All posts in community

The Write Stuff, Portland - April 6

Posted March 12th, 2013 by Bill

On April 6th, at Meriwether Lewis School, in Portland, OR, we will be hosting an open content authoring event. The event will be run unconference style, where participants will be able to work with peers as they research, create, and revise educational material. The day is free to attend, and lunch will be provided.

Eventbrite - The Write Stuff - Portland 2013

Based on past events we have run, we anticipate that most participants will be interested in one of five related tracks:

People looking to revise individual lessons;
People building/creating complete courses;
People supporting teachers/departments as they create their learning resources;
People who are not working on anything specific, but want to help convert existing openly licensed content into a more usable format;
People looking to learn more about open licensing, and how transitioning to open content can save money, increase teacher effectiveness, and be incorporated into ongoing teacher professional development.

If you are currently working on any curriculum, bring any resources you have collected, and we will work on these resources during the day. While there will be opportunities to discuss the philosophy behing open content, the main focus of these days is on the work: how can people get more benefit from the same effort by using a more open approach to their content?

If you are not working on any specific project, but want to work with a community of educators on creating open content, please come! There is a huge body of information that is high quality, but is not in a format or structure that supports reuse. With some time and work, we can fix that.

If your role in the educational world is to provide a vision for your organization, a portion of the day will also be dedicated to looking at how using open content can serve as a catalyst for transformation within a school. One of the things we will focus on is a recurring theme that we have seen as we have talked with teachers about open content: the planning process that every teacher does as they prepare for class is nearly identical to the the planning process for creating open content. The benefits of open content, however, accrue over time. Working with open content creates the implicit expectation that collaboration with peers is a normal and expected part of the preparation process.

This day is being organized by Bill Fitzgerald, Jeff Graham, and Andrea Burton, from FunnyMonkey. Tim Lauer has graciously allowed us to hold this event at Meriwether Lewis Elementary, and Rachel Wente-Chaney has arranged for lunch for all participants, sponsored by the Oregon Virtual School District.

So, what are you waiting for? Sign up to let us know you are coming, and we look forward to seeing you there!

Let's Not Eat Our Own

Posted January 27th, 2013 by Bill

Last week, a group of people released a document with the ambitious title of "A Bill of Rights and Principles for Learning in the Digital Age."

The work was posted in several places (and I'm probably leaving a few out):

Hack Education, from Audrey Watters;
The Udacity blog; interestingly, the Udacity blog is the only announcement that makes the claim that the "Bill of Rights" was originally posted on EdSurge;
Cathy Davidson, on the HASTAC blog;
edSurge, from Betsy Corcoran;
Bonnie Stewart, on her working blog;
Jesse Stommel, at Hybrid Pedagogy.

The document was also posted on GitHub to simplify the process of making changes (and we will talk more about this later).

Out of all the signatories, only Audrey Watters (to the best of my knowledge) posted any type of reflection about the process, and concerns with the document. Her post on what was left out and missed in the document is required reading for anyone looking to understand the larger issues around the idea of a Learner's Bill of Rights. Additionally, to the best of my knowledge, only Audrey disclosed that her travel expenses were paid by Udacity. Some of the other people who wrote about the event mentioned that the event was "convened" by Sebastian Thrun, but that doesn't get specific about who paid for them to get there. Given that some of the other signatories are local to Palo Alto, many probably didn't incur any expense, but there were enough people coming from places that require both air travel and lodging that it would be interesting to know who paid for what.

Returning to the "Bill of Rights," the document contains a curious sentence in the opening paragraph:

"We convened a group of people passionate about learning, about serving today's students, and about using every tool we could imagine to respond better to the needs of students in a global, interactive, digitally connected world."

The leading "We", copied in every announcement, implies that the group convened itself. While I understand the value of using the first person plural to create the impression of community, a more accurate sentence would probably be, "Udacity convened a group of people..."

It was also interesting to read how the Chronicle of Higher Education covered the piece. They open their article with this gem:

A dozen educators met last month in Palo Alto, Calif., to discuss the future of higher education.

This opening is equal parts grandiose and inaccurate - while I understand that the Chronicle needs to make this sound exciting in order to generate pageviews, the hue and cry about the demise of higher ed can lead a skeptical individual like myself to think that people might be - just maybe - stoking fears of a crisis to make things sound more dire, and therefore more interesting. But, more precisely, the folks that wrote the Bill of Rights are not a group of educators. Some are, but a sizeable portion are CEOs and management types who are definitely not educators. Either the Chronicle doesn't understand the difference, or didn't care to be fully accurate.

Ian Bogost posted an interesting critique of the "Bill of Rights" but his piece is interesting both for what he leaves in and for what he leaves out. Here is how he structures his opening:

The Bill of Rights and Principles for Learning in the Digital Age is a new document authored and signed by twelve scholars, technologists, and entrepreneurs including Duke professor and author Cathy Davidson, organizational technologist John Seely Brown, and Udacity CEO Sebastian Thrun. It's been making the rounds among those of us interested in such topics, also receiving coverage at The Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed.

Note the three links: to the GitHub repo created by Audrey, and to two articles.

Later in the piece, Ian quotes from and links to a piece by Kate Bowles. However, nowhere in the piece does he link to or even mention the existence of Audrey Watter's critique of the document. This is a curious omission, and it makes the document incomplete, especially considering that Audrey's breakdown expresses real and valid concerns about the "Bill of Rights." The omission of any reference to Audrey's critique becomes more glaring when Ian discusses the release of the document on GitHub:

For example, the authors embrace the rhetoric of openness by having published their manifesto on Github, a web-based hosting service that interoperates with a popular software versioning control system. Publishing non-software materials to Github is nothing new, and it's true that version control is sometimes useful for documents beyond source code. But by presenting the "official" version of the "Bill of Rights" on a website widely associated with open-source and open-culture values, its authors gain the credibility and appeal of the appearance of openness, with or without its reality.

