken for an undergrad.

But I’m really excited anyway. My professors are excellent, my cohort is excellent, and I’m getting paid to read and learn all day. Speaking of which, I have a couple more chapters to get through for tomorrow…

Open Attribute: Now in WordPress!

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As you may recall, Open Attribute is a growing suite of tools that makes attributing openly licensed content as easy as cut and paste. We started with browser add-ons for Firefox, Chrome, and Opera that detect Creative Commons license information on a website, and pull that information into a properly formatted attribution that complies with the terms of the license. With our browser-based tools, any user who wanted help attributing open content from anywhere on the web could get it.

Today, we released a WordPress plugin into the wild (you can see the little button over in the sidebar), and our Drupal plugin will be out any day now. We’re shifting our focus to open content creators and publishers, people who want to make it easier for their users to attribute them correctly; after WP and Drupal, we have our sights set on learning management systems.

Laura Hilliger, our designer extraordinaire, gave shout-outs to the rest of the team this morning, and I’m inclined to do the same. This group remains a joy to work with, and I’m flabbergasted by how much we have accomplished in such a short time. A tip of the hat to Pat Lockley, our developer who never sleeps (would you say that you’ve become our developer lead, Pat? I think you have), Paul Booker, Hans Lemuet and Nathan Yergler, developers who do appear to sleep from time to time (but do excellent work nonetheless), and our Mozilla cheerleaders Ben Moskowitz and Matt Thompson.

Goooooo team!

ACRL Roundtable: Fostering a Culture of Sharing

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Next week is the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) conference in Philadelphia (my hometown!). I’ll be hosting a roundtable called “Fostering a Culture of Sharing on Campus.”

Full description:

Academic libraries have focused increasing attention over the last few years on encouraging open access (OA) publishing among faculty authors. While some institutions have had success encouraging faculty to adopt OA policies, such a narrow approach is very limited. How can we as librarians work more broadly to foster a culture of sharing on our campuses, one that would improve access not just to peer reviewed scholarly literature, but also to teaching materials, data, textbooks, images, and all the other knowledge and creativity that is generated at colleges and universities?

When: Friday, April 1 · 12:15pm – 1:15pm
Where: Roundtable 27 (Exhibit Hall A, Pennsylvania Convention Center)

I’m very interested to hear what others are already doing to foster a culture of sharing on their campuses, and I also plan to have the group do some brainstorming so that we can walk away with concrete things we can do back at our home institutions. If we get stuck I’m likely to borrow the technique that Jane Park used to such great effect at Drumbeat: 1) Make a list of barriers to sharing on campus. 2) Pick one barrier, and make a list of possible solutions. 3) Pick one solution, and figure out how we might actually implement it.

If you’ll be at ACRL and you’re interested in openness on campus, I hope you’ll join me.

ACRL Roundtable: Fostering a Culture of Sharing by is licensed under a Attribution CC BY.
Based on a work at http://mollykleinman.com/2011/03/22/acrl-roundtable/.

Announcing Open Attribute

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I am so proud to announce the launch of Open Attribute, a suite of tools that makes attributing openly licensed content as easy as cut and paste. Today we are launching browser add-ons for Firefox and Chrome that detect Creative Commons license information on a website, and pull that information into a properly formatted attribution that complies with the terms of the license. We have an Opera add-on coming soon, and our next steps will be to build plugins for WordPress and Drupal. This project is a mere three months in the making, and it has been incredibly exciting to be a part of.

Allow me to indulge in the sharing of a little back story. I’ve been involved with Open Attribute since its inception at the Drumbeat Festival last November. It all started in the peer learning tent on the first day of the festival, where Jane Park from Creative Commons was leading a workshop on open content. We broke into small groups to consider the question “What are the barriers to reuse of open content?” More and more people and institutions are publishing open content, but the reuse rates, as far as anyone can tell, are very low. What’s the point of open content if people aren’t using and building on it? After we came up with a list of barriers, each group focused on one and asked “What might some solutions be to this barrier?”

The group I was in quickly zeroed in on attribution, specifically, how confusing people find it. All of us had heard from individuals who resist using open content because they don’t understand how to comply with the attribution requirement. Workshops and how-to guides and step by step flowcharts haven’t reduced the confusion, so we thought, “What if we can just create attributions automatically? Like the citation generators in academic databases? Click a button and you can have a properly formatted citation in MLA style, APA style, Chicago style. Technically, there is no reason why we couldn’t do a similar thing for attribution.”

