[M]etabrain [E]ntry [L]og - Braindumps on things Mel Chua has found shiny lately.

I think a lot of the things and behaviours that make an open source community work are also applicable to dating

From an email I wrote recently to a friend, who subsequently asked me to post these passages on my blog so she could share them with others.

I think a lot of the things and behaviours that make an open source community work are also applicable to dating, if that makes any sense at all.

Aspiring to radical realtime transparency but knowing you’ll fall short, having a rhythm, working to become a better hacker and help others become better hackers themselves, even if you’re different types of contributors or working through different processes or on different projects for a while. Clarification, getting things out on the table. The willingness to waste time experimenting because you know it’s not actually wasted time at all, just a process with long-term and unpredictable results.

My boyfriend uses the phrase “beautiful awkwardness” to describe the feeling you get sometimes when you’re sitting in the uncomfortable spot in the relationship domain specifically — but if you’re lucky, there’s someone you’re sitting with, together. And maybe that’s how you can tell. I dunno, I’ve never done this before. But if you’re comfortable enough with someone else that you can be uncomfortable together, then… that means something, I think.

January 29, 2012 – 3:09 pm | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Digital housekeeping

Today ended up being an input day, a reading day, a lazy trying-things-out day. I want to go outside and walk the town at some point, so I’m clearing house a little so I have that calm, scrapbooking bits I don’t want to forget so I can let go of them in my mind.

Found a lovely poem called “Mastery” by W. H. Auden.

You need not see what someone is doing
to know if it is his vocation.

You have only to watch his eyes;
a cook mixing a sauce, a surgeon

making a primary incision,
a clerk completing a bill of lading,

wear the same rapt expression, forgetting
themselves in a function.

How beautiful it is,
that eye-on-the-object look.

Auden also once said this:

Between the ages of twenty and forty we are engaged in the process of discovering who we are, which involves learning the difference between accidental limitations which it is our duty to outgrow and the necessary limitations of our nature beyond which we cannot trespass with impunity.

Somehow related in the fragments of my mind: the Technium has some short pieces on wisdom for the digital age, the sorts of things I imagine great-grandchildren of today’s teenagers chuckling over the same way my generation read the “Little House on the Prairie” series with the fascination kids have of a bygone era.

Klaatu showed me ownCloud, and I am enthralled.

Trying to find copies of the International Journal of Open Source Software and Processes to read somewhere.

I started reading c-base materials written in German and can now make out fuzzy outlines of meaning without a dictionary. Yes, I’m working through grammar books and going through translation exercises in reading class where we do pull apart sentence structures with a fine-toothed comb and debate which vocabulary word maps to what phrase. Once in a while though, it’s fun to just read something normal at a normal pace and see how I’ve progressed; what looked like gibberish to me before is now a story painted in broad strokes, with blurs. No details yet, no exactness; I need to learn more words before that. But I’m learning.

January 28, 2012 – 6:21 pm | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

CATME and the SCOPE-o-Matic Allocator

Stumbled across a 2008 ASEE paper on “A semi-automatic approach for project assignment in a capstone course” written by two of my Olin professors a few years back, and pondered the differences between that and CATME, the equivalent bit of software at Purdue. Disclaimer: I’ve used CATME as a student; I have not used the SCOPE-o-matic Allocator (which is what I’m going to call the Olin program because the paper does not give it a catchy name). The following is based largely on reading papers about how each program works.

Both are software programs made to assist professors in the tedious task of team selection, which is a complicated and highly subjective process that needs human input and oversight, but nevertheless relies on lots of tedious data-pushing best automated away so the humans can use their brains to, y’know, think. Very similar. Except one was made as a quick project by two faculty members at a tiny (300-undergrad) engineering college, and the other is a massive research project done by an entire team at a university 200 times the size – Purdue graduates more engineering students every year than Olin has ever enrolled in its entire existence to date.

So the SCOPE-o-Matic is, in effect, mini-CATME. Or rather, CATME is SCOPE-o-Matic on steroids. Both let you select and sort by a variety of hard and soft criteria; not just technical binaries like “do you code yes/no,” but things like “how comfortable are you with writing?” Both try to get the tedious stuff out of the way and narrow down the options so the final call can be made by human beings, with all the lovely squishy judgement abilities we have in our heads but not in our computers.