Looking at this paragraph in more detail, there are some issues. First, there were multiple versions of this document published, on multiple locations. Arbitrarily namimg one version "official" is problematic. Second, the implicit criticism of this paragraph is that using GitHub for document versioning is a misuse of the site; this is a small deal, but when paired with the charge of openwashing (one of the unpardonable sins within many open source communities) the person who put the document on GitHub is clearly being hung out to dry. Including a link to Audrey's critique of the "Bill of Rights" would have provided a valuable context; without that context, the conversation is incomplete, and arguably inaccurate.

And in thinking about the document, how it was disseminated, and the reaction, here is where I get stuck. There is a lot in Ian's analysis that I agree with, but when we are making critiques, we need to be aware of context within which we are talking. According to Audrey, she began getting hateful emails from male programmers after Ian's post. And this reality drives home the point: when we are making critiques, we have an obligation to be as complete as possible, and to pay careful attention to the contexts surrounding our critique. It's worth remembering that white men, and especially straight white men, get to play on the lowest difficulty setting.

Ian's full piece is on his blog. Despite the observations laid out here, it's a worthwhile read, and I strongly recommend going through it in its entirety.

Full disclosure here: Audrey is a friend of mine, and we had the opportunity to talk this weekend at EduCon. In those conversations, she shared the contents of some of the emails she received from people who felt the need to attack her personally via a private communication. And it's not okay. And to be clear, I'm not a huge fan of the "Bill of Rights." I'm still sorting out my reactions, but when Ian Bogost says "the effort may really amount to a branding exercise, or a way to set the terms of a debate" that feels about right. But regardless of how we feel about the document, the process, the resulting conversation, and who benefits, we have an obligation not to eat our own. I'm leery of the document; by nature I'm suspicious of any group that self-identifies as the "most interesting people" - but, giving voice to concerns requires a complete, open dialogue. Omitting details and losing sight of context doesn't further the conversation.

A General Guide For Creating Open Content

Posted January 16th, 2013 by Bill

In our experience working with people and communities around open content, one of the misconceptions we see regularly is that the process of creating open content differs from creating content that is not openly licensed. Fortunately, content is content; and if you have ever created a resource for use in your class, a piece of documentation, a video, a podcast, a blog post, shared a picture online, etc, then you have done the same type of work you will need to do to release openly licensed content.

A primary difference between openly licensed content and content that is encumbered under restrictive copyright is how we view the potential of that content over time. Content that is encumbered under a restrictive license is essentially fixed in time, where openly licensed content can evolve over time through use and reuse. The longer life of open content can shape how we release open content (for example, a polished video could be released with a link to the unedited source videos), but this is an issue that does not need to be directly related to how we create the initial resource. As we discussed earlier, we generally recommend a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license for openly licensed content.

In this post, we will define a general process that we have used when creating resources. We need to emphasize at the outset that there are a lot of ways to do this right. It's also worth noting at the outset that creating open content does not need to be complex (feel free to skip to the end and grab the tl;dr version). Different people have different creative processes, and people should use the means that have worked best for them in the past. The only real way to do it wrong is to eschew planning altogether. Creating quality material doesn't happen by accident, and a coherent process helps separate writing from editing from planning. In our experience, a clear separation of the different stages of the creative process has been helpful to bring increased focus to each stage.

Another facet that we will include in our planning docs includes some tools/accomodations for a team of people in different geographic areas working remotely. There are some parts of the work that require different types of collaboration, and we will highlight what has worked for us in the different stages.

Define the scope

Before we get started writing anything, we need to get a sense of what we want or need to write. This initial scope should be looked at as a starting point that will evolve over time, but without some initial focus, the work to follow will be too diffused to be efficient. In general terms, at this stage we start to define the boundaries we want to cover with this resource, and what is out of scope.

A good goal to mark the completion of this stage is a working outline; this is a living document that can be revised as the project takes shape.

For a team of people working together using a Google Doc or a Wiki to author the outline works well. Planning can be done via tools like conference calls, Skype, or Google Hangouts. With that said, I also wouldn't underestimate the usefulness of plain old-fashioned phone calls. Many cell phones and home phone plans support three way calls, and for many situations that's both perfect and convenient.

Collect resources

Once we have a sense of what we want to write or create, we can start to gather related resources. Ideally, this research will uncover a pre-existing, openly licensed resource that meets our needs perfectly, which we can use with little to no additional modifications.

Realistically, though, this research will uncover a range of information of varying quality, accessible under a range of licenses. We will cover licensing later in this post; at this stage we focus on the usefulness of the resources we uncover. As we collect resources, we can evaluate their potential usefulness through a series of questions:

Of the existing content uncovered via our research, how much can be used as is? How much needs to be revised prior to use? How much provides a useful structure? How much provides a cautionary tale (aka, this is NOT what we want)?

With some research completed, what still needs to be written?

As we collect resources, we should cross-reference these resources against our working outline. This will help determine how much of the resource can be curated, and how much needs to be written. Over time, it also helps us split our resources into three general groups:

Resources that are quoted, or otherwise incorporated into our work; aka, the list of sources and/or works cited;
Resources that are relevant, and helped refine the scope and direction of the project, but were not quoted or otherwise incorporated; aka, the list of works consulted;
Resources that are not relevant.

