technology
[Re-]Introducing Greg Grossmeier, Education Technology & Policy Coordinator
Greg Grossmeier was a CC intern, community assistant, and for the last year and a half, a volunteer fellow. He is rejoining CC staff as Education Technology and Policy Coordinator, initially focused on the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative.
How did you get involved in CC initially?
It all started back when I was a student at the University of Michigan School of Information working with the fledgling Open.Michigan initiative (of which current CC staff member Tim Vollmer was one of the founders). Open.Michigan is the initiative at the University of Michigan that helps faculty, students, and staff share their educational material with the world as OER (Open Educational Resources). I was drawn to this project primarily because it aligned with my background as a member of the Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) community. As I saw in the FLOSS world, our ability as creators of useful objects such as software and educational material to share these objects with each other in a way that allows them to not only read them, but also build upon them, is changing the way we interact with the world. One part of this ability is the legal assurance that you will not be sued for building upon someone else's work. This is where my interest, and involvement, with Creative Commons got its start.
I was an intern under the amazing Jon Phillips (rejon) during the summer of 2008 then stayed on as a Community Assistant for the next year. I continued my outreach as an unpaid fellow traveling to conferences until coming back to Creative Commons full-time.
Education Technology & Policy Coordinator, that's a mouthful. What does that mean? How does it relate to the work of other CC staff?
It is a mouthful! It means that I am the person you should talk to if you are working in the world of education, specifically Open Education, and have questions regarding integrating or consuming metadata, license choice and its ramifications, or any other legal, technical, or policy issue. This work dovetails nicely with the work being spearheaded by Tim Vollmer, Policy Coordinator, as I am focusing my time mostly in the education and technology realm while Tim also works on issues such as government data sharing and funder policy. I will be sort of a bridge between the CC technology team (note we’re hiring a CTO) and the policy and legal people, and a liaison for technology/policy discussions externally. My new boss is Cable Green, Director of Global Learning, who holds the big picture of how to scale OER.
I’m also looking forward to seeing how my new role can support and be informed by the work of the many OER leaders in the worldwide CC affiliate network.
You've been a copyright specialist at MLibrary for two years. There's a ton of cool stuff coming out of MLibrary. Tell us about that.
At MLibrary I worked for the Copyright Office which, contrary to what Melissa Levine’s (our fearless leader’s) title of "Copyright Officer" may imply, is not the copyright cop of the university. Instead, much of what I did was outreach and education on how faculty, students, and staff can share their scholarly works more broadly. This included issues of data sharing, open education, and open access publishing.
Specific to the library, the Copyright Office spearheaded the change of default CC license on the MLibrary website from CC Attribution-NonCommercial to CC Attribution. I hope that our reasoning for making the switch, which I outlined in a blog post, will help other galleries, libraries, archives, or museums (GLAM-institutions) adopt a similar license choice.
It is also about time for this year's Copyright Camp which is put on by MPublishing (the division within MLibrary that the Copyright Office resides). Copyright Camp is an unconference on all things copyright; from libraries to musicians, policy to practice, even education to robots!
Along with our outreach efforts, the Copyright Office also manages important projects at MLibrary including a new one concerning "orphan works."
So your most recent project is this orphan works thing, say more…
"Orphan works" are works (nominally books in our case) that are still under copyright but the copyright holder is not findable and/or contactable. These works are thus still unable to be legally reused without permission but there is no one to ask permission to reuse them.
With the leadership of Melissa and the help of my coworker Bobby Glushko, I built the process that powers the Orphan Works Project. The goal of the MLibrary Orphan Works Project is to either find the work's copyright holder OR determine that they are truly an orphan and make them available to users of MLibrary. (If you are a copyright holder of any works in the MLibrary collection, please fill out the form available on the project website.)
One could characterize part of the orphan works problem as one of a lack of metadata, or works with inadequate provenance. In a way, CC is mitigating future orphan works issues by making it easy for metadata to travel with works on the web.
You mentioned metadata and provenance, what excites you about the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative?
