Work

Marketing Hypothesis

11 Dec 2016 By Nate 10 Comments

I’m incredibly excited—and deeply honored—to be joining the team at Hypothesis, the organization behind the capabilities that enable everyone to take digital notes, everywhere. At Hypothesis, I’ll be leading marketing: telling the stories that engage people to add a new layer to the web.

If you haven’t seen Hypothesis before, look in the upper right corner of my blog and you’ll see buttons that let you create and add to your own digital notebook of annotated links. For your further travels, the easiest way to use Hypothesis everywhere is with our Chrome browser extension.

Why Join Hypothesis?

Let me count the ways < see how annotation works! I’m inspired to join Hypothesis because it hearkens to what speaks to me: an essential need that people recognize and will sustain.

For more reasons than I can go into here, information literacy has never been more important. Persistent, shared engagement with reading is the foundation of literacy. Annotation records, personalizes, and connects engagement across the digital landscape. This needs to happen.
Educators, journalists, publishers, and researchers—among others—are already using or calling for the kind of universal annotation Hypothesis provides. There’s a call to answer.
Hypothesis’s standards-based, nonprofit, growth-friendly model can enable good practices to spread wide and persist to be meaningful. It will succeed.

Why marketing?

Getting the story right is essential. To make the changes I want to see happen, I need to connect others to what matters to them. Story has always been a part of my work, but I’ve taken on so many things across my career that I’ve never been able to make story my primary focus. At Hypothesis, I’ll be joining an awesome team that’s already doing such great work that I’ll have the unfamiliar luxury to focus my efforts on making the story matter: Why do we need annotation? How do we annotate? Who needs to know?

It seems like all paths were pointing me to Hypothesis. In true serendipity, I first learned of Hypothesis from a post by Marshall Kirkpatrick, who went on to found Little Bird, where I radically transmogrified my skills and experience as part of their founding team. Next I moved to Lumen Learning, where we recognized how annotation could raise teaching and learning to new levels and were already piloting Hypothesis in combination with open educational resources (OER).

Looking back, I can see I’ve been devoted to expanding access to critical engagement with information from my academic studies—where I focused on how media and culture intermix—to each of my jobs, where my focus has always been to enable deeper engagement with information for a wider array of folks. It makes sense that I would get to Hypothesis, where we are working “to enable a conversation over the world’s knowledge”.

I’m leaving Lumen in good hands: a team of talented folks continues the important work we started together to spread OER broadly in higher education: Alexis Clifton, Alyson Day, Alyson Indrunas, Bracken Mosbacker, Gary Abernethy, Heather Angell, Josh Baron, Paul Golisch, Ross Strader, Suzanne Jenkins, and all the other folks doing amazing work less in the public eye. A special thanks to my Lumen colleague, Julie Curtis, whose leadership of communications and strategy at Lumen taught me so much that will help me at Hypothesis and beyond. And of course nothing Lumen does would be possible without the vision cofounders David Wiley and Kim Thanos provide. Thank you all for the great work we have done together!

Going forward: let marginalia reign!

Post-Fact Fictions: Let’s Get REAL About Information Literacy

16 Nov 2016 By Nate Leave a Comment

Read more posts about Renewable Experiential & Applied Learning (REAL)

Graphic showing overlapping petals labelled information literacy, data literacy, statistical literacy, critical reasoning, visual literacy, technology literacy. — Literacy Rainbow (6/6) by Justin Grimes licensed CC BY-SA.

I’m still thinking about the 2016 US election and what it means for the people, ideas and future I care about. One thing that is clear to me is that understanding and participating in such an election calls on all of us—regardless of our point of view—to increase our information literacy and use it to inform our critical reasoning. How’s your statistical and data literacy doing?

Folks are saying we now live in a “post fact” world, but I recognize that “facts” have always been generated within cultural, political, economic, and social contexts. If anything, we are drowning in facts, not sailing away from them. To survive, we need to get better at understanding how facts are now made, circulated, and given value.

As I continue to explore how what I’m calling “renewable experiential and applied learning” (REAL) can provide ways to improve education, I keep coming back to information literacy as a fitting and necessary foundation for REAL experiences based on renewable assignments. Renewable assignments promote learning goals for information literacy, and in turn, information literacy is a necessary component for learner success in REAL work. I’ll also provide a specific, example of a renewable assignment that demonstrates this close connection with information literacy.

Let’s start with the learning goals outlined in the best open resource on information literacy I know, the Open SUNY Textbook (OST) Information Literacy User’s Guide, and see how these goals both describe and call out for a REAL approach. Each one of these goals is fleshed out in the Introduction to this work, including more specific goals that are mapped to behavioral, cognitive, affective, and metacognitive domains.

Goal 1: Evaluate content critically, including dynamic, online content that changes and evolves.

While renewable assignments don’t necessarily require critical thinking, they do engage learners in open works that become dynamic through their own and others’ interactions. Obviously, any good assignment would also ask learners to exercise critical thinking.

Goal 2: Understand personal privacy, information ethics, and intellectual property issues in changing technology environments.