As with any type of work, citation and attribution are essential.

As we collect resources, we need to ensure that we store them in a place that is centrally accessible. If we are working within a distributed team, that place should probably be online. As you store resources, adding annotations/notes will make your life - and the lives of any collaborators - easier over time.

At the very least, use a tool like a Wiki or a Google Doc to save your citations. Zotero is also an excellent choice, as is something like Diigo. Again, the tool we use is less important than actually using one. If we are creating these resources as part of a group effort, then having the list of resources should be available to group members online.

Check licenses

If, over the course of our research, we uncover a resource/resources that we might want to incorporate or remix into our work, we need to check how the material is licensed. If the licensing isn't clear, or if the resource is encumbered with a restrictive license, we have a couple options.

First, if we want to use an existing resource in its entirety and it is not openly licensed, contact the author and ask permission. Many times, authors are happy to grant permission to incorporate their work.
Second, if we only want to use an excerpt, quoting a small portion of the resource and citing it is within the bounds of fair use.
A third option would be to provide a description of a resource, and then link to it so people can access it in its entirety. Obviously, the link approach is only viable for web-accessible material. In the case of material that is not available online, providing an offline reading list is a viable approach.

As licenses are checked, the list of resources should be updated with the new information.

Finalize the working outline

Once we have our resources collected, we can finalize the working outline. This requires that we clearly identify any information/materials that need to be created from scratch, and any sources that will be helpful for the writing/creation process.

If any specific types of media (video, audio, images, infographics, charts, etc) will help to enhance our resource, now is the time to dig into what will work best. It's also worth noting that media can be added later in the process, and that nailing the organization and the structure is a pre-requisite for a sophisticated use of media.

At the end of this stage, the working outline for the project will be translateable into a to-do list. Each component of the outline will have either a list of resources that can be curated to flesh out the section, or a person responsible for writing the material for that section. If you are working as part of a team, you will all have specific components to complete.

During this stage, sorting out the responsibilities of who is doing what can be managed via a blend of synchronous and asynchronous communication. Ideally, the outline we created in the first step (when we defined the scope of this project) will have evolved into this more complete working outline.

This is also a good time to emphasize that even a "finalized" working outline can be revised. Remember - we are creating open content - the idea that this work will be edited, reworked, and improved is implicit in the process. Make it good, and be comfortable with the reality that someone, somewhere will have thoughts and ideas on how to make it better.

Also, if you are working within a group of people, this stage - along with writing, assembling, and editing - can really benefit from face to face interactions, with as many people as possible working in the same place. If it's not possible for everyone to get together face to face, use phone calls, skype, chat, Google hangouts, etc, to support real time communication.

Write and/or Curate

Once the working outline has reached something that resembles final form, any new material can be written. Curated resources can often require transitional passages to stitch them together. As with any act of creation, don't worry about making this perfect on the first pass.

This part of the work is largely a solitary endeavor - hunker down, stow your self-critical tendencies, and get an initial draft out. It doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to be editable.

Assemble the work

Using the working outline as a guide, the various components of the resource can now be sequenced and pulled together. At this stage, the work should be reasonably complete, and the various sections should be ready for editing.

For a lot of us, this is where the process of creating open content ends. A lot of us have fairly complete but rough resources littering our office space, our hard drives, our blogs, our wikis, etc, and when asked why we don't release them out under an open license, we say something like: "It's not ready."

And really, we all need to get over it. Share it out under an open license, so someone else can discover it, and start with the next step:

Edit

This stage is where additional polish gets applied to a resource, and where something can be transformed from useful in a single context to generally useful.

This stage can and should include adding new content and removing existing content, even if the new content had been written from scratch. Revising the working outline is also a possibility.

If you are crunched for time, working solo, trying to catch up on sleep, trying not be a workaholic, you have permission to skip this step - as we have said before, editing can be done by anyone who wants to provided you release the material under an open license. The only way to ensure that no one will ever edit the resource is to not share it out.

Publish

In this context, the act of publishing a resource means that a resource is made available online under an open license, and ideally in a reusable format. And of those two details, the open license is the more important detail. Data in a proprietary format can be edited into a more usable format if it's openly licensed.

Where the resource gets published is up to you. Start a blog at wordpress.com. Create a Tumblr, join Posterous, and attach files to your posts as needed. Share information in Google docs. Put videos on YouTube. There are myriad ways to put data on the web. Pick one, use an open license, and let it rip.

All this is, really

Despite the copious verbage of this post, the process of creating open content does not need to be complex.

Plan what you want to write;
Research the topic;
Curate what you can, and write what you have to; and then
Publish your work under an open license.

There are really only two differences about creating openly licensed content and how most of us prepare and use resources, and they are more philosophical shifts than things that take time: first, open content needs to be released under a license that allows reuse, and second, when we create open content we need to view our work as simultaneously ours, and as a potential starting point for someone else.

Open Content Is Only Partially About Content

In this post, we have focused on the process of creating open content.

But really, creating open content is only partially about content. Traditionally, when we think about open content, we draw a line between open content and a textbook, and open content gets relegated to another version of a textbook, but licensed differently. And, seen through a narrow perspective, open content can be that. Open content can be used as a replacement for textbooks.

But it doesn't need to end there. If a teacher has the opportunity to work with a community of other educators to create the material they will use in the classroom, how will that affect their subject matter expertise? If working within a learning community to create openly licensed materials became a regular part of ongoing professional development, we could start to have professional development that is consistently meaningful. Peer mentoring looks a lot like working within a team to create openly licensed content. If teachers are working on open content with other educators (or even non-educators) outside their building, they are learning about different ways of doing things, different sources, different materials that are relevant to their work.