LRMI excites me because it will finally allow all of the hard work being done by the various online education projects (open or not) to correctly tag their works with important information (such as license, audience, subject, learning outcomes, etc) to be indexed and exposed by popular search engines. Currently we have a smorgasbord of education-specific search engines that attempt to give learners access to the world's knowledge but they routinely fall short due to technical limitations. If the metadata applied to these resources is consumed and used by popular search engines, learning management software, and even the student's own computer then, I hope, big advances in education can be made more easily.
How can people get involved in LRMI?
There is a Call for Participation (CfP) and more information on the LRMI project wiki page that has all of the details.
You're also a technologist, not just a metadata technologist — no disrespect to the meta! What do you do with the Ubuntu community?
The Ubuntu community was the first FLOSS community I felt at home in. When I moved to Michigan for graduate school there was no local community team (aka "LoCo" in Ubuntu parlance) so I took it upon myself to create one. Little did I know that there was a wonderful group of individuals waiting for something like this and the team took off. The Michigan LoCo Team has since been your go-to group for Ubuntu (and FLOSS) related activities including release parties and bug and packaging jams. During graduate school when I should have been studying for exams or writing papers I spent a lot of my Ubuntu/FLOSS time reporting and triaging bugs.
Do you see underplayed opportunities for CC and OER communities to leverage Ubuntu and other FLOSS communities and vice versa? Or instances that we just know more about?
Everywhere. The FLOSS community is first and foremost a sharing or gift economy. This aligns well with the OER community (as I said before). There are many FLOSS projects that are primarily developed to be used in OER (such as the OERbit publishing platform and OERca content management system from Open.Michigan) that could have far greater impact when applied to non-institution specific endeavors.
I also firmly believe that some of the sticking points holding wide spread adoption of OER back can be addressed using software, and specifically FLOSS. Examples of this are the Open Attribute browser plugin that makes attributing CC-licensed works dead simple, the Open Badges platform being created by Mozilla that will help online learners record and display their efforts, and AcaWiki which aims to make high-quality scholarly article summaries available in every discipline. These are all great projects to get involved with from both the education side and the software side, if you are looking for something to contribute to in your free time!
In addition to following Greg’s work on the Creative Commons blog, you can follow Greg on identi.ca and twitter.
No Comments »Creative Commons recruiting its next Chief Technology Officer
Laptop Stickers by Fred Benenson / CC BY. Does your laptop look like this? It doesn’t have to, but we wouldn’t be surprised if it does.
Since our previous CTO, Nathan Yergler, left CC to return to full-time engineering in April, we have been preparing to recruit his replacement. The time is now! See the full job posting on our opportunities page.
This is a fun job (I was Nathan’s predecessor, from 2003-2007) that offers technical, management, and communications challenges and opportunities for growth and impact. Using technology to enhance (rather than suppress) sharing has always been an important part of the CC story. Some background for the truly interested candidate:
- All software developed by CC is free software; see our source repositories and bug tracker;
- We have a small (two software engineers, one system administrator) technology team focused on maintaining and improving CC’s services (implemented using Python, CiviCRM, WordPress, MediaWiki, and other technologies); additionally technology suffuses all of our work, including when policy-oriented — the technology team and especially CTO are frequently called on to provide leadership on broad issues;
- See our CC Labs blog for occasional posts on the details of our technical work and thoughts on related happenings;
- Watch recordings of past CC technology summits;
- Read about the CC Rights Expression Language, a set of recommendations implemented across CC’s services and by many publishers.
Relative to when Creative Commons started with a vision of leveraging the Internet to scale sharing (and vice versa), there are an unimaginable number of freely licensed works to build upon, and to build services around, and 90% of the technical groundwork is laid (of course as an engineer you recognize that means 90% of the technical groundwork remains to be developed — and that’s just the beginning!). Now is an incredibly exciting time to lead the technology efforts of Creative Commons — be part of a great team, help communities yearning to share better and more effectively (e.g., see our new Learning Resources Metadata Initiative), and engage with developers around the world to help build a better future.
We’re accepting resumes through August 1. Again see the job posting for details.
