Well, here’s how it’s going to work.

1. Linda gets individual permissions to make transcripts & identities public (and keeps track of the emails granting permission).
2. Some participants may request certain edits before their transcripts are released. We do this editing.
3. Transcripts are posted online under a creative commons license. We may want to post permission emails (stripped of email addresses) alongside the data as the closest thing we have to “signed informed consent forms.”
4. The Purdue group visits Purdue’s IRB to get these interviews cleared as a public use dataset. Specifically, we’re in category 6b on page 3 of that document.

Or at least that’s the plan as of now. If we need to adjust, we’ll adjust. But if this all works, we’ll have an open data set that can be used by any future Purdue researchers for any future research without any further IRB approval – it basically places it in the same league as, say, publicly available census data.

Of course, this doesn’t solve the problem for other institutions. But Purdue has a pretty good reputation as a research university, so if we post the notice that Purdue’s IRB is ok with it, it makes it easier for other schools to go “well, if Purdue says it’s ok, we guess it’s ok here too.”

I should be clear about my bias. I feel the change idea is so undertheorized and that we only look at the people in that process as objects (they do or don’t adopt something) – but don’t look at them as learners. Those theories we do throw around (e.g., get administrative support, don’t do this until you’re tenured) seem to be a very limited view that creates barriers to change – and yet there are so many examples of people doing this stuff regardless of all the barriers…which suggests “there must be something else going on”.

The “change knowledge” idea gives me a set of lenses to explore “the other bits” – that perhaps there is a lot of knowledge out there but that we don’t give it full recognition perhaps because it runs counter to other ideas or because we have a limited view on “change” (e.g., it doesn’t count as a change if you don’t fully adopt someone else’s idea yet a change happened). So… my bias… the developmental piece of change – and the transformative theory work seems to be a useful way to think about this.

As I was writing that last email I was thinking “how to get this in the public space” and out of “email space” so – yes – let’s move it into the public space…do you think a blog is the way to go? what is something that captures our history (like a journal) but keeps the timeline/conversational bits (like a threaded conversation)? Oh – and it has to be something that is low motivation threshhold – in other words, super easy to naturally do.

And… people need to feel comfortable with it – or at least feel comfortable with being on the periphery until they feel comfortable joining in. It may be that we need to define “public” – e.g., it is in a public space but unless someone is doing a specific search to find us, [they] won’t find us – so it is sort of protected in a “we don’t know about you” place.

A thought that bubbled up in my mind (for a conversation down the road) – is if we think of this as a model – what would it mean if we invited teachers into something like this (or mentors?) who typically don’t have access to data about people talking about their experiences. Would this be a new model for linking research and practice – a form of participatory research in which educators would help researchers see the important themes through their eyes and would gain a better understanding of how this kind of research can help them?

So yeah, this is what we sound like in each other’s inboxes, long before anything gets formatted as a shiny journal paper – and this is the sort of conversations we’re hoping to expose and make available to others. We will someday have an open mailing list… but first we need to get that data public, because “we have discussions regarding non-public data” is one of the biggest reasons it’s a closed list right now.

This means all the works are listed online – but not everything is open access and available online. I’ve been doing some copyright checking, and things fall into 3 categories:

Category 1: The publisher already makes the full text of your paper available freely online (i.e. “they are already open access, so let’s just link to them”). We’re done, no action needed.

Category 2: The publisher doesn’t have your paper freely accessible online, but is ok with you putting it up there yourself. Specifically, these publishers allow us to upload postprints (the edited document after reviewer comments – what it looked like before they formatted it with all the journal branding) without asking for further permission. I asked Debbie to send me postprint pdfs for these; once I have them, I’ll upload them, and that’ll be done too.

Category 3: Some publishers don’t grant you anything at all, so need to specifically request permission to make anything available to anyone. So I’ve asked Debbie to decide what version she wants to try to open up (preprint, postprint, etc) and send that version to me so I can prepare a letter to the publisher asking for permissions just for that specific document. As soon as they say ‘yes,’ we’ll be able to post that too; it’s just that the road is a bit longer.