What implicit message would it give to our kids if they were able to see their teacher as an expert who, as part of their daily work, created the tools they used to work? What would it say to our kids if they were able to have a role in creating or revising the content for the next year's class? Because really, for some classes, having the outgoing students highlight give guidance, and edits, on what worked and what didn't would be a great final assessment, and would provide an interesting way of seeing what people learned. We talk a lot about the need for students to be creators, but we tend not to model the creation as much as we should.

With open content, the content becomes a catalyst for an ongoing process of creation, community engagement, learning, and reflection. For people looking for a practical use for a learning network, look no further. Open content can provide the resources that we use to run our learning environments, but it can also provide the starting point for ongoing professional growth within communities of practice.

Image Credit: "Devil's Tower" taken by Holly Hayes, published under an Attribution NonCommercial license.

When We Talk About Open Content, This Is What We Talk About

Posted January 1st, 2013 by Bill

Over the next six months, we have three scheduled events supporting communities developing open content. The three scheduled events are taking place on the following dates and times:

January 24th, in Philadelphia, at Science Leadership Academy
March 9th - San Francisco
April 6th - Portland, at Lewis Elementary.

These events are being run unconference style. We will be documenting the planning (both logistics and content-related) to run a successful event over the next few weeks. Our goal is to create an replicable blueprint that supports anyone, anywhere putting on their own open content event. We will update this post with information on the San Francisco and Portland events in early 2013.

We have also talked with a few other people in different cities, and it is possible that we will add other dates to this list. If you are interested in hosting an event, please be in touch. We want to see community focused open content authoring events become a common part of the landscape.

As part of our work with open content, we are also working on freely available open source web-based software that will allow communities to create, distribute, remix, and redistribute their own open content. This software allows organizations to create their own resources, texbooks, and supporting material, which they can then share if, when, and how they choose. We have already built the tools that allow this content to be exported in ePub 3.0 and .mobi formats, so that any content created within this site can be browsed on the web, and/or exported and read on Android and iOS devices. We are also putting considerable focus on the user experience of authors, and of the design of the site across all devices that connect to the internet. As part of this work (as well as for some client work) we recently built Zoundation, a Foundation-based theme. This earlier writeup provides additional background on Foundation.

Our goal is to be as close to fully transparent in our work as possible; any software we release will be freely available under an open source license, and as an installable site built in Drupal, and we will regularly blog about our progress and our process. After the Open Content event in Philadelphia, we are presenting at Educon on this work, and looking to grow the network of potential collaborators. To be clear, when I say "collaborators" in this context, I mean both technological and educational, as both skillsets are required to make this grow in a sustainable way.

While we have written about open content in the past, we find it both useful and necessary to revisit our definitions and make sure that we're not working on any assumptions that are out of date, or otherwise crazy. In general terms, when we talk about open content, this is part of the foundation holding up the conversation.

Granularity

When creating open content, it needs to be easy to break a collection of resources up into its component parts. As an example of what we mean, a unit on the French Revolution can stand on its own, but someone coming along looking to adapt the material should be able to extract the information directly relevant to the Tennis Court Oath, and only use that.

Some formats (pdf, flash, SCORM, etc), regardless of how the content is licensed, require work to disassemble into their component parts and reuse the material. At times, organizations that market their work as open put technological barriers between users and content as a means to complicate the process of reuse. Keeping the concept of granularity in mind when designing systems for open content, and when authoring open content, can help ensure that no unnecessary barriers to use and reuse are placed between people and information.

Licensing

Licensing is a topic worthy of many posts; over the years, many of these posts have been written by people far more knowledgeable on the subject than me.

As a matter of personal preference, I strongly prefer the Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike license. This license allows for reuse and modification, by anyone, in any work, provided they are not using it it commercially, provided they attribute our original work, and provided they share it under a license that supports non-commercial reuse. Part of the reason I like this license is that if someone wants to reuse my work commercially, all they need to do is ask. The non-commercial clause is a lot better than the status quo, and the need to ask permission is the same as material covered under a traditional copyright.

However, when remixing content from various sources, the combination of the Non-Commercial and Share-Alike licenses can prevent reuse of content from different sources. As an example, a person has content from two sources. One is licensed under the Non-Commercial Attribution Share-Alike license. The second source is licensed under an Attribution Share-Alike license.

The Attribution part is easy, but things start to get dicey with the Share-Alike portion of the license. It's very unclear what license the derivative work can or should be released under. Within the FunnyMonkey office, Jeff Graham has been telling me this for years, and due to my innate stubbornness I have only come to realize the accuracy of what he has been telling me in the last few months. This post on data migration also demonstrates some of the issues at play here; while the focus of the writeup is data migration, the section on License Chaining is directly relevant to open content.

And, until this gray area gets cleaned up, we are advocating for use of the Attribution Share-Alike license. The thinking behind this is that the Share-Alike component of the license will prevent anyone from appropriating open content and interfering with the free reuse of derivative works. It's a good thing the textbook companies don't have many lawyers, and that they aren't litigious about inane details.

The short version: licensing is not simple, but the Attribution Share-Alike license simplifies more problems than it creates.

Sharing, and the various layers of sharing

So far in this post, we have spent some time focusing on the ideal setup, rather than the practicalities.

However, all open content becomes open through a simple act of sharing. There are countless reasons people give to not share their material: It's not good/coherent/clear/polished enough; I only wrote this for me; I need to be able to collect usage data, etc, etc, etc. However, let's set these arguments aside, and ask a simple question:

What happens if a piece of work gets shared out in any format, be it a pdf, a word-processing document, a google doc, something linked within a Tumblr or Posterous - really, just some low level, relatively straightforward mechanism to share?