4 Comments »Kwame Nkrumah University adopts CC Attribution for OER policy
KNUST OER production workshop team by bagaball / CC BY
The Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) has adopted a university-wide open educational resources (OER) policy with CC Attribution as the default license for university material. KNUST’s “Policy for Development and Use of Open Educational Resources (OER)” (pdf) outlines the purpose, role, and process of OER production at the university, and specifically states that,
“Materials produced which do not indicate any specific conditions for sharing will automatically be considered to have been shared under a Creative Commons Attribution license.”
The policy is available at the KNUST website and, in line with their policy, is available for use under CC BY.
KNUST is a partner institution in the African Health OER Network and works closely with the University of Michigan Medical School and Dental School to develop and distribute health OER. KNUST OER is hosted at http://web.knust.edu.gh/oer but is also duplicated for use at the Open.Michigan and OER Africa sites.
You can help us improve the case study on KNUST here.
1 Comment »Livestream of TEDxNYED this Saturday
The event I blogged about in December, TEDxNYED, is happening this Saturday, March 6, in New York City. TEDxNYED is “an all-day conference dedicated to examining the intersection of education, new media, and technology.” For those of you who can’t attend, the conference will be livestreamed from 10am EST to 6pm EST at http://tedxnyed.com.
The speaker line-up includes our own Larry Lessig (founder and board member of CC), Michael Wesch (a cultural anthropologist who created those awesome YouTube videos like “Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us”), Neeru Khosla (Co-founder of the CK12 Foundation that submitted seven open textbooks to California’s Free Digital Textbook Initiative), and David Wiley (big thinker in open education and associate professor of Instructional Psychology and Technology at BYU).
Along with Whipple Hill and others, Creative Commons is one of TEDxNYED’s sponsors, and we will be hosting a table at the event to network with conference attendees.
All TED Talks are licensed CC BY-NC-ND.
No Comments »TEDxNYED
You’ve all heard of the TED Conference (Technology, Entertainment, Design), the annual meeting of great minds with amazing 20 minute speeches that share what they’ve been doing with their lives. But not all of you may have heard of TEDx—spinoffs off TED that are independently organized around a central theme or idea.
TEDxNYED is one of those spinoffs—”an all-day conference dedicated to examining the intersection of education, new media, and technology, will take place on March 6, 2010 in New York City.” The speaker line-up includes our own Larry Lessig (founder and board member of CC), Michael Wesch (a cultural anthropologist who created those awesome YouTube videos like “Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us”), Neeru Khosla (Co-founder of the CK12 Foundation that submitted seven open textbooks to California’s Free Digital Textbook Initiative), and David Wiley (big thinker in open education and associate professor of Instructional Psychology and Technology at BYU).
CC Learn is partnering with TEDxNYED and Whipple Hill to help with this amazing event. With currently 300 or so people expected to attend, space is limited, so please apply if you would like to join. “TEDx NYED is particularly seeking applicants who work in and around education and who are dedicated to reforming schools from the inside-out as well as outside-in. Those interested in attending should apply at http://tedxnyed.com/apply.”
From the press release,
“TED is an annual event where some of the world’s leading thinkers and doers are invited
to share what they are most passionate about. “TED” stands for Technology,
Entertainment, Design — three broad subject areas that are, collectively, shaping our
future… The diverse audience — CEOs, scientists, creatives, philanthropists — is
almost as extraordinary as the speakers, who have included Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Jane
Goodall, Frank Gehry, Paul Simon, Sir Richard Branson, Philippe Starck and Bono.
…
At the TEDx NYED event, live speakers, two Ted Talks videos, and networking
sessions will combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. The
TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx
events, including ours, are self-organized.”
All TED Talks are licensed CC BY-NC-ND.
1 Comment »TED Fellowships Deadline
I blogged about the past year’s fellows in February, and now the deadline for 2010 is approaching next week. For those who don’t know what TED is, I’ll quote myself,
“TED stands for “Technology, Entertainment, Design” and their talks are given annually at the TED conference in Long Beach, CA. 50 speakers give “talks” or 18 minute speeches about a variety of issues, including “science, business, the arts and the global issues facing our world.” (Past speakers include Al Gore, our own Lawrence Lessig, and Jill Bolt Taylor—a brain researcher who describes the stroke she suffers in exhilarating fashion, to name a few.)