Some things I’m learning as I go through this process:

• I want to set myself up for open access and download/citation metrics now, as a grad student, before I even have journal publications – I want my publications list to be completely up-to-date and fully instrumented for “impact measurements” at any given moment.
• I am now proactive about copyright assignment, open licensing, etc. for everything scholarly I do. I was pretty proactive before, but this… goes to a different level.
• I am looking at the few scholarly things I’ve done in the past – conference papers, panels, presentations – and trying to get retroactive permission for that stuff to be posted, while everything’s still fresh in my mind.

It’s like scholarly housekeeping. I tell myself it’ll make a giant difference when I go up to defend my dissertation someday, years down the road – and when (and if) I apply for postdocs and faculty positions, and when… the list goes on and on. I gotta keep this somewhere, and it’s best to start when your career is young.

I have decided that the POSSE owl should be named Superb Owl. So that he can have one day a year dedicated to him.

(Note that the POSSE owl is not necessarily a male owl, and that my posting of Robyn’s quote does not constitute my endorsement of such a name for said owl. Still, it made me stammer incoherently for a moment. Thank you, Robyn.)

That is all. Have a very good evening, and may your nacho overdoses be miraculously healed with a good night’s sleep.

“The point of an institutional repository’s collection policy is so that you can say no.”

It’s not about what you will collect, it’s about what you won’t collect – how you don’t want to use your limited resources. Lunch with Mike was a joy; his casual comments (because he’s deeply embedded in his field) expanded to a wealth of information when I tracked them down. For instance, the Panton Principles (rationale for open data) – how did I not see this before?

I learned a lot about how someone thinks about an institutional repository. (I know it’s one view out of many possible ones, but still – getting a rich slice of that one view was extremely useful.) Content in Purdue’s IR is organized the same way its departments are organized; interdisciplinary research usually comes out of Discovery Park and goes in its corner of the repository. There are common actions that an IR’s workflow should handle well: consuming (downloading someone else’s papers), submitting (sending in your own), accepting (what it sounds like), and batching (creating collections of papers). Make sure you check and know all four.

Mike confirmed some other things I had been thinking about, like how catering to faculty self-interest (“ah, I can track publication downloads and use this for my tenure case!”) actually works well. Mandating something that should ostensibly be in faculty’s self-interest (“only publications listed in the IR count for your tenure evaluation!”) is… hard, and I’m not sure if I agree with that goal (I still live in a dream world where people do good things without being required to do them, apparently) but it’s got an undeniable impact on compliance rates.

On the way back, he introduced me to the work of Jason Priem, who looks at altmetrics – can we more accurately measure scholarly impact if we look at social media instead of merely journal citations? – and whose open access koans made me grin. Apparently Jason is speaking at Purdue in 2 weeks – I’m totally going. And apparently Jason is getting his PhD at the same place as Bryan Behrenshausen, last summer’s opensource.com intern (and the man behind the POSSE profiles from last summer – we’re currently having a debate about the future of POSSE, by the way).

My brain is swimming — and I haven’t even started my German translation homework yet. It’s been a good, good day. Extremely good. A day full of The Learn.

And so begins the public chronicle of Project Puppy. I must apologize for the obscurity; we’re still waiting to get consent from our interviewees to be 100% transparent about the whole project, but the short version: Project Puppy is radically transparent engineering education research. What would it mean to run an engineering education project like an open source one – if you assumed an abundance rather than a scarcity  mentality, if you shared rather than hoarded your data, if you welcomed surprises and “uninvited” contributions instead of carefully curating access? What would happen?

At least that’s the lens I’m bringing to it – my other collaborators all come from different backgrounds and perspectives. Linda Vanasupa from Cal Poly started the whole story; some time ago, Linda recorded 8 fascinating interviews, but didn’t have time to go through and analyze them. So she poked Robin Adams at Purdue, who brought up the idea to a few grad students: Joi-Lynn Mondisa (doing mentoring research), Junaid Siddiqui (doing transformation research), Dana Dennick (using conceptual change frameworks), myself (radical transparency and the open source way). And off we ran.