As soon as this idea came forward (no one remembers who said it first, but I think it was Jane), we all got really excited. We knew we were on to something. Here was a tool we could build to solve a problem that training alone hadn’t solved. And we had come up with it in a setting that was all about connecting the people with ideas to the people with the skills to make those ideas a reality.

At the end of the first day, we reported out on our idea to the whole Drumbeat festival, and a couple of people from Mozilla quickly reached out to offer support with coordinating the project. Several of us spent the second day of the conference working on an outline of the idea, some basic specifications for the tools, and some text that would help us recruit other interested participants. Most of that work is still hanging out in our neglected wiki page.

Mozilla asked me if I would be the “educator lead” for this project. I had no idea what that meant. I don’t think they did either. Nathan Yergler from Creative Commons was to be the “technical lead”. We created a Google group, participated in a couple of Drumbeat conference calls, and through some magical mix of Mozilla outreach, Twitter, and luck, we ended up with a great team of people who had the right skills and a huge amount of energy. At this point, I don’t think anyone knows or cares who was supposed to be the “lead” on the project; everyone pitched in and worked hard, and we made decisions on everything from development priorities to icon design more or less by consensus. Three months later here we are, launching our first tools.

I have never worked on a project like this before. Partly it’s that it was significantly more technical than anything I’ve ever done, with techier collaborators – I had to learn how to use IRC! But mostly it’s that here was a group of people, from vastly different personal and professional backgrounds, most of whom had never met in person, scattered all over the world, who spent substantial time working on Open Attribute just because they cared about it. Yes yes, this is what free and open software is all about, but I’m not a programmer, so I’d never experienced this kind of distributed collaboration before now. It is awesome. I am so proud of what our team has accomplished, and I’m excited to get to work on the next phase of development. Oh, and also, the add-ons themselves are great. I am already using them. They make attributing CC licensed content so much easier. Go install one.

$2 billion dollars to improve access to educational resources. That’s right. $2 billion.

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Today the Department of Labor announced a solicitation for grant applications under the Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training Grant Program (TAA CCCT), which will invest $2 billion “to provide community colleges and other eligible institutions of higher education with funds to expand and improve their ability to deliver education and career training programs.” All of the materials created with program funds must be released under a CC-BY license. This is $2 billion dollars from the United States government that is in part explicitly to fund the production of open educational resources. Hal Plotkin alluded that something big was coming in his talk at Open Ed in November. This is a really big something.

A mini link round-up:

The full program announcement

The Department of Labor press release

The grants will provide postsecondary institutions with an opportunity to develop and make innovative use of a variety of evidence-based learning materials, including cutting-edge shared courses and open educational resources. These resources would be available online for free, greatly expanding learning opportunities for students and workers. In addition, these learning tools will help schools and students tailor education so each worker can have a better opportunity for success in the classroom and job market.

Mr. Hal Plotkin himself on the grants and their import

The materials produced as a result of these grants will carry the Creative Commons BY license, which also permits their free derivative use for commercial purposes. That means companies, schools, entrepreneurs, and others will be free to bundle, adapt, or customize the learning materials to create new offerings, products, and services. Schools will be able to affordably offer courses in subject areas and at levels of expertise previously beyond their reach.

Creative Commons, whose licenses make the whole thing possible

Congratulations to The Department of Labor, The Department of Education, and others involved in crafting this important, innovative program. Creative Commons is committed to leveraging this opportunity to create a multiplier effect for public dollars to be used on open, reuseable quality content.

Tech President, “Obama puts dollars behind open sourcing education”

[T]he Obama administration is putting a considerable amount of money — $500 million a year for four years, for a total of $2 billion, or what Secretary of Education Arne Duncan described on a press call as “may be the largest investment into two-year institutions since the GI Bill” — behind the principle [of OER].

Chronicle of Higher Ed, “2-Year colleges get details of $2 billion grant program”

The announcement of the program’s details has been long anticipated by community-college officials. President Obama first proposed a major grant program for community colleges in 2009, shortly after taking office. He originally proposed a $12-billion plan to improve community colleges, called the American Graduation Initiative, but that plan collapsed during negotiations over legislation to overhaul student aid and the nation’s health-care system.

People are going to be talking about this for awhile.