The Launch of the Digital Public Library of America

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My favorite tweet in a long time, courtesy of @electriclit:

It’s going to be a good day. The Digital Public Library of America opens at noon: j.mp/15hTf0w // @dpla

Today is launch day for the DPLA.  Hooray!  So many people have worked so very hard in the past two years to get the plan down, the services built, the data in, and the site up and running.  It’s just a start.  There’s vastly more to be done.  And it’s not the launch day we had in mind; the in-person celebration will have to wait until the fall.  But the team got to the launch date on time and on budget.  I’m so grateful to everyone who has put their shoulder to this wheel together, across institutions, time, and space.

The key message of the launch of the Digital Public Library of America today is that collaboration can work.  We can build together, using the design and the principles of the web itself, a whole that is far greater than the sum of its parts.  The future of libraries is bright indeed if this same spirit that has gotten us to DPLA launch day can persist.  Under the leadership of the founding executive director Dan Cohen and the founding team of Emily Gore, Amy Rudersdorf, and Kenny Whitebloom, I am highly confident that it will.  Thanks to each of them for taking the leap of faith to work full-time on this start-up.  Because as of today, the DPLA is in their hands, spun-off, officially, from the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University into a shiny, new, approved 501(c)(3) non-profit organization.

The collaboration to get to this point has taken many forms.  The number of different types of institutions that had to come together to make this possible is itself remarkable.  For starters, a group of forward-looking funders had to agree to come together to pay for something that is going to be enormous, and very expensive.  Our founding support has come, in the form of millions of dollars, from the Sloan Foundation, the Arcadia Fund, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Knight Foundation (disclosure: I am on its Board of Trustees), and the Institute for Museum and Library Services.  The Open Society Institute also supported a key meeting, with our new partners at Europeana.  First among equals is Doron Weber, vice president of the Sloan Foundation, whose vision this project this is, as much as anyone’s.  Without all this financial support to date, and more still to come, there would be no DPLA.

There would also not be a DPLA without human involvement from librarians, archivists, museum staff, technologists, and people who care about these things from a vast array of public and private institutions.  The human interoperability — literally, thousands of people working together, virtually and in person — to build something on this scale, for the country and the world, is impressive.  The vast majority of people working on the DPLA are volunteers, coordinated by a tiny core staff who are devoting their full-time efforts to the cause.  It is how the web has been built, it is how free software is built, it is how social media is being built, it is how Wikipedia is being built.  This approach scales, it can thrive, and it can be sustainable.  It is working.  The launch of the DPLA is proof that it can work in the world of libraries in a digital-plus era.

The Obama Administration has promoted the creation of public-private partnerships to solve the country’s hardest problems and to create jobs.  I think the @dpla is a perfect example of how this strategy can work.  We are so grateful for the leadership of the National Archives and the Smithsonian, as content partners, and the NEH and the IMLS, as funders, for joining with those of us in the private sector to make this launch happen.  Those who don’t think government can work don’t know what leaders like David Ferriero, Susan Hildreth, Martin Kalfatovich, Eva Caldera, and Jim Leach do for us all as public servants.  They know how to collaborate with the private sector — like the growing number of content and service hubs across the country — in the broader public interest.  There are many others in Washington, DC, and in state government who could jump in to help.  We welcome you any time.  We are solving a hard problem for the country and we have created new jobs — four so far, and counting.  We can do so much more as we add partners and build out the open, generative platform that is live today and will be much stronger tomorrow.