Now, with the new TED fellows program, extraordinary people you may not have heard of yet (without the $6,000 to pay for standard admission to the conference) can give talks, too.”
To apply for a fellowship, go to their website and follow the instructions there. The deadline for all applicants is noon (EST), September 25. It’s eighteen minutes of exposure to talk about anything you want; you could very well be that spokesperson for your cause. All TED talks are licensed CC BY NC-ND.
No Comments »Back to School Conclusion: The Open Trajectory of Learning
As students around the world return to school, ccLearn blogs about the evolving education landscape, ongoing projects to improve educational resources, education technology, and the future of education. Browse the “Back to School” tag for more posts in this series.
Today’s predictions about the future of learning might eventually seem as preposterous as early 20th century predictions of flying cars and robot butlers. But what we sometimes forget is that our vision for the future today will ultimately shape the outcomes of tomorrow–not in a causal, deterministic way, but in an enabling way. By sharing our hopes and dreams for an open future for learning, we foster an environment in which it can happen.
At ccLearn, we strongly believe that the future for education and learning is one that includes technical, legal, and social openness.
The spaces in which teaching and learning occur are increasingly moving towards technical openness by running open source software, integrating machine readable metadata, and adopting open formats. Schools, colleges, and universities involved in open courseware, wikis, and other organizations engaged in online knowledge delivery are beginning to embrace RDFa and metadata standards like ccREL, open video codecs, open document formats, and open software solutions. More open technology continues to be developed, and there is no indication that this will stop or slow down.
Members of the global education community have been moving towards legal openness by converging on Creative Commons licenses that allow sustainable redistribution and remixing as the de facto licensing standard. This phenomenon is international- Creative Commons has been ported to 51 countries (7 in progress), with CC licensed educational resources being used all over the world. Although ccLearn found in our recent report “What status for ‘open’?” that some institutions have some homework to do on what it means to be open, we are well on the road towards a robust and scalable legal standard for open educational resources.
Perhaps most powerfully, we are beginning to see a move towards social openness in educational institutions in the prototyping of new models for learning involvement, organization, and assessment that maximizes the availability of learning to all people, everywhere. By leveraging the power of online organization and open content, often times coupled with a willingness to re-conceptualize what it means to be an educator, new possibilities for learning will emerge, leading to a more educated world.
We can’t fully predict today what kinds of practices, pedagogies, and technologies open education will enable tomorrow. But we are in a position to claim that our goal for an open future enables the creation of these new and better practices, technologies, and social structures.
ccLearn would like to thank The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation for their continued support of open education, the Creative Commons staff who make our work possible, and all of you for your continued support of a truly global commons. We hope that you all continue to contribute to open source learning software, embrace open formats, license your educational works with Creative Commons licenses, and get engaged in the world movement towards an open future for learning.
En Estados Unidos están de regreso al colegio este mes y con este contexto en ccLearn, han venido publicando una serie de entradas algunas de ellas ya quedaron comentadas en español, creo que justifica comentar y traducir lo pertinente:
De regreso al colegio, conclusiones: El camino abierto para el aprendizaje
La entrada de cierre para el ciclo de ccLearn sobre el regreso al colegio esta nuevamente a cargo de Alex Kozak quien indica como desde ccLearn, se cree firmemente en un futuro del proceso de educación y aprendizaje atravesado por la idea de apertura en lo técnico, lo legal y lo social.
Los espacios en los que la docencia y el aprendizaje se dan para Kozak están migrando a estándares abiertos en con el uso de software open source, integrando metadatos que pueden ser leídos por las máquinas y adoptando formatos abiertos. Escuelas, Universidades y en general instituciones de educación superior que desarrollan courseware abiertos, wikis y otras organizaciones involucradas en los procesos de disponer del conocimiento a través de la red están empezando a adoptar RDFa y estandares de metadatos como ccREL, codecs para video abierto, formatos abiertos de editores de textos, y soluciones de software abierto o libre.