We’ve poked around the data a bit, but today was the first conversation we had about what it might mean to make this an “open research project.” What if we asked our interviewees – there are only 8, after all – for permission to release their transcripts under a Creative Commons license (Linda’s idea) and then did our coding process in public so that people could see what it looked like to do engineering education research?

Sure, there are concerns to deal with (for instance, Junaid brought up the question of what happens if someone does a writeup on “our” data that is a distorted misrepresentation – how would we deal with that?) but this opens up some interesting possibilities. For instance, not only would we have (we hope) some papers, but we’d get out a manageable-sized dataset for coding practice in a qualitative methods research course for anyone who wanted it. We’d be working with questions of open access – which Dana, with her library science background, intellectually understands but doesn’t practice, and which I, with my open source background, practice but may not be fully conscious of. We’d be looking at an interesting model of research mentorship and resource allocation; Robin already mentioned that it was refreshing for her to not be “the boss” of the project, and to not have the pressures of funding breathing down our necks!

In short, it’s an adventure. Now, Project Puppy isn’t about radical transparency per se. It’s a “normal” engineering education research project (on a topic I can’t yet reveal, but Linda’s working on that) we’re trying to conduct in a radically transparent way. My job, in part, is to model this radical transparency for the rest of the group – and so here comes this blog post. More stories to come!

First is my classmate Nikitha’s project for pedagogy class: redesign Purdue’s MATLAB-heavy intro-to-engineering first-year class to use a “flipped” model – view lectures at home, work on homework in class where there’s help available. (Mind you, this doesn’t mean they’ll implement it; she’s a TA, not the prof. Still, it’s cool.) The conversation took off from there, and…

• Matlab has a docstrings-like functionality (I knew that). But it also has doctest, which lets you embed testable examples in your docstrings. (I did not know that, but holy shit.)
• If you must give standardized, identical coding-based homework (and sometimes, for intro programming, you kinda have to), the best format I’ve ever seen was at Matt Harrison’s intro Python workshop at OSCON 2011. It’s composed entirely of well-commented unit tests. Good for self-testing and places with a working Honor Code.
• Which reminded me of Olin professor Mark Chang, who graded our Computer Architecture homework via automatic test. I realize this isn’t an original idea, but it’s still a damn good one for some things – TDD is a good habit.
• And how could we forget Allen Downey’s Cat Book, which is the current first-year Olin textbook for the class-with-lots-o’-MATLAB? (Comment from one Purdue TA I sent it to: “Can I go back to undergrad and take this class?”)

Second was a faculty workshop on curricular change at Rose-Hulman, which sounded like the I2E2 summer workshop (I drool over both of them – faculty development is teh awesum) and my subsequent musing to Sebastian (who’s working on I2E2 this term – or rather, continuing to do so but finally getting paid for it). “I wonder how much effect faculty workshops actually have,” I wrote. ” I mean, does anyone keep track? I’ve never seen a faculty workshop do longitudinal follow-up..”

I know there are things like Disciplinary Commons (hat tip to Matt Jadud for the pointer) and the Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education (a.k.a. “POD” – hat tip to Ruth Streveler, Alice Pawley, and Matt Ohland for ridiculous amounts of pointers to even more resources on this). There’s a similar society centered around TAs. There’s a group within ASEE that focuses on it within the engineering education realm. None are online communities, so it’s an adjustment to learn how to tap into them, find out about them… I’m still learning of them, barely starting to learn about them, legitimate peripheral participation opportunities seem scarcer, cycles slower…

But there’s something here, I think, that catches my interest. Faculty development intrigues me. To understand how professors come to change their teaching practices is to understand a powerful lever for seriously changing the world, long-term. Faculty are generally (1) very smart and (2) resolutely independent as well as (for pre-tenure folks) (3) under a high-stakes gun and (4) perpetually hosed, but they are the teachers and shapers of students who (by and large) immediately go out into the world to do stuff afterwards. They think long and deep about hard problems, and lot of them care – but they care about different things (teaching! research! writing! service! etc), and some of them show it more than others. I like hanging out with them, and maybe that’s why I’m training to be one someday. But maybe I’ll end up researching them too. Maybe.