Similarities end there. The SCOPE-o-Matic’s data entry is done by teachers; CATME has students enter all their data. This makes sense. When you’re processing thousands of first-years, they know themselves way better than you do, and besides, do you really want to do that data entry? But when you’ve worked with 80 seniors for the past 3 years, you may have noticed things about them that they don’t know (or don’t want to admit) quite yet; the collaborative judgements of multiple mentors are likely to end up with a more accurate triangulation than the self-perception of a 21-year-old.

Then there are extra features. CATME asks students to put their schedules in, and tells teachers (when picking teams) and students (when receiving them) how much and when their mutual free times are, which is nice. It can also be used to survey students on team dynamics throughout and after the course, a feature SCOPE-o-Matic doesn’t have. Then again, Olin classes are tiny, and it’s humanly possible for a professor to sit down for “marriage counseling”with each of the 6-10 teams in his class in the span of a week. At Purdue? You’d never have time for anything else.

Different strokes for different institutions. It’s neat to see how the same idea adapts and springs up independently in multiple schools.

[0] Yes, Mark Chang actually called it marriage counseling. As I recall, my Computer Architecture team was a dysfunctional polygamous triad where all three members were in open relationships (had other team projects going on that semester) and had serious problems with the division of child-rearing (completing our labs) when people intermittently went deadbeat and refused to pay child support. The three of us remain good friends to this day, but we learned some hard lessons about team dynamics that semester: good friends don’t automatically make good teammates.

January 28, 2012 – 12:19 pm | ene, olin | No Comments »

I do not know what to call this.

I write again tonight to sort my brain out. Bear with me; it’ll take a little while to get past the facts and through into the thinking and maybe a little of the feeling.

Purdue has a kickass audiology department with a student clinic that does full hearing tests for $10 (if you’re a student). I’m at least 6 years overdue for mine, so I went in and got mine done this week. The people were great. The grad student and the audiologist were both cool, sharp, patient with my questions, appreciative of the detailed answers and feedback (“it’s nice to get someone who knows about this stuff, you’ve done your homework!”) and encouraging of my interest.

The test results were a little bit surprising; my residual hearing is in the low frequencies, and the mid-range of what I’m able to hear has apparently dropped about 30dB in the last decade, which is a nontrivial and unexpected shift.  I’d want to remeasure before freaking out, and I’m not freaking out about that drop (so I go from hard of hearing to… hard of hearing? big deal) but I don’t want to lose what I’ve got, and they said it wasn’t normal for hearing to just spontaneously drop in someone so young. But by and large, I’m in the same place I’ve been for the past 2 decades. Cool.

We talked about hearing aids. My hearing loss has always been one of the most difficult to amplify, and this is still the case. I’ve got high-frequency sensorineural, sweeping down through severe and into profound – “profound” is the step right next to “stone deaf.” Sensorineural means it’s the last step in the chain-o-hearing that’s broken, so we can’t bypass anything short of jacking directly into my brain (which is what cochlear implants do).

Things have come a long way, especially in the past 2 years, for people with my sort of loss. Amusingly, some of the things they’ve implemented in hearing aids recently are the same things my friends and I tried in SigSys when we were undergrads. (I can verify that frequency compression sounds terrible.) However, when you get down to it, hearing aids can’t isolate the sounds I can’t hear without bludgeoning the sounds I can hear to death — if we turn up the dial so I can get the high sounds, I’m already clawing at my ears in agony because the subwoofer is too damn loud.

But there’s a bit more. I’d noticed for years that hearing test were done with two types of sounds: pure tones and scrambled buzzing sounds that sound like very far-off beaver sneezes. So I asked why they used beaver sneezes in the hearing test – casually, expecting an answer like “oh, the two types of sounds help us distinguish between X and Y.” Instead:

“Beaver sneezes?”

“Yeah, the noisy ringing buzzer sound, the one that’s not a pure tone that you play…”

“Those are pure tones.”

So this is what the beaver-sneezes mean: my cochlea is crap. It’s rubble so far destroyed that even if hearing aids could isolate and amplify those frequencies to the point where I could hear them – which, by the way, is somewhere around 120dB, or the volume of a jet engine – I would, at best, get scrambled signals. The best I can hope for is the ability to hear beaver sneezes.

Well, shit. There goes my hope of someday working on a thing that’ll let me hear a Mozart flute concerto like a normal musician.