De otro lado la comunidad global del sector educativo se esta moviendo hacia la apertura legal, sus decisiones de adopción de licencias Creative Commons como un estándar converge para permitir la redistribución y mezcla de los recursos . Este es un fenómeno internacional- Creative Commons se ha adaptado al sistema legal de 51 países (7 mas lo están haciendo), los recursos educativos licenciados con CC se usan por todo el mundo. En todo caso se debe considerar que ccLearn encontró en su informe “What status for ‘open’?” que algunas instituciones todavía tienen que revisar lo que significa abierto, pero que el camino hacia estándares de apertura en los recursos educativos esta en marcha.
Para Kozak incluso lo llamativo es que se esta empezando a ver una mayor apertura en lo social en relación con los pilotos educativos en los nuevos modelos que las instituciones ensayan. A la hora de abordar el proceso de aprendizaje, la organizacion, y valoracion de estos pilotos están maximizando la idea de hacerlo accesible a cualquiera en cualquier lugar. Kozak cree que apalancando la capacidad de las organizaciones en linea y del contenido abierto, junto con el cada vez mas frecuente deseo de re-conceptualizar lo que significa ser docente, nuevas posibilidades para el aprendizaje surgirán para llevarnos a un mundo mas educado.
Para Kozak aunque no podamos predecir las practicas, pedagogías y tecnologías que favorecerá una educación abierta mañana si podemos decir que la meta de un futuro abierto permitirá la creación de esas nuevas practicas, tecnologías y estructuras sociales.
Breve comentario desde mi propia óptica
Aunque en regiones como América Latina nos hacen falta datos para asumir como ciertas muchas de las afirmaciones de Kozak para el mundo anglosajón lo cierto es que la sensación que hay en el ambiente es que muchas de sus conclusiones pueden ser extensibles a nuestra realidad,
De hecho algunos otras de las entradas de este ciclo de regreso al colegio que hizo ccLearn se referían a proyectos concretos que mostraban proyectos y practicas abiertas (Vital signs y el caso de los libros de texto). Creo que deberíamos visibilizar algunas de las muchas iniciativas que están ocurriendo en nuestra región para conocerlas y aprender de ellas… espero poder hacerlo muy pronto! (si tienen ideas dejen su comentario y hagamos seguimiento de ellas juntos)
3 Comments »Incentive Bill for 21st Century Skills
Last month, a bipartisan bill introduced in the U.S. Senate recognized the fact that students learning today need to be taught the necessary skills to succeed in this century—an age of new media, the Internet, and ever evolving technologies. The bill, introduced by Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, would “create a new incentive fund that will encourage States to adopt the 21st Century Skills Framework.” The fund would provide federal matches to those states that integrate the teaching of 21st century skills such as “creativity, innovation, critical thinking and financial, economic, business and entrepreneurial literacy” into core curricula, according to the Partnership for 21st Century Skills.
eSchool News reports what Shelley Pasnik, “director of the Education Development Center’s Center for Children and Technology,” has to say:
“The legislation goes beyond technology. It’s about implementing a framework for 21st-century learning,” she said. “It’s more promising this way. If it were just about technology purchases, it would be a missed opportunity.”
We couldn’t agree more. Giving a student a computer won’t teach him or her how to use one, but integrating activities that require the use of one will. More broadly, students will learn the relevant skills to succeed in the current day and future when core curriculum is revamped to include current day and future projects. Revamped curriculum and associated learning materials will also only achieve maximum impact if the resources are open for use and iteration. Opening up the resources makes the federal investment worthwhile, and is helpful for states that are slow in jumping on the bandwagon to catch up. It also gives extra incentive for high quality materials, as competition turns to collaboration between states.
You can read the full text of the proposed bill here.
No Comments »Vital Signs on Moving Towards Openness
Photo by Petri Tuohimaa for GMRI, CC BY-NC-ND
“Sarah on a beach near Portland, Maine looking for two species of invasive marine crabs – Carcinus maenas (European green crab) and Hemigrapsus sanguineus (Asian shore crabs).”