To my closest colleagues on the Berkman Center/DPLA team — Maura Marx, Rebekah “The Bomb” Heacock, and Kenny Whitebloom in particular, and Robert Darnton, the university librarian — my virtual hat is tipped to you for years of hard work and inspiration.  You are the best colleagues I could ever wish for.  Thanks for what you’ve done.  Ditto to the entire Berkman Center team, led on this project by my great friends Urs Gasser, Colin Maclay, and Caroline Nolan.  You have proven, once again, what an unparalleled incubation space the Berkman Center can be.  Other members of Harvard’s faculty — Terry Fisher, Charlie Nesson, and Jonathan Zittrain — have led the work in special and constructive ways.  The tech teams, led by Jeffrey Licht at pod consulting, iFactory, and ThumbTack, deserve special thanks, too.  Every beta sprinter and app developer, making use of the newly open API, is just awesome; you will make the case for why the DPLA ought to be, at its core, a free and open platform with free and open metadata and content, to the greatest extent we can make it that way.  Our pro bono lawyers at WilmerHale have gotten us our 501(c)(3) status in what must be record-time, ready for launch.  (And Maura: you’ll be the Best Fed Ever at IMLS.  Congratulations on your major appointment.)

To every member of the Steering Committee, every member of the new Board, every member of the Workstreams, and everyone who has piled in on an event, listserv, hackathon, Beta Sprint, or meet-up: thank you for your partnership, goodwill, and contributions to come.  This is just the beginning — of something very big, if we can keep the band together and keep it growing.

Thanks, @electriclit, whomever you may be: it is a good day indeed.  May there be many more such good days in the future.

Do We Still Need Libraries?

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The New York Times is running one of its Room for Debate series on the future of libraries.  The four debaters (so far) are Luis Herrera, director of the San Francisco Public Library (and a board member of the Digital Public Library of America); Susan Crawford, visiting professor at Harvard Law School; Buffy J. Hamilton, a school librarian at Creekview High School in Canton, Georgia; and Berkman fellow Matthew Battles.  All four of their essays are excellent. And each of them answers the “debate” question in the affirmative: yes, we do still need libraries.  Of course, they are right.

It is worth backing up and asking why this question even applies.  What would lead us to question the library as an institution?  After all, as the authors point out, they are more popular than ever by many metrics, including how many people still walk through their doors.  Why is this even a “debate”?

It’s a debate because too many people think that we don’t need libraries when we have the Internet.  That logic couldn’t be more faulty.  We actually need libraries more (as Luis Herrera points out) now that we have the Internet, not less.  But we have to craft a clear and affirmative argument to make that case to those who don’t work in libraries or focus deeply on their operations.  Librarians have to make a political and public case, which is too rarely being made effectively today.

These days, in most towns in America, the same debate recurs each year when budget time rolls around: what’s the purpose of a library in a digital age?  Put more harshly: why should we spend tax dollars, in tough economic times, on a library when our readers can get much of what they need and want from the Internet?  In the era of Google and Amazon, the pressure is on libraries.  Every year, as more and more library users become e-book readers, the debate rages a bit more fiercely.

The annual conversation about libraries and money is hard in the context of academic institutions, too.  Libraries have long stood at the core of great schools and universities.  In many fields, the library is in fact the laboratory for the scholars, whether in the humanities or in law.  The texts, images, and recordings in these libraries are the raw materials out of which scholars and their students make new knowledge.  But increasingly, scholars are turning to digital sources – databases, commercial online journals, Google Scholar – to do their work.  Does every university and every school need to invest millions of dollars each in buying the same texts and bringing them to their campus?

The future of libraries is in peril.  Librarians and those of us who love libraries need to make an affirmative argument for investments in the services, materials, and physical spaces that libraries comprise.  This argument must be grounded in the needs of library users, today and in the future.  The argument needs to move past nostalgia and toward a bright and compelling future for libraries as institutions, for librarians as professionals, and for the role that libraries play in vibrant democracies.

Many libraries are making this argument, implicitly, through their good and promising works.  You need go no further than a visit to Luis’s San Francisco Public Library to see how exciting libraries can be today.  The Chicago Public Library, under new director Brian Bannon, is doing many promising things, including the MacArthur Foundation-funded YouMedia.  The public libraries in New York — I’m most familiar with NYPL and the Queens Borough libraries — have extraordinary things underway.  So does Amy Ryan at the Boston Public Library.  There are cool things happening in Chattanooga, by all accounts.  And these are just big public libraries.  Many academic libraries and small public, county, school, and special libraries are busily charting a new and positive future.  We need to get the stories of these leaders to be the narrative about libraries today.

