 So thank you everybody for coming. I'm going to be talking a little bit more about the background of this. But we are from the University of Michigan, we're from the Open Michigan Initiative. And if you're interested in following along with the slides on SlideShare, you can do that. And we're going to talk, try to talk very briefly about some projects we've been working on and some research we've been doing. And there's a much more detailed handout about the methodologies, the background, our processes and everything on a Google Doc. So you can use that later if you have questions that might be deeper questions. But we're happy to, we're going to try to talk later. So like I said, I'm going to be talking a little bit more about the research we've been doing around how we can build a community of sharing at the University of Michigan. And really digging into what our community needs, what it wants, how it shares. So we've been doing a lot of different evaluations and research over the past year and a half. So I'll focus on that and Pete will be talking more about what we're actually doing with that research, what we've been doing in the last six months with that. So a year and a half ago, we started on a very large, kind of broad evaluation and impact study because we've been around for a little over three years now at Open Michigan and we really wanted to see what impacts are we having on our community at the University that we serve. So we did several different kinds of data gathering techniques, but we launched a survey in March 2011 that reached the entire university campus and we have about 40,000 students on our campus. And this survey was tailored to students, faculty, and staff about what their awareness of was of Open Michigan in general. If they had used the Open Educational Resources that we published, what they thought about it, how they used those resources. But a big facet of this survey was also about their general sharing habits. So nothing explicitly connecting to openness or OER or open education. But just how do they share with each other? What do they share with each other and why do they share with each other? So this slide is an example of one of the questions we asked faculty members about why they share. And so we learned some really interesting things from especially the survey comments from this large survey. And one of the things, so you see some of the more typical expected results from the survey that we, you know, a lot of people didn't know about us. We need to become more embedded in communications channels with the University of Michigan, figure out ways to make our Open Educational Resources useful to our local community. But a big facet of what we learned was this need to start encouraging a cultural shift in learning toward openness. We realized that people are sharing and they're doing lots of open things but they're not calling it the same thing we were calling it. So how do we match that up? How do we start connecting with people in their disciplines at their levels? So we also have been looking at our own processes and analyzing the work and the processes and methods that we've been using to develop content at the University of Michigan. And we had developed what's called the Describe Process that is a distributed participatory mechanism for publishing open educational resources and open content. It uses the talent and the interest mostly of student volunteers that we have hired a couple people and we've had about 82 people participate in this process since we were launched in 2007. So we have exit interview surveys from the day that have other quantitative data survey, data interview, data from them. And what we were learning was that the people that were working through the Describe Process were connected with the intrinsic values that we have in this. They are motivated by the same motivations we have, a desire to do good, a desire to share resources, a desire to provide quality access to resources with materials. And we did find that this process taught them specific hard skills. So they were learning how to use and apply copyright, they were learning how to use open licenses, they were learning how to search for and find open content. Another thing that they were learning how to do was shift and perspective. So they were actually taking this training and these experiences and embedding them back into their discipline and daily lives, their daily academic lives at the University of Michigan. So you see that same theme emerging from the surveys that we did to this evaluation of our Describe Process where the people that interact with us are starting to shift their culture toward just thinking about more open practices in general and sharing more broadly. So those were all good things. But we also figured out some more controversial things about our Describe Process. We realized that the process itself is a very good mechanism for publishing content, but it's not a very good community builder. So what was happening was that Describes who were working with us were being segregated from the rest of the community of individuals, faculty, departments that were working with open Michigan because we had so deeply identified them with this specific process. And the very things that they were learning, the hard skills that they were learning were actually in some cases barriers to them feeling like they were connected. So we were making them work through copyright issues and IP issues and publishing issues that were very tedious and wrote work for them, very detail-oriented work. So then they could achieve that larger goal of doing good and connecting with other people and publishing materials that provided more access to the broader global learning community. And so those were issues where we weren't seeing the opportunity for the community members to build their perspectives, to build their relationships, to build their engagement through the Describe Process. It was actually being very