In April, I had a chance to meet with Sarah Kirn, Program Manager of Vital Signs, a field and inquiry based science education program at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute. The meeting took place in our sunny San Francisco office while Sarah was in town for the week. She marveled at the weather, her native state being Maine, where she has worked with the Gulf of Maine Research Institute since 2002. She explained that the Vital Signs program itself actually started in 1999. Back in 1999, Vital Signs was using Apple E-mates, something which, at my age, I’ve never heard of, much less used. The following are excerpts from our meeting, along with some recent edits over email.
I might have used it, I said. I remember using those old Apples…
“No, no, no,” she said. “It’s not an old box-style computer—it was an early portable computer. They’re really…kind of sleek and green and had a little stylus and keyboard. It was a great piece of technology that didn’t make it into mainstream use. So we started developing Vital Signs on Palm computers in about 2001.”
Let’s rewind a bit. Vital Signs, according to their website and info sheet, “is an inquiry-based, field science education program that links students and scientists in the rigorous collection and analysis of essential environmental data. Innovative technology, relevant content, and critical partnerships create an authentic science learning experience for students, a distributed data gathering network for scientists, and a statewide community of teachers, students, and scientists collaborating to learn about and steward aquatic ecosystems.”
Basically, Vital Signs is focused on giving students firsthand experience of being scientists in the field. The environmental data that students collect will be used by students and scientists—real, professional scientists—in their own research. How will Vital Signs do this? One advantage the program has is its geographic location: Maine. All seventh and eighth grade students in Maine have their very own laptops—and not just any laptops mind you, but laptops made by Apple, those cute white Macbooks with the sheen still on their covers. How did they score those? It starts with a governor who had a vision for revolutionizing education.
I read somewhere that the [laptops] are funded by either the state or the Marine Institute…
“The state. The program was started six years ago. Then Governor Angus King was nearing the end of his final term. He wanted to leave a legacy that would position Maine for success in the 21st century. He started thinking about technology in schools. He asked Seymour Papert, ‘how many computers do I need to put in schools to make a difference? If every school had a classroom full of computers is that enough? If every school had three classrooms full of computers, is that enough?’ Papert replied, ‘it really doesn’t matter how many computers you put in the classrooms unless each student has their own.’ Governor King took a budget surplus and made the first round of the Maine Learning Technology Initiative happen.” (Maine was also the first state with high speed internet access to every library and every school.)
So is it all seventh and eighth graders?
“All seventh and eighth graders and their teachers. It actually started with the teachers first, which was critical to the program’s success. Teachers got their computers a year before their students. Governor King had the insight to get teachers involved in the administration of the project. The woman he hired to run it, Bette Manchester, had worked as a teacher and as a principal. She had the insight that when you take a classroom where traditionally the teacher has been the one with all the knowledge and their job has been to impart that knowledge to their students, and you give all the students their own high speed, connected laptops, you’ve given all the students access to more information than could possibly be in their teacher’s head and this had the potential to flip classrooms upside down. So how [do] you help teachers make that fundamental transition in their role, especially given that teachers often have a different relationship with technology than their students do? There’s often more fear, there’s often less willingness to try things, there’s often more fear about being wrong and doing something that’s going to mess it up. So this is where Bette began.”
So how does Vital Signs fit into it—what role does it play with the laptops, with the Maine Learning Technology Initiative?
“We are developing a suite of software that will enable students to make and record rigorous observations of invasive species in their community’s aquatic habitats, and to work online with each other and with scientists to understand the meaning and importance of the observations they made. We will create an interface that allows students, scientists, and the public to query the database, create maps and graphs of the data, and share multimedia reports and data products. Most of this software suite will be web-based and all of it will be freely available to anyone, but it will also become part of the disk image installed on all 32,000 Maine Learning Technology Initiative laptops.”
So the whole point of Vital Signs is first of all to get students used to technology…
“No, not at all, our primary goal is to build science literacy. But let me back up and tell you a bit about the Gulf of Maine Research Institute. The Gulf of Maine Research Institute has a three-pronged mission. One, we’re doing fisheries ecosystem research. Fisheries have traditionally been managed on a species by species basis, but there is growing demand for a more holistic approach. Species-specific management was simple, but of course every fish in the ocean is eating other fish and competing with other fish for food and being eaten by other things like whales and other species humans want to protect. So there’s all sorts of complicated issues and if you look at it on a species by species basis, you’ve oversimplified it to the point where it breaks down.