First, no one might find it. But, that's no different than the status quo. If work isn't shared, no one will find it there either.

Second, no one might use it. See answer above.

But the reality is, if its on the internet, someone, somewhere will stumble across it. And, out of the people stumbling across it, someone will find it useful.

Reuse cannot occur without the initial act of sharing starting things off.

And yes, I realize that earlier, I was talking about granularity, and the need for formats that support reuse, etc. And all of that still holds, but if we look at creating open content as a continually ongoing process of refinement, redistribution, and reuse, information in less usable formats can be curated and converted into more usable formats. The process of bringing good information into reusable formats is one of the key goals of the Open Content Barn Raisings that we are holding.

And it all starts with sharing what you have created under a license that supports reuse.

Web to print

I have seen many open content initiatives get mired in the perceived need to support a web to print (not "ctrl-P" print, but "professional textbook" print) workflow. This is a business or organizational need, not a learning need. It's 2013; between a responsive design that works on the web across devices, .mobi and ePub export, and the ability to (ctrl-P) print sections, we have the majority of learner-centered use cases covered. If an organization needs to be able to support print on demand, they can develop a workflow that makes sense for their organization - this is a problem that has been solved in many ways, but it is not a foundational concern for learners. I haven't encountered many learners reading content on their phone saying, "I really wish I could convert this free ebook into a textbook I could pay sixty dollars for."

Open Content as Teacher Professional Development

If a group of teachers are working together to develop resources to both use in their classes and get reused internationally, that sounds like a great use of professional development hours. One of the benefits of having content reused over time, across geographic areas, is that teachers working within the community will have the benefit of feedback on their work from a broader range of professionals than is possible within a single school, district, college, or university.

We have talked about this before, but a broader use and adoption of open content has the potential to shift how we think about Teacher Professional Development. Additionally, if we look at a body of open content that has been created by a group of educators over time, that body of work begins to look suspiciously like a professional work portfolio.

Closing Notes

Open Content is about many things, but a facet that surfaces repeatedly over time has to do with choices. Using open content is a clear way of demonstrating to teachers and learners that we have options. Over the next few weeks, in the lead up to the first event in January, we'll start documenting the planning steps needed to hold an event, and the steps needed to create good open content.

Image Credit: "Climbing" taken by Alex Indigo, published under an Attribution license.

Getting Better Faster - Thoughts From BADCamp

Posted November 3rd, 2012 by Bill

While down in Berkeley for BADCamp, I had the chance to go out to lunch with Jeff Graham, Chach Sikes, and Catrina Roallos. We got to talking about ways to help people working in technology (or wanting to expand what they do with technology) learn the requisite skills needed to continue to grow.

We talked about ways of finding community - either within open source projects or in hackfests - and about how the connections there can be key. And we also talked about how learning leading edge development best practice - for both front end and back end developers - really isn't widely available within schools.

One thing Chach brought up in the conversation stuck with me. When she brought it up, she made sure to point out that it was advice that she had been given from several people over time, but the reason it stuck with me is because it's so simple, but it's the kind of thing that can help you no matter your experience level (and really, it can help both within tech and in other disciplines).

The advice Chach gave is this: If you work on soving a problem for more than half an hour and you are still stuck, stop and ask a question.

This is some seriously awesome advice. First, it ensures that a person is making a concerted effort to solve the problem on their own before reaching out. This helps avoid obvious and/or lazy questions. Doing some initial legwork also leads to informed questions; an informed, focused question is a lot easier to answer than a general fishing expedition.

This approach also assumes that you have a community, or at least a place where you can ask the question. If you don't know where to ask questions about your specific project, places like StackExchange or even Quora can be good places to start. But, the thing that's awesome about asking a question is that it implicitly acknowledges that none of us ever needs to work in a vacuum, and that it's okay to not know the answer to everything. And, in situations where you don't know the answer, seeking out smart people is a great idea.

Additionally, setting a time limit helps ensure that you don't get lost down a rabbit hole. If we work on something without success for too long, it's natural and normal to get discouraged, frustrated, or angry, and these states of mind rarely lead to our best work. We all have different thresholds, but setting a time limit helps minimize the chance that we'll lose half a day trying to chase down a solution.

As we continued talking over lunch, it was pretty obvious that experienced developers have work habits that are only tangentially related to technology, but that these habits are a key part to their continued success. Individually, none of these habits are a magic bullet, but taken collectively, each strategy helps create incremental improvement.

And that's how we get better.

Over the next few weeks and months, we are planning on doing some work around helping people learn both the techical skills and the less tangible habits and strategies that allow people to have more options in their lives. Things are in the early stages yet, and we'll be updating here with details as things progress, but as we get started on this path, I wanted to share this out. There are simple things we do - habits that work for us and help us work more effectively - that can be shared and taught, and that will help others. One of the things I love about the advice Chach shared is that it can be put to use pretty much immediately, and it can work anywhere - for Drupal developers, for designers, for sysadmins, or outside technology.

What are some tricks, habits, or strategies that have worked for you?

Portland Education Hackfest

Posted June 2nd, 2012 by Bill

On Saturday, June 2, the team at FunnyMonkey participated in Hack for Portland Schools. The event was designed to brainstorm and, if possible, build, tools that help foster connections between schools and their surrounding communities. Research within Portland shows that nearly 85% of people living in Portland do not have a child in the school system. Despite this, however, many of these people have a strong interest in contributing to their schools.