proscriptive. So that was a challenge for us. We had to figure out how can we build community around different opportunities for people and different mechanisms for people. So as we were doing this kind of retrospective analysis of the last couple of years of our own processes, we also started thinking about the future and how we could take this information and move forward with it in a strategic way. So for the first time, we developed a mission statement for the Open Michigan Initiative that actually focuses much more on building a culture of sharing rather than publishing content, which is what we had started doing. So we're not so interested in publishing OER resources for as a mechanism for engagement. What we're interested in figuring out broader varied ways for people to engage in doing the things that they're doing in their everyday academic experiences, but thinking about it in an open construct. So we also started last year doing things like building out different kinds of engagement opportunities for people. So previous to this last year, most of the events that we put on for our community were training events that were associated with the Describe process. They were mentorship events associated with the Describe process and a little bit of community partnership. But what we've been doing in the last year is trying to connect with people where they are and with what they're interested in doing. So we've been identifying community partners. We've been identifying faculty members, student groups and other initiatives on campus that are already engaged in projects that they care a lot about, that they want to succeed and they want to share those things with other people. So Open Michigan has been able to provide our expertise, our knowledge about how to share well with these people and actually provide opportunities for them to learn with each other. And so this is an example of a workshop that we did that was inviting the community member, the community in general, to learn how to use Arduino and open hardware. So these were the kinds of things that we were seeing people really get excited about and we were getting a lot more engagement and a lot more participation through these discipline specific events where people were already excited about these things and we were able to connect it with the broader concepts of sharing well, thinking about open practices and starting to connect these dots and connect our community together. And so we have all of these different specific activities that we've been engaged in and we've been doing a lot of this research that's kind of separate, but we're seeing this common theme emerge about really focusing on that community of sharing and supporting those different mechanisms for people to share. And so one of the things we started doing this summer was we hired an intern, Amna Shirakoba, who's from the School of Information who's been instrumental in helping us with this project. And she has been working on developing all sorts of processes, but one of the things that she did was stakeholder interviews. So we have the survey data, we have the described process analysis, and then we have this kind of engagement, face-to-face engagement that we've been very successful at. But how do we take that back to all of the individuals who are working with us to see what their own personal motivations are for working with us, what their needs are, what the skills that they want to gain are from working with Open Michigan and those kinds of things. So she interviewed seven stakeholders who were people like instructional designers, librarians, students, and community members who had somehow worked with Open Michigan, and these are some of the things that we discovered were their interests and their needs. So how do we take all this information now and how do we think about this and how do we think about acting on this? And that's what Pete is gonna talk about more of. So. Like I could keep going, I guess. Um. Like you can take over. So these are the things that now that we have all of this information, we're really trying to figure out. So we're trying to tease out now all of the separate skills, all of the behavior sets, all of the needs of our community, and to provide various avenues for engagement and connection. So not just through that prescripted describe process where you can either be a content contributor or you can be a describe to work with us, but we're trying to figure out how all people can, all the different people on campus can connect with each other through their interests, through their needs, through Open Michigan and through Open Practices so that we are not just being this bottleneck of in order to be open, you have to do it our way and this is the one way that we do it, but we offer several avenues for connection. And we also want to start connecting our face-to-face community with each other because we realize they think that they're often operating in isolation. And so how do we start connecting them with each other, acknowledging the work that they're doing, recognizing that work as participating and contributing to a larger open infrastructure and open learning practices at the University of Michigan and what mechanisms can we use to do that now? He can start talking. So yeah, so as Emily was saying, we were realizing that our community really wanted recognition for the Open Practices that were already participating and their efforts were already there. But what was really interesting to us was that they weren't as interested in being a part of this sort of larger new open community. They were more interested in taking the sort of advocacy role and expert role and openness back to their local domains. And that really supports our notion of having this really distributed, decentralized sort of open activity structure. One where we can pass on understandings of how to share well to other people in their own local contexts. So let's look at what motivates academics in general. And