We can establish a bright future for libraries.  I think it can be done by working together to take ten steps:

  1. We must redefine libraries for a digital-plus era.  By digital-plus, I mean that materials are born digital and then rendered in a variety of formats, some print (traditional books and hard-copies of images) and some digital (e-books, interactive games, image files, audio and visual works in digital format).
  2. The basis of this redefinition must be demand-driven, firmly grounded in what people need from libraries today and in the future.
  3. In this process of redefinition, we must account for both the physical and the analog.  Both have a place in libraries of the future.
  4. Libraries must become networked institutions.  There’s much to be learned from how networked organizations function that will help libraries (and librarians as professionals) to thrive.  Library schools and i-schools have a big role to play, as do funders and organizations that focus on professional development for librarians.
  5. Librarians should only seek to do those things that need doing and where libraries have comparative advantage in serving the public interest.
  6. Librarians should seek common cause with authors, agents, editors, and publishers, but if that fails, libraries may need to take on new functions.
  7. Librarians should seek common cause with technologists, inside and outside of libraries, in the public and private sectors — and develop strong technical (coding, information architecture, design, etc.) skills across the board within the library profession.
  8. Library spaces should function more like labs, where people interact with information and make new knowledge.
  9. Librarians should work together, along with private- and public-sector technologists, to create a common digital infrastructure and build from there.  We should draw upon hacker culture and the lessons of the creation of the Internet in order to do so.  (I have in mind the DPLA as a big part of the way forward on this front.)
  10. Libraries should maintain physical spaces but use them for lots of things other than the storage of physical materials, as the Room for Debate essayists make plain.

The argument that libraries are obsolete in a digital era is faulty.  But those of us who love libraries need to make the case for why that’s so.  This case has everything to do with libraries finding compelling ways to support education, helping people to learn, thrive, and be the best civic actors we can be.  We have to recreate the sense of wonder and importance of libraries, as public spaces, as research labs, as maker-spaces, and as core democratic institutions for the digital age.

Concussion: Returning the Student Athlete Back to Life, with Dr. Gerard Gioia

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Tonight at the Phillips Academy faculty meeting, we are talking with Dr. Gerard Gioia of the Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, DC. The purpose of this discussion is to ensure that we are adopting best practices to protect our students from traumatic brain injury (TBI), or concussions, and that we have sound policies and practices in place to help ensure that students get treatment and care for injuries they do sustain.  Dr. Gioia is a very clear and effective speaker with access to a great deal of relevant data and practical guidance for schools.

We are talking about the concussions that are most commonly seen in residential academic settings.  Research shows that about half of all concussions in these environments occur in the context of sports (hockey, lacrosse, football, and soccer are among the most common) and about half in everyday life.  After a student has a concussion, we, like many schools, have adopted accommodations for them on a case-by-case basis.

According to Dr. Gioia, the definition of traumatic brain injury, or concussion for short, is an injury to the brain due to a blow to the head or body that jerks the head forward and backward.  The damage is a “software” problem: that the brain’s electrochemical function changes as a result of the trauma.  Put a slightly different way by Dr. Gioia, it’s less of a “hardware” problem than a “software” problem.  Kids experience physical, psychological, cognitive, and socially-related symptoms that can last for hours, days, and much longer.  Concussions happen much more than we realize, among both kids and adults.  Injuries are one-off; there’s no one-size-fits-all in terms of the way to treat it and how quickly to bring kids back into their ordinary pattern of life.

The primary effect of TBI is to damage the working memory.  Students can experience slower reaction times, have trouble paying attention, or struggle with concentration.  Students can also experience greater irritability as a result of the injury.  Recovery time tends to be between 1 day to 140 days.  Our understanding and treatment modalities need to take into account this range and the variation within it.