However, despite the desire of people to help schools, and despite some areas where schools say that they would like community support, there are still ummet needs. These unmet needs are exacerbated now more than ever, as public education has seen several successive years of funding cuts.

Our app aims to facilitate connections between schools, the professionals within schools, the students learning alongside these professionals, and people outside schools who are in a position to help.

It's also worth noting that the toolkit we are building can be used equally well by a school, a school district, or a non-profit organization bringing goods and services to schools and communities.

Our app lowers multiple barriers in connecting schools/organizations and volunteers:

It allows schools/organizations to define and publicize the areas where they want help;
It helps volunteers identify the areas where their expertise or resources will do the most good;
It eliminates the need for a third party to hold onto information for a school, and for a school or district to be dependent on a third party system;
It creates a mobile-friendly signups that work on any modern mobile device.

Using our app, a school/district/organization can create a mobile version of all signup opportunities. So, when people are doing outreach, they can sign up volunteers on the spot, and immediately get them into their database. This eliminates the gap between a person's desire to contribute, and the inertia that must be overcome to actually follow through and contribute. This also allows the organization seeking volunteers to do more focused outreach, as they can communicate with people who have already expressed an interest to contribute to a specific project.

Ideas for future expansion include:

integration with other donor apps via their apis (Kickstarter, Donors Choose, etc);
for organizations serving a broader geographical area, the addition of geographic data to allow for mapping of opportunities;
iCal integration;
in larger install, including more metadata about events to allow for more precise categorization of events
[your idea here] - please share any additional ideas in the comments

This app is currently available on Github - for people who just want to get started, the entire codebase is available for download. It runs within Julio, our distribution for schools and districts. This app also leverages the very awesome Registration module made by ThinkShout.

National Standards and Local Communities

Posted November 27th, 2011 by Bill

The goal of state and national standards is laudable: ensure that every kid, anywhere in the States, gets an education of comparable content and quality. However, that idealism and good intent can get lost in a variety of ways; Tom Hoffman breaks down the various shortcomings of Commmon Core pretty effectively.

But, another side effect of national standards like Common Core is that it stimulates a need for curriculum and assessments aligned to these standards. To meet this new requirement at the state level, a service provider would need, in very general terms:

a content team available to align content to the new standards;
a team to design and write new assessments, or to adapt existing assessments;
in-house expertise to align the new/adapted assessments to the standards;
marketing copy and sales teams to push these materials to decision makers at both the state and district level.

Obviously, the details required to get this done go beyond this general list. Equally obviously, the organizations best positioned to move into this new space are the ones who have been selling to education prior to the existence of the Common Core standards, and/or organizations who played a role in creating the Common Core standards.

As of March 31, 2010, there were 65 original Endorsing partners; currently (late November, 2011) the list has swelled to 154 partners. It's also interesting to look at the number of organizations that are Common Core Endorsing Partners, and also actively lobby at the national level around Education.

It's not surprising that companies and organizations that were selling to education, and who were active in developing the Common Core standards, would also be active in paying lobbyists to help influence the legislation that would tilt the balance toward the infrastructure they were developing to service the need they were helping to create. It's also perfectly legal, but it points out a consequence of national-level standards that have gained widespread adoption within the states: Now that states have adopted these standards, schools and districts within these states now need to adopt them. In this way, national standards streamline a process where local communities send money outside their local economy by buying products manufactured by national or multinational corporations.

Leaving the influence of lobbying on our educational system aside, I would love to see an educational system where local schools could partner with local independent booksellers to buy texts, and local libraries to assemble reading lists that could be accessed by students. Setting up a system that encouraged and supported schools to work with businesses and institutions within their local communities would actually enrich the communities. When a school district sends money to Pearson, or Scholastic, or McGraw Hill, or any other multinational textbook and assessment company, that money is gone from the community, forever. An equivalent investment in the local economy would both create work and provide a needed boost to local institutions within communities - this would have an immediate benefit to these communities. It's also difficult to argue with tying schools, students, and communities together within a strong public library system.

However, national-level standards require a national-level distribution system, and local booksellers do not have the time of the expertise to align their merchandise with standards. While schools and districts have the expertise to develop assessments that align with standards, most are not funded to do this work at scale at the local level (FWIW, I'm sure that there are some schools that are doing this, and are doing a great job - please let me know about them in the comments). In this way, state and national level standards help ensure that local money leaves communities and flows to multinational corporations. The fact that these same multinational companies get increased access to lawmakers via their lobbying efforts doesn't help.

Image Credit: "Taj's broken arm" taken by Craig Allen, published under an Attribution license.

Unconferences! For All My Friends! Or, Putting the You in Unconference

Posted June 6th, 2011 by Bill

Unconferences, peer-driven professional development, and teacher-centered professional development are all things I would like to see become more widely adopted. With the process of meeting and having an unconference becoming more familiar, and with EdCamp, a new flavor of unconference gaining visibility in the space, I've been thinking about ways that unconferences could become more prevalent as a recognized, even mainstream, form of professional development.

As luck would have it, I tend to think when I cook, and this last weekend was prime grilling weather. So, here are some reasonably well-charred thoughts about how I would love to see K12-focused unconferences grow and develop.

Reach out to union leaders and district officials

EdCamp appears to be more popular among the educators already active on Twitter or other social networks, and they occur largely outside the structure of the organizations in which the participants work. As part of an excellent broader post, Dan Callahan provides a brief explanation of the thought process:

[E]arly on in the planning process, we made some serious decisions in support of our vision of what Edcamp is and should be. Foremost among those was the decision to not pursue PD credits for Edcamp. In these early stages that we’re working in, Edcamp needs the high-energy, hungry for participation crowd. Without those kinds of participants, Edcamp falls flat on its face.