I'm thinking of academics as kind of a whole ecosystem with faculty, students and staff because we actually work with all of them. And this is by no means a comprehensive list, but this is something that we sort of aggregated from a lot of the feedback that we received and we sort of developed some statements for individuals. And again, what we're trying to do is improve open practices where people are. We need to know what motivates them in that environment. So what we can see is that, kind of some of the typical things that you might expect when faculty want to build reputation in their field and want to have better impact of their domain knowledge and students want to sort of build relationships through shared experiences and staff want to sort of get more visibility and use out of their work that they do. And all of these sort of motivating words here, sharing and gaining reputation and making contributions to society, these all sort of stream recognition to us. Sure, I want to go and do things and build stuff on my own, but in the end I want to be noticed. I want to be recognized for the contributions that I make. And it's really too simplistic to think about recognition as a reward. Different people are motivated differently depending on the context that they're in. So what motivates a graduate student to go back to school is very different from what motivates her to do traditions. And so we need to appreciate that. You can actually extend lots of different behaviors or even create or habituate certain behaviors through rewards, but sometimes that's just not enough. Sometimes rewards just don't actually cut it. And the tasks that we need to do and the concepts that we are trying to instill in other people are just too nuanced. They need better feedback systems than simple rewards. So that's when we came across badging. And so we thought about badges and we saw a lot of people sort of talking about badges especially at the last open ed conference and the Mozilla Drone Beach Festival. And so we're seeing badges as sort of a symbol of identity as a way to signify to other people levels of achievement or character and participation in events as well as belonging to a particular group or a set of groups. And so when we started looking at the sort of social communities and systems that Open Michigan's trying to reach, we saw badging kind of quite a few potential applications. And so if our main goal at Open Michigan is to build this culture of sharing at the university, we could probably use badges as a mechanism to sort of identify community members and to help them recognize one another as having skills in certain areas or sort of just be advocates in their own local domains. So again, it's sort of bringing it back to where they are. So over the last six months, we've been working on some infrastructure. We've been working with Mozilla and peer-to-peer at the university and some other folks on helping design the OpenBadge infrastructure. And you can learn more about that at openbadges.org. But then to link up to that infrastructure, we've also built a Drupal module that ties into our own CMS so we can administer badges and hand things out to our own community. And throughout this whole process, we've been doing a lot of thinking about sort of what Open Practices do we want to recognize but also what Open Practices would community members want to recognize for each other. And we came up with a lot of really cool ideas, some that we'll probably have to throw out, but that's the fun of brainstorming. So we have initially created some badges that really are simple and focus on the basic contributions to Open Michigan. And so they range from a general community participation to participating in the DSGOT process or publishing your first resource at Open Michigan. But our next set of badges are gonna explore more detailed tasks that are related to creating and using open content, being an open advocate generally, as well as encouraging other people to share work. And so what we're really excited about are really self-defined badges where an individual can actually assess themselves for certain achievements or provide feedback to other community members. So we don't want to be the only group that is handing out badges. We think that peer badging is really important here. So the kind of next, next phase of our badge work is gonna be in the context of learning. And this is, I mean, there's already lots of debates and conflicting viewpoints about the proper learning mechanisms and how badging might impede learning or how it might help competency building, et cetera. And there's a lot of different groups that are starting to focus on badging within learning. But they're really looking at certifying skills, et cetera. And our interest is less on that and more on helping individual learners set goals for themselves in learning, figure out where they are and assess where they are in their learning sort of life. And then figure out where they wanna be, and how to make sense of their educational and personal identities. So with that, I'll leave it open for some questions. I think the psychology of the motivation in the workplaces has been around quite a while. How different do you think these badges are, as opposed to the certificates that we might have handed out to our employees about 10 years ago or even currently to some of us? Yeah, I think it really depends on how the badges are created and how they're distributed. So, again, going back to sort of the peer feedback mechanisms. So a lot of the certificates that we've seen in the professional societies are very top-down. And there are certain hierarchical social structures that say, okay, you've done this well enough for me to give you this badge or this certificate. But I think it's a lot more interesting to think about a very, very wide variable set of pieces of recognition that individuals can pass to one another. When I see you share something, I can go to your blog where you shared