“So we do fisheries ecosystem research and the twist that we bring to it is that we partner scientists with fishermen. Fishermen have spent, often, generations at sea. For example, I went fishing with one of our fishermen partners and I was looking around on his boat and I didn’t see any charts (he was using an electronic navigation system). I asked if he carried charts on his boat. He looked at me and said, ‘No.’ ‘What if your electronics break down?,’ I asked. He showed me a little notebook that has all the tows three generations of his family had made. He knows the bottom of the ocean the way we recognize streets on land. He just navigates by the bottom. So there’s that kind of incredible knowledge about where fish are, where you want to catch them, what time of year, the temperature of the water and all the rest. Fishermen also have tremendous skill in handling boats. So if you pair both the knowledge and the skill set of fishermen with the rigorous methodology of scientists, we can start one step ahead of everybody else. And contrary to what many people think, fishermen are not all out to destroy the ocean. They would like their kids to be fishermen, the way they are, and their father and their grandfather were. They are really interested in figuring out different ways to better manage the fish.
“The second thing that we do is community-building and education work around marine resources, bringing together managers, the fishermen, scientists, and environmentalists to all put their ideas on the table. We create neutral space for that to happen in what’s been and continues to be an extraordinarily contentious arena. We’ve become trusted for the neutrality that we bring to the table and for giving everybody respect and equal airtime.
“The third thing that we do, something that we see as essential to creating a sustainable marine ecosystem including humans, is science education. We’re committed to building science literacy in Maine so that citizens have the tools to understand natural resource issues and come to their own informed conclusions. We target our education programs at middle school, which is where researchers suggest that kids either stay in science or pop out of it.”
That’s actually kind of true.
“We have two active education programs at GMRI: Vital Signs and LabVenture!. LabVenture! is a fifth and sixth grade program that happens in our building. We’ve raised money to bring every fifth or sixth grade student in the state to our lab for a half-day immersive science experience. Every school district decides whether the program works best with the fifth or sixth grade curriculum, then we send a bus to the school to bring the students to Portland. We use technology to enable them to work independently of their teachers, and use the scientific method to solve a mystery.”
So they’re doing kind of field work?
“Yeah. The mystery is about the X-Fish––what is it and why is it important. They go through four stations. At one, for example, they use a microscope to look at the fish’s stomach contents and take images––still, digital images––of what they see. They make observations, make hypotheses about what they expect to find, document what they see, and then record their conclusions at each station. The concluding presentation of the LabVenture! program is a colloquium drawing from these student-collected digital assets to solve the mystery of the x-fish.
“Vital Signs will be for 7th and 8th grade students and will immerse students in their own communities. Students will go outside with their laptops and work in teams to investigate and document what they see. One person will have dry hands and sit in a dry place and enter the data, the other team members will take pictures of and identify species and habitats, use a GPS to get location data, use probes to measure water quality and soil quality, write general observations. The software will guide them through making their observations and provide on demand help. They’ll collect all that data, they’ll bring it back to the classroom, they’ll send it to our database. The teacher will have a chance to look at it to evaluate student learning. And then students will actually peer review each other’s work. With Vital Signs I see the opportunity to use technology to enable students to take on the work and the role of the scientist in the field—from asking the questions to collecting the data to analyzing the data.”
“We have two interconnected goals with Vital Signs. One, to give students a richer understanding and experience of what science is and how messy and complex it is. Two, to produce quality data that’s useful to the broader scientific community. We’ve already worked with scientists around the state who are studying invasive species and they’re really interested in the data that will come out of Vital Signs. This is a big motivating factor in the students but also the teachers who really like to be able to tell their students so and so scientists are looking at this question just like you are and they’re really interested in the data that you find from this site.”
I’m interested in how the peer review process actually works.