While I understand some of the concerns here, I disagree with the conclusions for an unconference at this stage. To start, the "high energy, hungry for participation crowd" will come regardless, because they want what the camp offers. For the first EdCamp Philadelphia, pursuing PD credits would have been premature, as the nature and value of the event were unproven. However, now that there have been two of these events in Philadelphia, and people can articulate the value of the event, it is time to rethink the value of PD credits.

PD credits would help get more teachers into the mix, and if we have confidence in the model we need to welcome other voices with different viewpoints, and different concerns and needs. If what we want is a face to face meeting of people we know via twitter, then PD credits aren't needed - let's just have a tweetup and call it a day. If, however, we want to move beyond a small portion of professional educators, PD credits would help.

Having PD credits available for unconference-style events creates some additional opportunities that would not exist otherwise. As just one example, if an EdCamp was available to teachers within selected districts on a district-wide teacher professional development workday, teachers could opt to attend the EdCamp as one of several choices.

Also, to be clear: the main reason I am advocating for increased outreach to unions and district administrators is not because their approval or sanction is critical to running a successful K12 centered unconference, or even for current models of K12 unconferences to gain increased popularity. The main reason that union leaders and district admins need to get included into the conversation is to educate them about how unconferences work, and how they are an effective form of professional development. A smart union leader would do well to look at the unconference model, as it provides a clear way for more people to understand the value of an experienced teacher. Veteran teachers have a wealth of experience to share, and the unconference format is an ideal way to do it.

And, if reaching out to district admins and unions can save just one school from the drive-by intellectual mugging of a Willard Daggett, then our work is done.

Encourage more sharing of immediately usable knowledge

Gerald Aungst sums it up nicely:

I seem to be missing the steak, and I’ve been wondering why. It got me thinking about why edcamp still feels powerful and important to me, even though I walk away from many sessions feeling as though nothing of substance actually took place.

Given that unconferences are driven by the needs and desires of the participants, this is an easy one to address: if you want to learn about something, run a session on it. Use the session as an excuse to push your own mastery and exploration of a topic you want to know better. A session designed for teachers to share insights on how they structure their classrooms would be incredibly useful, and it would be made more useful by having students join the conversation.

Another way to help get more immediately useful information would be to give every participant a piece of paper on the way in with the question, "What is the single most useful classroom technique you have ever used?" The sheets could be collected after lunch, and conference organizers could collate and blog the responses. At the risk of stating the obvious, if you want different information, ask a different question.

Or, teachers could just blog about the techniques that they have used in the class, with no EdCamp necessary. If EdCamp attendees interested in gleaning practical tips made a point of asking fellow attendees about ideas and tools that could be implemented immediately - and then blogging these ideas - a body of classroom-tested practices would emerge out of an unconference format.

And, of course, if you are in a session and are at a loss about how to connect the abstract to the practical, ask the room to help you do just that. And then blog about it, so other people can share the knowledge.

Don't drink your own kool aid

People are excited about EdCamp, and that's great, but let's not get carried away.

[T]he edcamp philly crew met at a similar venue, Barcamp Philly. I can not say that I directly learned a single usable thing at that conference but going changed my life. It was meeting Dan, MaryBeth, Kevin, Hadley, Kim, Kristen, Rob and introducing them to my sister Chrissi and Collegaue Nicolae that spawned a international movement in education (emphasis added).

As I said earlier, I'm really glad to see people using the unconference model within education. These concepts have been developed and honed within open source, blogging, design, and software development communities, and they receive continual use within these communities because they work. People within education can learn from this pre-existing practice. The EdCamp organizers reference Barcamp as an inspiration, but current barcamps borrow liberally from practices used in Lightning Talks, Pecha Kucha, Ignite, and Birds of a Feather sessions, to name a few. And this is all good, as we all benefit from using different ways of working and communicating with our peers. But it would be myopic to imagine that unconferences would be as accepted within the education world if these other types of unconferences hadn't been happening in other areas.

It's also worth noting that education-related unconferences are nothing new either. Bloggercon, in 2003, addressed education and included a full unconference day. Since at least 2003, the open source labs and meetups that Paul Nelson, Jeff Elkner, Paul Flint, and (starting in 2006) Steve Hargadon, ran at NECC were unconference-like, with the potential for people to engage in inquiry-driven/peer-driven learning. The EduBloggerCons that Steve Hargadon started running - beginning in Atlanta in 2007, and continuing in different forms to the present day - are education-focused unconferences. It's also worth noting that the National Writing Project has been doing unconference-like professional development since the late 70's. Northern Voice has been running strong since 2005.

In short, there's a lot of prior art here. It's all - including EdCamp - good work. But branding something that is both relatively new on the scene, and relatively similar to past and present endeavors an "international movement" is the type of hyperbolic overreach we can do without. Education doesn't need Don King or Don Trump; we need smart people doing good work. Leave the marketing copy for the people who don't have real skills.

Overblown claims diminish credibility. Let the work speak for itself.

Strive for jargon-free zones

I recognize that this is a tall order, but we need to move away from jargon when we describe what we do. We don't need to talk about how we collaborate within our PLN's; we need to describe how we connect and learn from people in informal settings. Retreating into jargon obscures the work and the process that makes the experience valuable.

Along these same lines, any discussion of tools (I love site X or software Y! It's shiny!) needs to be grounded in specific learning opportunities that wouldn't be possible (or as accessible) otherwise. Chasing the horizon is fun, but the run needs to be worth it.