it and actually hand you a badge that maybe just says something. And it doesn't mean that it has to be fully validated and certified, but it is a little token of trust that you hand off to another person. A lot of this we found too was just a basic awareness of people or wanted to see who else was a fan at the very basic level. Like we have an email list that we email out to people, but they weren't really using it very much and they didn't really know who else was involved in this stuff. So they wanted to just even connect with each other and figure out through their own disciplines where there was that commonality. I think I'm gonna be a downer because I've had a slightly different experience. I'm dealing with students and I have like a project that involves students collaborating on them and sharing them online and I've actually found that they're very resistant to the idea and I've done some surveys too and maybe it's a difference between different schools and maybe it's because sometimes people say that they want one thing, but really they probably want another. I hope that's the case, but in my experience it's about 65% say they would never share their notes or competitions with anyone for a couple of reasons. One is that they want to get ahead, there's a competition and sometimes for them to get the best grade in the class it means leaving the others behind. And two, a lot of students and this is by far the most popular answer are afraid that professors will accuse them of cheating if they collaborate with their classmates. I wonder if you guys have had any experience with that and how you've helped get over it. Whether it's a top down model or just I mean you guys are the university you're with the university so I think that helps I'm outside so I don't carry much credibility but I'm really curious to know how you've changed their minds of those sorts of things that you have. We've actually encountered a lot of students that are already collaborating and this is the issue of like there are all of these different projects and all of these behaviors that are happening on our campus that we would call open that they are not labeling as open and so students are collaborating to co-create basically what amounts to open handbooks or textbooks. Student study guides. Yeah, well study guides and also there's an example of a handbook that is for global engagement so students going abroad what they need to look out for it's health sciences related. But then we also have examples of students who have self designated wiki spaces to share notes and to pass on notes to different cohorts and to train each other about passing on notes to other cohorts and keep that system alive and developing and we're trying to figure out ways that we can support that behavior and make it even more open so that it's not behind a closed system so I think it depends on the avenue. I think this is the issue of where when we were saying you need to be open and you need to do all this stuff that wasn't really resonating with people but people are actually doing a lot of these things in their own disciplines and sharing for their own specific motivations and we can connect through those avenues where they're already starting to share and say hey, you can share even more and you can share better in these ways do you want to do that and see how that builds out. Yeah and I think what you're really pointing at too is that there's an existing culture in some places where sharing is not allowed, collaboration is not allowed and there's fierce competition. One might expect that in like a medical school setting where we actually do a lot of operation there'd be lots of competition but what we've found is that the students have been sharing notes with each other for over a decade and they've developed online systems and actually they've been able to create a whole new online system every year to share notes and certain notes get passed on like the Mathis notes have been passed on since 2002 to each class and they'll update them and so we're finding little pockets of sharing that it's really interesting and we know that we can help them do it better and so that's what we're focusing on is finding where it already makes sense to people and then helping them do that better. Yes, how does it like, how do you know that that is real? Like why couldn't I just download the jpeg and put it on my website and say I'm sweet? Yeah, exactly. That's, and so you should read a little bit more about the Mozilla infrastructure and that's one of the many issues with the whole open badging infrastructure is that there are ways to assign badges and sort of validate them that way digitally and there's also this mechanism for what we're calling badge baking but essentially you're putting metadata into the badge and creating an encrypted hash and then you can hand off that badge with the metadata sort of baked into the PNG. I can address that in the end of the video. I do appreciate it, sure. And that's exactly it. Badges are not just a visual representation of your work but they actually contain metadata embedded within them and so when Peter was talking about baking them essentially you pass information to Mozilla, we say like, okay, you actually assigned so it's the issuer, including recipient why they got it, what they did in order to get that badge. If there's a URL associated with that that you post on your server that actually represents that learning so in some ways it kind of does and we've heard some discussion about an e-portfolio and in some ways the badges kind of are their own little e-portfolios and so then we pass that back to the recipient and the recipient then gets to push it into their backpack and decide whether or not they want to make it public. So badges are embedded with data. And when people start counterfeiting your badges, you know you're a success. So you think we're out of time? Are we out of time? Yeah, so I don't know if we'll jump in much but thanks very much.