Dr. Gioia suggests that best practices include ensuring that kids experience no additional forces to the head during recovery, by keeping them out of sports and other activities that might lead to re-injury.  Running, jumping, jogging the head; working too hard on homework; and emotional stress all can harm the brain further during the recovery period.  Students who have experienced a concussion especially need to rest their brain and get good sleep.  We need to help facilitate their physiological recovery.  The cognitive demands of school can slow recovery or exacerbate the negative impact of the injury.  (Studies show that math, it seems, is the hardest thing for students to do, by far, after a concussion.)  Dr. Gioia recommends a moderated approach to bringing kids back into their regular activities after a concussion.  The rest right after the injury is most important, with only a gradual increase in activity thereafter.  Dr. Gioia suggests setting up a team on campus that works with students after concussions, which is the approach that we’re taking at Phillips Academy.

Dr. Gioia ends with a positive message: these kids who get concussions will get better.

Claude Steele’s Whistling Vivaldi: And Other Clues to How Stereoptypes Affect Us

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Tonight in the faculty meeting at Phillips Academy, we will discuss Claude Steele’s Whistling Vivaldi.  (Steele is a distinguished social psychologist; former provost of Columbia; now dean of education at Stanford.)  It’s an exceptionally good book on many levels, assigned to the full faculty by the Access to Success working group at Andover.  The social science he presents about stereotype threat is deep and revealing; the personal narratives are compelling; and the ideas for concrete action at schools are constructive.

Steele’s book should be required reading for anyone who works in a school.  More broadly, anyone who cares about the present and future of American democracy should read it.  The topics that he takes up — the risks associated with stereotype threat and implications for education, politics, and identity — belong at the top of the list of important issues that we face as a country.

It seems fitting to be having this conversation tonight, on the 50th anniversary of James Meredith’s registration at Ole Miss.  Yesterday’s lead story in the New York Times (by Adam Liptak) also highlighted the important new challenge to affirmative action that the United States Supreme Court will hear this term.  (From the story: “On Oct. 10, the court will hear Fisher v. University of Texas, No. 11-345, a major challenge to affirmative action in higher education.”) It’s unfortunate that we are still struggling at the level of admissions of diverse communities; the discussion should be much further along than it is today.

Instead of arguing about the rules for admissions and whether our campuses should be truly diverse in the first place, the conversation should be about what schools should do once we have highly diverse communities. This issue is crucial to the future of Andover and our educational program.  It’s not enough to admit students from a broad range of backgrounds; it’s essential that we are intentional and effective about how we enable all students to succeed and enjoy their time at schools, including but certainly not limited to Andover.

(Book page for Claude Steele, Whistling Vivaldi)

Mimi Ito Comes to Andover

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This morning, Prof. Mizuko (Mimi) Ito is at Phillips Academy, Andover, to lead us, as a faculty, in a community conversation to start off the year.  Mimi is setting forth the core data and arguments behind Connected Learning, which is our professional development theme at Andover for the year.  She has us all on an Etherpad page hosted by Mozilla (a “mopad”) as a back-channel, which is leading to lots of discussion about whether we can pay attention to her lecture as well as our own chat session (not to mention Twitter stream and live-blogs, like this one that I’m writing contemporaneously).

The Connected Learning model is built around encouraging kids to tie together their learning in three areas: their Interests (diverse, self-directed), their Peer Culture (the social, peer-driven), their Achievements (academic and otherwise), in ways that are both online and offline.  Mimi also talked some about the desired outcomes for Connected Learning, the 21st century skills and deeper learning.  She stressed that it is very early days in terms of how digital media and education are evolving, and that assessment and evaluation are major areas for future focus and collaboration.  For more on the theory of Connected Learning, see a seminal blog post from Mimi (which includes a seven-minute embedded video) and many other posts from the DMLCentral community.

Mimi stresses, and I completely agree, that a technology-centered approach to education isn’t ever going to work.  There are many experiences that we can draw on to show that this is true: TV and education is just one example.  Our approach needs to be grounded in clear and compelling pedagogical goals, figuring out where technology can help and where it cannot.  Our use of technology can help us to transform teaching and learning in fabulous ways, but the technology will not do all that on its own.