Eliminating jargon and eliminating an initial focus on the tools acts as a sanity check. This also helps make the ideas we are discussing more accessible to a broader audience.

Conclusions

Unconferences will continue to increase in popularity for two simple reasons: they work, and more people are getting comfortable participating within them. With small, targeted adjustments, the current reach of education-focused unconferences can be extended. But, given that the power of the unconference is within the participants, we all have a role and responsibility here. If there is something you want to see happen, step up.

Code Review: It's A Group Thing

Posted May 9th, 2011 by Bill

Coming up this Wednesday, May 11th, the Portland Drupal Users Group will be devoting the entire meeting to code reviews of full project applications.

The meetup starts at 6:00 PM, and it will be held at TigerLogic, 1532 SW Morrison St, Portland, on the 2nd floor. I have heard rumors of pizza, and possibly beer. Show up to find out if these rumors are true!

During the meeting, there are several things we're looking to accomplish:

Make a dent in the full project application queue;
Make further inroads into defining a clear, replicable process for code reviews, thereby:

Making it easier for new developers to get familiar with Drupal;
Making the application review process less painful;
Beginning to establish code review sprints as a new community norm, like code sprints and documentation sprints.

If you are an experienced developer in Portland, COME ON DOWN! We need you to help answer higher level questions, and review code!

If you are a developer who wants to get more involved, COME ON DOWN! We need you to ask questions, answer questions, and review some code!

If you are a themer, COME ON DOWN! We need you to help review theme applications!

If you don't write code, and don't theme, COME ON DOWN! We need you to help with documentation, as we will also be working on documentation.

We are also fortunate to have Alan Palazzolo and Chacha Sikes joining us to help run the event.

So, on Wednesday, May 11th, at 6:00 PM come on down, review some code, write some docs, and meet some great folks.

Image Credit: "I Hate Wires" taken by Robert Anthony Provost, published under an Attribution license.

Community Development and Code Reviews

Posted April 25th, 2011 by Bill

All of what follows in this post is based on two core principles:

Teaching and explaining a topic is the best way to master it; and
The ideals of a community are best handed down from individual to indivdual as they work toward a common goal.

Toward that end, on May 11th, the Portland Drupal Users Group will be using our monthly meeting to run code reviews.

As a side note, while this writeup uses Drupal as an example, the general principles will work across projects, or in training/educational contexts outside software development.

Benefits

Code reviews can help grow the existing pool of talented Drupal developers by providing a documented, more structured way for developers new to Drupal to begin learning the Drupal codebase, and learning how to work within the community that maintains with that codebase. Code reviews can also help alleviate one of the more consistent bottlenecks for developers looking to contribute more to Drupal: the project review process.

Code reviews reinforce good habits. The process of reviewing someone else's code forces a few things to happen:

The reviewer hones their developer chops by seeing how other people have solved problems;
By reviewing code for security issues, developers get more familiar with the best practices for writing secure code, and security issues in exiting code can be addressed;
By reviewing code for proper and appropriate use of Drupal's APIs, developers get more familiar with Drupal's APIs, existing modules get more stable and less likely to break on upgrades, and more people become familiar with how core works;
By testing and reviewing code via the Coder module, and/or using Devel as needed, easy fixes get implemented more quickly;
Opportunities for documentation and better test coverage can be highlighted as part of the review, leading to more automated review and better documentation.

But, most importantly: the process of providing a review of someone else's code creates a dialogue within the community. Code review is contribution and connection, and these are key elements to working successfully in the Drupal community.

Additionally, code reviews provide a clear starting point for people asking how to begin in Drupal. Not many people are going to start reading api.drupal.org without a clear context or reason to do so. Code reviews provide that context, and the process of a code review provides a structure for people coming up to speed on Drupal development. So, when someone says, "I want to get started in Drupal, but I don't know where to be begin," we now have a simple answer:

Check out this page for some background on giving code reviews, and then review some code. The process of reviewing projects will get you up to speed on how to develop in Drupal.

To summarize, code reviews:

Help new developers learn Drupal development best practices;
Help new developers make contributions and connections within the community;
Help reduce the bottleneck of getting new projects approved. And, it's worth noting that increasing the visibility of code reviews as a valued contribution within the community will likely increase the pool of reviewers into the future.

Getting Local

There are a large number of local user groups. While a lot of work can be done virtually, the value of face to face meetups should not be overlooked or underestimated. Local user groups provide an opportunity for more exerienced and less experienced developers to get together and share ideas. If user groups dedicated one to two meetings a year to code reviews - where more experienced and less experienced developers worked together on code reviews - the habit of code reviews could start to become a recognized norm. Once a developer has become proficient in code reviews, the practice of reviewing someone else's code can just as easily be applied to reviewing their own code.

Over time, code reviews should be as familiar and as recognized as Code Sprints and Documentation Sprints. These are held at every DrupalCon, and are regular occurrences at local Drupal Camps. Given the value of code reviews in developing new talent, increasing the consistency and quality of contrib, improving collaboration between developers, and strengthening the contributions of local user groups, code reviews have a role to play in helping the Drupal community continue to grow, evolve, and mature.

Getting Started

Fortunately, getting started is the easy part. The queue for project applications is open, and you can sort by date to see the oldest projects first.

The Code Review Group is getting up to speed, and you can indicate on your profile that you are actively reviewing code. This wiki page and this handbook page both provide instructions for diving in to a code review.

And, if you are in Portland this May 11, come to the Users Group meeting and get running with some reviews.

Image Credit: "Crystal peer-reviewing Mike's code" taken by Jason Crane, published under an Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license.