Third was an article on the first high school focused on software engineering. New York City. Opens this September. I wonder how they plan on recruiting, how they plan on teaching, and so on… the article reports that “the school was the brainchild of Mike Zamansky, a teacher at Stuyvesant High School,” so I’m checking to see if I know any folks who know people involved in this.

Specifically, I wonder if the people working on the school would be interested in teaching open source. TOS has a good base of New York faculty, and starting high school students early in the same (H?)FOSS projects as some nearby colleges could be a nice opportunity for vertical learning, peer teaching, and involving students in a community of practice that is real and also has scaffolding to accommodate them.

Wondering. Not a bad thing. I’m off to class, and then I have some work to do — but letting these things come up and whirl around as ideas for a bit ain’t a bad thing. I’m writing them down so I can find them easily later, and now… it’s time to move on to the other things I was to do today.

We’re qualitative researchers, and we do a lot of interviews – for instance, talking with faculty who teach open source (me) or engineers on interdisciplinary teams (Robin and Tiago) or people who mentor minority STEM students (Joi). Whenever we do an interview with someone, we always send them their transcripts and our writeups on them afterwards to catch mistakes and make sure they’re okay with what we’re saying about them in our papers. Privacy and confidentiality are vital.

And that’s the problem. Security is in ZOMG mode, so we can’t simply stick these up on Google Docs, which was one suggestion – creating individual password-protected posts on our WordPress instance was another, which I instantly flinched at and nixed. For similar reasons, Dropbox was a no – not to mention I had nightmares of how that would (not) scale. Having one person email every subject is a nightmare, even if we use a separate group email account; inboxes are not made for workflow management, let alone collaborative workflow management.

And so I turn to you, o internet, for any ideas you might have. It’s safe to assume everyone involved has email and internet access. It’s also safe to say they’re probably not computer geeks and that any solution needs to be web-based or cross-platform. We can get hosting space and stand things up ourselves, but don’t have a dedicated professional sysadmin (I’m the closest thing we’ve got) and don’t have much budget – if we have any at all – to throw at services. I may be able to beg IT to do something for us if they already have instances of that software running for other people, but there are no guarantees.

What would you do? Here’s what I’ve thought of.

1. Drupal. With customization, you can have any content workflow ever known to mankind. That’s a ton of customization, though – and we’d need to make unique logins for everyone, which is a pain (we don’t want to force our interviewees to acquire Yet Another Web Login if we don’t have to). IT will know what Drupal is, but I’m not sure they’ll want to babysit something so heavily customized.
2. Etherpad. Opens up the option of collaborative transcript editing and easy viewing of a writeup’s edit history, which might be handy especially for remote (phone, but sometimes videoconferencing or text chat) interviewees. Security is sketchtacular, though; you can protect each pad with an unique password, but whoever knows the password can read the pad. And I am pretty sure that if I asked IT about hosting an Etherpad instance for us, they’d laugh at me (fairly enough – it’s not the easiest thing in the world to maintain).
3. Request Tracker. Track each interview as a ticket, which preserves email exchanges with interview subjects for future researchers on the team. Use RTFMs (premade text snippets for quickly composing common replies) to standardize and semi-automate responses. We can assign tickets (interviews) to specific projects and set per-project and per-ticket permissions, and our interviewees only see the email-based interface which makes it easier for them. IT knows RT (I’m pretty sure they use it themselves), and we need something very close to plain vanilla, so they might even do it on our behalf. This is my favorite option so far, but it’s pretty… culture-shock inducing for non-software people (which is everyone else in my research group).

Ideas?