But – moving on! I’d decided to do the Hearing Thing this semester, and when I do something, I want to do it all-out – I want to do it right. So I’ve been taking my first trips to the Disability Resource Center to get set up for CART, to the Vocational Rehabilitation center for the state of Indiana so they can give Purdue money to get me CART, and going to the university’s counseling center (staffed by psychology grad students who are getting their clinical experience hours) because I was confused at how confused I felt about this now that I’m not pushing through everything I don’t understand by blocking it with overwork. Everyone has been very wonderful and kind.

“It sounds like you’ve worked very hard to let yourself appear as normal,” my counselor said at one of our most recent sessions.

“Because I like forgetting,” I replied. And then I stopped and did a double-take at what had just come out of my mouth.

I do. I like forgetting. For someone who advocates awareness at all times… I like forgetting. I like it when my family forgets. I like it when my classmates go “no, really? I couldn’t tell!” I like it when I can go hours – days, sometimes – without thinking about it, all my adjustments so automatic and unconscious that I’m only aware of them when I stop and analyze in retrospect. To me, that feels like success, to do something that’s really hard to do so well that nobody – not even me – notices that it’s happening at all. Bearing this cognitive load all the time and being able to ignore it? To me, that feels like strength.

On the other hand, wearing a weighted vest at all times certainly might make you (muscularly) stronger, but it’s also kinda dumb.

I don’t know why I should be scared of learning about this, but I think I am scared, a little. Finding out more details about my hearing that I didn’t know before, thinking about, okay, do I want to make changes to my life at some point trying to fix that, what’s the cost/benefit analysis here, do I want to do things that will visibly mark me as different, do I want to think about cochlear implants (ooh, geeking out about shiny technology!) or do I want to say screw it, I’ve got other things to do with my time, because that’s what I’ve done with nearly every decision about this that’s been mine to make…

I’ve always mainstreamed and tried to be a “normal” person, and I can pass — but maybe this isn’t as good a situation as I could be in, and there’s no way to find out whether something else is better without trying it, which means an upheaval of equilibrium, a gambling of resources. Now that I’m doing bigger and harder and more awesome things, I’m starting to run into my hearing as a limiting factor. Maybe not a hard blocker, but as something that saps me, slows me down, to a degree I notice now in a way I haven’t before, with my tiny little schools and the text-based world of my career in open source. My world is huge and open right now – I feel unlimited, I can go anywhere without help… but maybe I can’t go some places as easily as I could otherwise. I’m not sure what “otherwise” is.

Sit in the fear, Mel. Sit in the weirdness and the questions and the things that aren’t resolved. Sit in the discomfort, and keep moving, but don’t run away because you’re scared, and don’t forget the other things you have to do.

Why is the balancing so hard?

January 27, 2012 – 6:56 pm | Uncategorized | 9 Comments »

15 minute GEECS webinar abstracts

Ruth Wertz just forwarded a call for abstracts – GEECS is looking for webinars by and for grad students working on engineering education. (If you’re interested in grad students who work in engineering education, check out GEECS.) I sat down, started typing, and hit the “send” button on these two about 15 minutes later, and I’m sharing them for a few reasons:

1. To share the talk abstracts in case anyone finds them interesting and would be interested in hearing the talk, whether that’s through GEECS or some other medium.
2. To illustrate how quickly it’s possible to throw together abstracts. One need not agonize too much. (One can agonize more, and if I were submitting this to, say, Science magazine, I would – but here? Nah, ship it.)
3. To encourage other engineering education researchers to, y’know, write more about what they’re thinking. Where others can see it, be inspired, and pitch in. (Most people are good human beings.)

Without further ado:

Why you (yes, you!) should start a research blog

“What?” you say. “Blogging is for other people. You know, the ones with interesting thoughts to write about. Besides, I’m too busy writing conference papers.”

“Are your papers on interesting things?”

“Uh, I hope so.”

“Then you have interesting thoughts to write about. What if I told you blogging can help you write your papers? That it can help you find coauthors, collaborators, research subjects, and sometimes even funding? That it’s probably what got me admitted to grad school in the first place?

I’m not talking about having a shiny professional site with slick regular postings and SEO all over it. I’m talking about the courage to think and write out loud, in public, where other people can see – and help with – the thoughts inside your head.”