“We’re still working out the details, but the main idea is that students will develop an identity within the program. They’ll be able to gain and demonstrate expertise in the various data collection tasks-–-identifying individual species, taking crisp photographs that let viewers verify identifications, writing interesting and relevant observations, using the water quality probes, etc. When they have been recognized as having achieved proficiency in a particular task, they’ll be able to exercise their knowledge by providing a review of un-verified records. For example, if you’ve demonstrated expertise in identifying European Green Crabs, Carcinus maenas, you’ll be able to search the database for unverified sightings of these crabs and comment on whether they were correctly identified or not.”
Are you looking to expand this outside of Maine?
“Maine is absolutely the perfect place to develop and test Vital Signs, but our attitude towards practically everything that we develop, whether it’s in education or science or community, is that if we solve a problem that we have in Maine, that solution might be really valuable to somebody else outside of Maine. Maybe not for the same thing that we’re dealing with but for something else that they’re concerned about. So we’re always interested in building programs such that they may be modeled and may be replicated or extended outside the Gulf of Maine. With Vital Signs all our code will be released as open source software so the components can be used elsewhere. We’re very interested in partnering with organizations outside of Maine to expand or replicate Vital Signs.”
That’s where Creative Commons and open education comes in?
“Right. The first thing I talked to Ahrash [Bissell, ccLearn director] about was actually the student data, and how do you license it so that it is open to be used and obvious that it may be used. One of the things you come up against in education is the need to protect the identity of your students. And there are other considerations: if you’re working for [Creative Commons] or I’m working for the Gulf of Maine Research Institute, the product of our work is owned by our employers. But students, they’re not employees of the school…
“So what we’re working out is, exactly how do we create attribution? Who gets attribution? Are you able to cite this body of information? We really hope it’s used by people other than the students. And we absolutely encourage students to remix the data. There’s all sorts of things you can repackage and re-purpose.
“Every educational resource that GMRI has created has always been out there for people to use. When we post activities online we don’t presume that teachers will only use the activity the way we’ve written it. And often the activities that we write have suggestions for how to change them that might suit one group of students or an older or a younger group of students. So I think there’s a general assumption that what we post online is going to be reused and remixed.”
Currently, the Gulf of Maine Research Institute’s website (including what they have up so far for Vital Signs) is CC licensed under CC BY-NC-ND. The environmental focus of Vital Signs for the fall of this year will be Invasive Species Monitoring—so seventh and eighth graders will be out in the field collecting data on invasive species for scientists to study for their research.
When I asked Sarah how and why she ended up managing the Vital Signs program for the Gulf of Maine Research Institute, she told me that her first job after college was as an Outward Bound sailing instructor teaching sailing courses off the coast of Maine. The experience inspired her educational [philosophy], or pedagogy, a word she normally doesn’t like. It’s all about giving students a genuine role to play and making learning contextual. After completing her masters in Oceanography, she realized she didn’t want to do just research and that she didn’t want to do just education. Vital Signs was perfect because it was “something in the middle.” “Vital Signs gives students a real role to play in answering authentic questions. When you put learning in an authentic context, it’s much more real.”
We all remember our math teachers don’t we? Sarah remembers her Calculus teacher back in high school…
“Mr. Smith, why are we learning calculus? What’s the big picture?” asked an eighteen year old Sarah.
“Well, Sarah,” he replied, “maybe you’re going to work designing cans in the future. Then you’ll have to maximize volume and minimize surface area…”
“There is no way on earth that I am going to design cans!” she remembers thinking.
Among her many activities including sailing boats, hobnobbing with local fishermen and consulting with scientific experts in her field, Sarah has not quite made the time to design a single can yet. But she is spearheading the ongoing Vital Signs project, which is a significant indicator of the changing science education landscape towards sharing and openness.
2008 Summer Internships
For all the students who have been patiently waiting, Creative Commons has posted summer internship positions. Please spread the word to interested college or graduate students. We are currently looking for a Community Development, a Business Development, a Technology, and a Development intern. Three full-time and one part-time (Development) positions are available in total.
Applicants may submit a cover letter, resume, and references for the position(s) of interest through March 3.
No Comments »