Ways to follow along: our hashtag today is #connectedandover.  Mimi Ito can be followed @mizuko.  And Andover’s Twitter handle is @PhillipsAcademy.  And for other schools: I highly recommend a professional development day focused on Connected Learning — it’s both provocative and a lot of fun.

Meanwhile, Andover students are trickling in all around us, with many more to arrive in the days to come.  Some are back for sports, others for community service, others who are international students coming from around the world.  It’s our goal to connect the learning happening in these many domains, in the service of our students’ overall education and growth.

New post on a new blog

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With thanks to my friends at Phillips Academy and the Berkman Center, I’ve got a new look to my old blog. I’m excited to write my first post to try it out, on the day when all the Phillips Academy faculty return from the summer (welcome back, colleagues!) for our Convocation ceremony together tonight in the Cochran Chapel.

And tomorrow, we welcome Mimi Ito as our first professional development speaker and discussion leader for the year, on the topic of Connected Learning.  I am deeply grateful to Mimi for agreeing to travel across the country to help us kick off the new school year.

New Heads of School Institute (Part II)

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We are half-way through the Institute for New Heads of Schools.  (This is the second of two posts on this topic; the earlier post is here.)  I’ve been looking forward to the first session this morning, led by James P. Honan, senior lecturer on education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.  I’ve been an admirer of Jim’s for a long time; he is a great teacher and leader, including a lot of service on school boards and trusted advisor to heads of school (including BB&N and Dana Hall).

* Stewardship and Sustainability.  Jim’s session is on “Strategic Financial Management: Stewardship and Sustainability.”  Unlike the other sessions at the institute, Jim teaches his using the case method, and he’s a fine case teacher.  Every one of us as new heads has been asked by our boards, I suspect, to focus on “sustainability” and to take a hard look at the financial model of our respective schools.  Jim frames the session with a good, hard question: “what do you want your financial legacy to be once you leave as the CEO of the school?”  You want to have managed with strong controls and with sound compliance; to have aligned the resources well with the strategic priorities; and to be able to show that your management of financial resources led to the school being better by the end of your time there.  Most schools have their money in roughly four buckets: 1) general, 2) plant, 3) endowment, and 4) grants.  Most for-profits, Jim notes, have just one such bucket; the nature of the accounting in schools is different in this important way.  There are three types of money: 3) permanently restricted (e.g., many endowed funds); 2) temporarily restricted (e.g., grants and other “use-it-or-lose-it money”); and 3) unrestricted (within reason; the board can still constrain its usage somewhat, if needed).  Jim emphasized the importance for heads of institutions to be the “translator” of the financial issues related to the school for the community at large.  He cites to Herzlinger’s four questions that we (as leaders and trustees) should ask about the financials regularly: 1) are the organization’s goals consistent with its resources?; 2) are the sources and uses of resources matched?; 3) is there intergenerational equity?; and, 4) are present resources sustainable?  “High performing organizations aren’t just lucky,” Jim tells us.  Another good line: in education, “you can’t cut your way to prosperity.”

* Creating a Culture of Philanthropy.  The job of a head of any academic institution is, in part, about development, institutional advancement, fundraising — whatever we call it.  Our sessions on philanthropy, (led by Denise Martin of the Center for Early Education with Reveta Bowers), are focused on the people involved: staff in the development office, the alumni and other potential/actual donors, the faculty (who often ought to be more involved; I always liked talking with donors as a faculty member; I’m told it is rare that faculty are really involved in development in schools), the students (around whom everything needs to revolve).  The role of the head of school seems to vary a lot in terms of what role we play in fundraising.  I’ve always enjoyed this part of my job, especially as executive director of the Berkman Center, since I just thought about it as talking with smart people about work that I’m excited about.  I realize it can be hard work, but it’s rewarding and think it will be a great way to channel passion about the mission of the school.