The open-licensing component of renewable assignments asks learners to engage directly with the privacy and property rights of information, not merely in the object of the assignment, but by design also in the output of the assignment—their own work. Because learners’ work will live openly, they will at a minimum need to grapple enough with questions of privacy and intellectual property to publish their work with an open license. Questions of ethics aren’t necessarily built in to renewable assignments, but like with critical thinking in Goal 1, are natural extensions of thoughtful activities.

Goal 3: Share information and collaborate in a variety of participatory environments.

Again, REAL’s very structure leads learners to engage directly with this learning goal, as sharing through open publication is built into every renewable assignment. Like ethics and critical thinking, collaboration may not be a component of every renewable activity, but it’s a short step away when assignments ask learners to engage with already existing open materials often built collaboratively, and publish their own work openly, thereby inviting future collaboration.

Goal 4: Demonstrate ability to connect learning and research strategies with lifelong learning processes and personal, academic, and professional goals.

REAL’s experiential and applied components specifically ask learners to think in multiple contexts directly tied to their larger lives, traveling the circuit from learning to experiential activity and back again to reflection.

Example Renewable Assignment

For a concrete example, here’s a simple assignment, inspired by some of the activities in that same original OST work on information literacy and designed to lead to the same learning goals, but devised to be renewable, and fit any group participating in a common activity.

Assignment: Building a Choral Handbook

Simply, ask your group to build a guide for whatever activities the group shares collaboratively. I call this a “choral” handbook based on ideas from Mike Caulfield about how multiple, choral explanations can aid learning. Your group can make its own Choral Handbook using tools common and familiar to the group. A truly renewable assignment would produce a public, openly licensed handbook that would then be enriched and improved as new people engage in the exercise.

Part 1: Document

Go to the place where you engage in any activity common to our group.
Which part of the activity do you think is hard but you know how to do?
Do that hard part. Take notes. Drawing or taking pictures can be helpful. Look up things you don’t know.
Post your description of that hard part of the activity and the step-by-step actions you take to do it in a good place in our Choral Handbook.
For each step, include if you created or where you found that information so others know where your guidance comes from.

Part 2: Reenact

Read our Choral Handbook to find a post about a different activity or part of an activity that you don’t know how to do as well or you think can be improved.
Follow the steps in the post. Pay attention to where the information in each step comes from: is it credible? Is there better information?
Ignore, add, or change steps as you see fit. Take notes. Drawing or taking pictures can be helpful. Look up things you don’t know.
Alongside that same post, add a new post of the step-by-step actions you take to do that activity that you think improves on or provides a worthy alternative to the original post. Remember, because all posts in our Choral Handbook are openly-licensed to permit revision and reuse, you can reuse any or all of any other post in your own work as long as you attribute the original author.
For each step, include if you created or where you found that information so others know where your guidance comes from.

Part 3: Reflect

Return to your post from Part 1. Based on your experience reenacting a different activity in Part 2, is there anything you would add, take away, or change to make it better?
Revise your post as you see fit.
For each step, add any new or changed sources of information.

Open Batteries

25 Oct 2016 By Nate Leave a Comment

Read more posts about Renewable Experiential & Applied Learning (REAL)

Kid's art hung on fridge. — Josh’s First Fridge Art by Jessica, licensed CC BY-SA.

When kids are little, we are quick to share their works, without worrying if they are worthy, or if sharing gets in the way of the creator’s growth. A first scribble hung on the fridge engages its crayon-wielding artist in community, audience, and their own creative evolution. I still remember my first daughter’s prolific Blue Period, quickly far too large for her limited fridge gallery.

Yet as soon as kids enter school, their work descends into an underworld of assessment: kindergarten’s finger paintings give way to worksheets, reports, and standardized tests that fall quickly to their final, lonely resting places, giving off the dying breath of grades.

In a previous post on an “electric” metaphor for renewable experiential and applied learning (REAL), I suggested that renewable assignments—assignments where students produce meaningful, public works—store value like batteries, not only for their creators, but also for future learners and the community at large.

What makes an assignment renewable? A renewable assignment should be meaningful beyond its role in learning and assessment. This is the simple power of experiential learning: when an assignment engages a learner and their work in the larger world, it provides opportunities for learning that go beyond mere graded exercises.

But experiential learning—easier said then done! How can a learner take first steps in the larger world when that larger world is made out of expensive materials that specifically prohibit contribution, modification, and republication?

Truly renewable assignments engage learners in open materials—openly licensed or in the public domain—so that learners are free to take small, first steps, and increasingly larger strides, to contribute to and modify meaningful works, and also republish their contributions to put real experience in their learning.

Artifacts produced by open, renewable assignments store the engagement of each learner—not only so each learner can build on their experience, but also so others can too, “renewing” the assignment again and again.