From Marisa Ramirez and Ann Hanlon’s Asking for Permission: A Survey of Copyright Workflows for Institutional Repositories , I learned that one can contact publishers not just about individual articles, but about retaining your publication rights for all articles you send them in the future — or even all articles you entire institution sends them in the future – and yes, you can use form letters for all of this; no need to agonize over your phrasing. (Amy and I have therefore launched an effort to get blanket permission from Purdue from one of our department’s major publication outlets. More on this story later as it develops.)

I also noted the following passage with a tone of righteous indignation:

“…libraries should not pay to provide open-access to articles authored by their faculty if they are already paying content licensing fees, and paying salaries to faculty who are not compensated by publishers for their contribution.”

It’s like a strange parallel universe. Usually, when you write something for someone else to sell, they pay you. But in academia, you (or your university) pay them. And then you pay them for a subscription. To your own work. What the hey?

Figuring out copyright is hard, and it’s made harder because almost nobody (20% of the responding repositories) shares the responses they get from publishers – and even those who do are very careful because of fears (founded or unfounded) regarding legal liability, sharing only individual policies on general sites like SHERPA/RoMEO. Which is incredibly useful, by the way. Check it out if you’re curious about an individual publisher’s policies – some repository managers didn’t even know this sort of resource existed.

The survey (of 121 repositories, mostly US/UK ones due to a paucity of institutional repositories elsewhere in the world) confirmed that librarians (not authors) are doing the bulk of the work needed to get content in a repository, that everyone was scared of copyright, and that “educating authors on copyright” was the most common challenge on the open access repository front, followed closely by “obtaining publisher copyright policies,” both of which can be tedious and thankless jobs.

Summary: learn more about copyright so you don’t have to be afraid, and realize that those who want to see the work done (in this case, institutional repositories populated — and in my case, open access) are going to have to do the work, because even if faculty are supportive of the effort, they have no time.

Next week I’ll begin working with my first faculty participant – the goal is to make one of my former professors the first person to have their complete scholarly works up on Olin’s institutional repository (or at least the ones they published while at Olin). Stay tuned.

It may lead to your work being picked up by a new audience. “One of the things we’ve found is that new audiences are constantly revealing themselves to us,” the repository manager of Cal Poly said in 2009, “and that’s been the most surprising piece.” (From Jean-Gabriel Bankier and Courtney Smith’s paper on Repository Collection Policies [pdf].)

It’s also something that can benefit your students, who can also often place their work (essays, dissertations, presentations, etc) in the repositories of their colleges and universities as well. If those repositories are open access, the students have an instant public portfolio for their scholarly work, which can lead to fascinating conversations with future teachers and employers. In other words, it’s the academic equivalent to our usual argument for getting students involved in open source projects; open source gives you a portfolio of outputs of practice, whereas open access gives you a portfolio of outputs of scholarship.

Yes, grad schools can usually access published papers already, but that’s a tiny fraction of a student’s work; how many undergraduates have published papers? Even those who do will likely have a lot more good work that is not published anywhere (for instance, an undergraduate thesis), and plenty of students will want to show their portfolios to prospective industry employers, who mostly need open access to see any of this at all.

(This is, by the way, one way some faculty get into open access and institutional repositories themselves — they nudge their students to put things into their school’s repository, then go “wait, I could do that too.”)

And this isn’t just about big research schools. Jonathan Miller, the library director for Rollins College, writes about OA for liberal arts colleges.

Colleagues are surprised because they assume OA is an issue for researchers and the large universities that employ the majority of them. I argue that OA is not just the concern of research universities. In fact, it might be even more relevant for smaller colleges than for larger schools.

Rollins is a largely undergraduate, teaching intensive school with a liberal arts curriculum. This means that, at least in one sense, we need broad not deep access to information. We are net information consumers, rather than net producers. The subscription model of collecting a relatively small number of periodical titles “just in case,” doesn’t make much business sense for a school like us. What we really need is “just in time” access to a broad array of information resources, none of which will be used particularly heavily… the librarians are the faculty and students’ guides and partners in a larger, richer, but more complicated  information environment.

If you care about teaching, you should care about open access. If you’re curious and wondering where to learn more, here are the best resources that I’ve found.