* Trusting Relationship with the School’s Staff.  The executive director, Dallas Joseph, and board chair, Jeff Shields, of the National Business Officers Association (NBOA) came to talk about the importance of the business officer’s role in the success of a school.  I spoke at NBOA’s annual symposium a few years ago (about Born Digital), and I was highly impressed by the organization and its members.  So I’ve been looking forward to this session.  The speakers emphasized the importance of a trusting relationship between the head of school and the CFO/business officer.  That seems, of course, quite right.  It occurs to me that much of the messaging from this camp is about building trusting relationships with staff (and faculty and other constituencies) across the school, starting from the very beginning.  Simple and obvious, but worth focusing on.

* A First Year as Head of School.  Vince Watchorn, who just recently completed his first year as head of Providence Country Day, took us through his own experiences and teed up what one can expect in the first year.  The most important thing (and I agree with this, ex ante), he says, is to spend the first year devoted to observing, to listening, and to learning from what one takes in.  He talked also about helping to lead a conversation, to inspire other people to talk in public about big, important topics that may not have been discussed recently at the school.   He also talked very helpfully about the balance between the internal and external demands of the job.  It is crucial to balance the two, but achieving that balance is always a challenge — in the first year and throughout one’s time as head of school.  In Vince’s case, he toggled between an internal focus and an external focus during different periods during the year as a way to manage both demands.  Everything is connected, as in a complex system, Vince argues (which I also agree with; see Interop, which Urs Gasser and I just published.)  One nice nugget: in response to a question from my friend Zachary Lehman, new head at the Hill School (who is going to be completely amazing), Vince said that “the best new traditions are old traditions that have been forgotten.”

New Heads of School Institute (Part I)

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Last week was my first as head of school at Phillips Academy, Andover.  This week, I’m off campus with about 70 (yes, to my surprise: seven-zero) newly minted heads of independent schools for an institute (I am thinking about it as “camp” for new heads) hosted by the NAIS.  It’s very well-organized and well-staffed — and is a useful time to reflect on this new role we’re all taking on.

Over the course of the week, I’ll update this blog entry with the high-level points that seem to gain the traction among members of the group and which seem highly relevant to me.  The things I’ll pull out from the conversations and post here may not be the most important to everyone at the institute, but rather the topics that are most useful (selfishly) to me as I think about leading Andover.  I will try to limit myself to no more than one topic per session, lest the blog post get too long; they’re not in order of importance, necessarily, but in order of the sessions at the institute.  And I’m live-blogging as sessions go, so please excuse typos and shorthand.  Other participants would no doubt come up with quite a different list.

*  Assessment.  No small question: How do we define, measure, and achieve success as a school?  In the opening session, led by NAIS president Pat Bassett (blog, @Pat Bassett on Twitter), part of the discussion centered around ways of assessing the success of a school.  There seems to be little disagreement with the core premise: it should be child-centered.  The primary definition of success for a school should be how well the kids are prepared to succeed, in a broad range of ways (academically but also ethically, socially/emotionally, artistically, athletically, and so forth), after they graduate.  Also, it seems straightforward that assessment should be “formative” rather than “normative.”  How do we assess these varying kinds of “success” of, and for, our kids?  (I am a believer in Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences theory and framework, FWIW.)  For instance, some people think we should go beyond grades and test scores and college admissions (as important as those things are, in their way), and instead should look to alternate modes of assessment.  One suggestion we discussed: should we be creating a digital portfolio for our kids from pre-school through the end of their time in school?  A related topic: a good portfolio would be far from standardized, but rather student-driven — which would cut against ease of analysis across large numbers of applications.  This general topic of assessment is one of enormous interest to me; there’s an important national (and, in fact, global) conversation on this topic that we should all be a part of.  I’ll be staying in touch, for instance, with the work of my former colleagues at HILT, who are doing great things in this area in higher ed.  I’m also puzzling about how success can relate also to kids enjoying and benefitting from their time at Andover while they are there — not just in the sense of “preparing” for what comes afterwards.