REAL Circuits of Learning

11 Sep 2016 By Nate Leave a Comment

Read more posts about Renewable Experiential & Applied Learning (REAL)

Now that Renewable Experiential & Applied Learning has an acronym (REAL), the next thing it needs is metaphors and cocktail napkin sketches…so here goes:

A key part of REAL’s “renewability” is the idea of connecting learning and experience in virtuous cycles that rotate through activities in educational organizations and the wider world of communities and workplaces. My first metaphor for these virtuous cycles is an electrical circuit:

Learners are the electrical charge,
traveling from knowledge-building activities in educational settings
across conduits to activities of practice in community/workplace settings
and then completing the circuit by returning to their original educational setting.
Once returned, learners amplify their experience by engaging in renewable assignments
that further their learning and enable assessment of their progress toward learning goals.

In this “electric” metaphor, the openly-licensed artifacts (OER) that learners generate via renewable assignments at different points around the circuit act as batteries, storing the power of learning to later empower other learners and learning.

What is a Doorman? Opening Doors From Little Bird to Lumen

24 Apr 2014 By Nate Leave a Comment

Arbour Hill Gardens used under (cc) from William Murphey.

After more than a year working to help local Portland social intelligence startup Little Bird take flight, I’m excited to announce I’m moving on to work with a wider variety of projects. In short, I’m bringing the role I played at Little Bird as a “Doorman” to organizations of all sizes, from startups to large enterprises.

What’s a Doorman? A Doorman opens doors for people to connect, working at the intersection of growth, community and product.

I’m really excited about my first/next project as a Doorman: working with Lumen Learning, another amazing Portland startup that takes me back to my prior experience in education and technology. Lumen works to improve student learning and lower the cost of education by helping educational institutions adopt, adapt and build open educational resources. Lumen is taking the collaborative economy to school.

Lumen was founded by Kim Thanos and David Wiley, two highly experienced and connected leaders in the education and open content worlds. I’m honored to have the chance to collaborate with both of them again to help spread Lumen’s valuable and worthy intervention.

It’s a hard time to leave Little Bird when so many things there are really taking flight, from today’s announcement that Carmen Hill will join the team to lead marketing, to some great new customers and product enhancements, to closing a second round of seed funding and making key CTO and COO hires back in February. I’m proud to have worked with Marshall Kirkpatrick and the whole team to get Little Bird in flight.

Curious about Little Bird? I’m happy to talk with anyone about this awesome team and the powerful engine and services they provide to harness social intelligence for your business or project.

Want to hear more? Need to get in touch? Reach out to me at any time.

A Little Bird Told Me

1 Feb 2013 By Nate 6 Comments

I’ve been working in educational technology for the last 14 years: first at OMSI, then at Portland State, and most recently at rSmart, focused on Sakai open source collaboration and learning technologies. As of February 2013, I have joined former data-journalist Marshall Kirkpatrick‘s startup, Little Bird, here in Portland, Oregon, as Doorman: leading marketing, sales, and support.

I’m profoundly excited by Little Bird. While it may seem like a dramatic departure from my edtech work, at its heart, Little Bird is ultimately a powerful tool for learning, bringing you directly to the leading people and most worthy content in any topic. Little Bird can help anyone do with purpose what I have done haphhazardly and organically: building my own understanding and relationships by connecting to people that matter, first online, but then also, almost always, offline as well. Needless to say, I wouldn’t be joining Little Bird if I hadn’t first learned from, and then met and developed a relationship with Marshall on Twitter. Now with Little Bird, we are working to enable everyone to learn and build relationships that can change their work and lives.

Little Bird’s team is an awsome collection of wildly unique individuals, who nevertheless share inspiring intelligence and worthy values. I’m honored to be able to work alongside Marshall, his Little Bird co-founders Mikalina Kirkpatrick and Tyler Gillies, and our growing team of folks including Danish Aziz, Peat Bakke, Devin Gaffney, and Brennan Novak. As much as I have learned from and loved working with folks around the world in the Sakai community and at rSmart, it’s a like opening a present every day to spend time face-to-face with Little Bird’s team of smart, thoughtful people, deeply embedded in Portland’s welcoming, innovative tech and creative communities.

My connection to edtech remains: for as long as it makes sense (or until my term ends, which ever comes first), I still serve on the board of directors for the Apereo Foundation—the new organization formed in late 2012 by joining Sakai and Jasig. Maybe the new experience and viewpoints I gain from Little Bird can add some valuable perspective to Apereo. At the very least, I know I’ll be looking at education, and the technologies we hope to make serve it, with a new, avianette lens.

Looking back, I’d like to give my deepest thanks to the people that made my journey with Sakai and rSmart possible: first and foremost, Chris Coppola, who helped me start that journey and lead me forward with his thinking, drive, and values. Wende Garrison and Trish Harris, who put a lot of very smart wind and perspective in my sails and sailed along with me. Kim Thanos, who continues to advise and inspire me in so many wise ways large and small. The whole rSmart team, but most especially Brooke Biltimier, Brenda Chapman, Tom Chapman, Duffy Gillman, Paul Hauser, Orla Mester, Erik Mertz, and Lance Speelmon, who always seemed like close collaborators even though we were so often working at a distance. In the worldwide Sakai community there are too many to name who have been my brothers and sisters in the campaign to make education better: but I thank you all and hope to continue to serve you at Apereo and beyond.