“But I don’t know how to code…”

“It takes an hour to set up, doesn’t cost any money, and can be done by anyone who uses Facebook or Twitter. C’mon. I’ll walk you through.”

Open Access for Great Justice and Research Impact

Wouldn’t it be great if your engineering education research could impact the practice of engineers and engineering educators? Well, in order for that to happen, those teachers have to read your research — but many of them…. can’t. This is a problem. Open Access is a solution. (Widespread telepathic broadcasts would be another, but we’re not quite there yet.) Let me show you how to wield it.

I’ll briefly cover academic copyright — you know, those scary papers IEEE/ASEE/etc make you sign when you publish or present with them — what do they mean? I’ll talk (with empirical evidence!) about how open access can help you get your engineering education work out to the audience of engineering educators who *don’t* subscribe to JEE and other engineering education venues (in other words, “almost all of them.”) And I’ll show people how to send in the single document that’ll let them post their papers publicly online, completely legally, for other folks to use.

January 27, 2012 – 5:54 pm | ene | 1 Comment »

Pondermel: test-driven matlab for teaching, high school software engineering, faculty workshops

Documenting thought-trails here so I can put these ideas aside and get on with the stuff I’m doing now – if they come up again, they come up again.

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.

January 23, 2012 – 6:16 pm | ene, teaching open source | 2 Comments »

Design my research group’s collaboration infrastructure

Dear lazyweb, my engineering education research group’s infrastructure is driving me nuts, and I’d like to fix it.

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?

January 22, 2012 – 6:46 pm | ene, fedora, teaching open source | 2 Comments »

The reminder

I’ve been reading around the “communities of practice” space for the past few years, and ran across this bit on John’s blog that resonated with me (emphasis mine):

“In 1997 I decided to leave what seemed like a privileged and secure job in the administration at the University of Colorado to seek my fortune in corporate America and later as a solo consultant. I would never have thought of making such an audacious decision without 5 years of involvement in a dialog group that in hindsight was a community of practice about workplace communication and identity. That dialog enlarged the set of conceivable decisions, because the intimacy of the group gave me access to other people’s decision space.  Communities thrive and are most relevant around practices that are difficult, for practitioners that make difficult decisions.”

–John David Smith

It’s important, especially when the aspect in yourself you want to nurture is still young and fragile, to have a world where it is safe. A space you don’t need to protect, a space where you trust others to make and keep it safe for far, far longer than you need it. A little world where you can put your energy and focus into watching and coaxing yourself to gently unfold. And enough buffer time on both sides to both relax into the safety of that world in the beginning, and to steel yourself to go back out again after it’s done.

As I write that last bit, I have a mental image of heavily armored fighters trudging into a room, drifting with snow. They unstrap their helmets, their breastplates, pull off their boots, pile all those things on the side until we see the shapes of human beings in light clothing, soft and slim and vulnerable, in lamplight on an empty mat, breathing. And then they stretch, slowly – and dance, silently, with quiet smiles and the occasional gentle open mouth of soundless laughter, swarming and lifting and touching each other, holding. Then, drenched in sweat, they lie stretched out in the floor in the flickering lamplight, chests expanding up and down, up and down, inhaling and exhaling. And then a ritual of reversal. Toweling off, methodically pulling on the boots, the shinguards, gloves, the plating that protects but also restricts. Door opens, howling of the wind, and then it clangs behind.

They are vital, those regular few moments that remind you that you’re not alone.

January 21, 2012 – 7:43 pm | Uncategorized | No Comments »

How institutional repositories work nowadays

Let’s take a break from the usual flood of “open access, open access!” content to step back and look at institutional repositories more in general.

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.

January 20, 2012 – 12:46 pm | ene, teaching open source | No Comments »

Open access makes sense for teachers who care about teaching

Open access makes sense for faculty who’d rather spend their time teaching. Even teaching faculty need to publish, and the more people who read your research, the better – but who’s got the time to maintain a website of their publications? Heck, I’m a regular blogger and my publications list is out of date! With open access, you don’t have to; if your institution offers personal researcher pages as a feature of their institutional repository, you automatically have an online portfolio of your publications. If your institution has an open access policy, that portfolio also makes those pieces available.

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.

January 19, 2012 – 12:30 pm | ene, olin, teaching open source | 1 Comment »