*  Data can be our friend.  There’s a growing movement in the education field, including in secondary education, toward using data more effectively than we’ve done in the past.  (This second point, on data, is related to the first, with respect to assessment, but it is also more capacious.)  Some schools report that there’s a basic commitment to using data to drive a certain level of accountability.  That’s crucial, as a matter of basic management and governance.  More broadly we ought to strive for greater sophistication with respect to how we analyze data (it’s not just about the collection and collation of data, but about what we do with it, what kinds of decisions we make); how we think about both qualitative and quantitative sources of data; and how we incorporate and understand data from other fields (say, the increasingly important and revealing science of learning).

*  Diversity and Inclusiveness.  Every school has its own story, and (one hopes) its own pathway, toward becoming genuinely diverse and inclusive.  These issues are essential for every school to acknowledge, understand, and ultimately get right.  Diversity and inclusiveness relate directly to access — access to success at the school, in education more extensively, and in professional and personal life.  The NAIS board has put in place a set of new “principles of good practice for equity and justice.”  The presenter, Gene Batiste, VP at NAIS (see a brief speech of his here), notes that these new principles serve to support the diversity practitioners in schools by putting the responsibility of diversity and inclusiveness work in the ambit of heads of school and trustees.  As a side note, related to this and other points: each of the institute’s teachers is emphasizing the importance of modeling on the part of the head of school, which is true in the context of inclusiveness as well.  For Andover, as a need-blind school, this work is especially crucial.  In my mind, the work around access, equity, and justice are directly about making good on the promise of the school’s commitment to need-blind admissions.  I am extremely eager to work on these issues with the very strong team at Andover.

* Governance.  I’m especially interested in issues of governance and how decisions are made at schools.  That might have something to do with being a lawyer by training.  The faculty member leading this session, Reveta Bowers, the head of school at the Center for Early Education at West Hollywood, CA, is completely amazing and inspiring.  She’s been a head of school for 42 years, and that’s the least amazing thing about her.  Reveta led a captivating discussion about the governance of schools, focused initially on the relationship between the head of school and the Board of Trustees.  There’s a wide range of board sizes, cultures, and issues in the room of 70 of us, but many commonalities, too, across these differences. The key shared topic is the distinction between governance (the role of the Board) and management (the role of the head of school and her/his team) — and what that means.  Newly minted heads of school spent the session at the front of our seats throughout her presentation.

* Messaging and Social Media.  If you ever have the chance to take a workshop by Andy Watson, (very experienced) head of school at Albuquerque Academy, do it!  (Find him @atwatson2 on Twitter.)  He’s a great teacher — of writing and otherwise.  We also got a bit into social media strategy by the end of the session.  Most schools seem to agree: no friending of current students on Facebook, but Twitter following back and forth is fine.  Seems about right to me, and is consistent with my past practice at HLS.

Book Experiment #2: Interop

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Urs Gasser and I began a research project in 2005 to study Interoperability (Interop, for short). Our gameplan was to answer a straightforward question: do higher levels of interoperability lead to increased innovation? A few years and many case studies later, we had found a general correlation between more interop and more innovation in the context of information technologies.

But we also had discovered a few order things that we had not expected. We found that we were seeing interop stories everywhere we looked. Interop seemed to matter outside of the IT context, too. We also found that people in a wide range of fields had also been thinking about interop: those who care about economics, computer science, systems theory, complexity theory, and so forth. We decided that there might be a book project that could build from the base of our research into those original case studies.

As we began to write up the longer-form argument, we agreed also to experiment with the format of the book, as we had done in the context of Born Digital, Intellectual Property Strategy, and other book projects. The premise here, with Interop, (now, in fact, published as a book, by Basic Books) is to present the book along with a rich set of case studies, available freely online, that have served as the raw data for the analysis and theory we present in the book version. Our early case studies on digital music, digital identity, and mash ups in the social web were the first three. Over the next few years, we worked with a strong team of interns, as always spread across two research centers (the Berkman Center at Harvard in the US and the FIR ate the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland), to produce several more. These new case studies, also published freely online, range more broadly.

Over the next few weeks, we will roll out pointers, from our blogs, to these online case studies about interop. They can be read as standalone pieces or, better yet, as a companion to the Interop book itself. We look forward to your feedback.