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New federal education fund makes available $2 billion to create OER resources in community colleges
The Department of Labor and the Department of Education today announced a new education fund that will grant $2 billion to create OER materials for career training programs in community colleges. According to Secretary of Labor Hilda L. Solis and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, the Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training Grant Program (TAACCCT) will invest $2 billion over the next four years into grants that will "provide community colleges and other eligible institutions of higher education with funds to expand and improve their ability to deliver education and career training programs." The full program announcement (PDF) states that all the resources created using these funds must be released under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license:
In order to further the goal of career training and education and encourage innovation in the development of new learning materials, as a condition of the receipt of a Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training Grant ("Grant"), the Grantee will be required to license to the public (not including the Federal Government) all work created with the support of the grant ("Work") under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License ("License"). This License allows subsequent users to copy, distribute, transmit and adapt the copyrighted work and requires such users to attribute the work in the manner specified by the Grantee. Notice of the License shall be affixed to the Work. For more information on this License, please visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0.
The program supports President Obama's goal of having the highest proportion of college graduates in the world by 2020 by helping to increase the number of workers who attain degrees, certificates, and other industry-recognized credentials. The first round of funding will be $500 million over the next year. Applications to the solicitation are now open, and will be due April 21, 2011.
Cathy Casserly, incoming CEO of Creative Commons, said, "This exciting program signifies a massive leap forward in the sharing of education and training materials. Resources licensed under CC BY can be freely used, remixed, translated, and built upon, and will enable collaboration between states, organizations, and businesses to create high quality OER. This announcement also communicates a commitment to international sharing and cooperation, as the materials will be available to audiences worldwide via the CC license."
Beth Noveck, professor of law and former U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer and Director of the White House Open Government Initiative, said, "The decision to make the work product of $2 billion in federally funded grants free for others to reuse represents a historic step forward for open education. The Departments of Labor and Education are to be congratulated for adopting more open grantmaking practices to ensure that taxpayer money funds the widest possible distribution of this important job-training courseware."
Congratulations to The Department of Labor, The Department of Education, and others involved in crafting this important, innovative program. Creative Commons is committed to leveraging this opportunity to create a multiplier effect for public dollars to be used on open, reuseable quality content.
Where new learning materials are created using grant funds, those materials must be made available under CC BY. However, it is not a requirement that all the TAACCCT grant funds be spent on the creation of learning materials. We've also updated the title of this post to reflect this clarification, which before read U.S. Department of Labor and Department of Education commit $2-billion to create open educational resources for community colleges and career training.
Second Addendum:
See our page about Creative Commons and TAACCCT for further information.
CC Talks With: The Right to Research Coalition's Nick Shockey: Open Education and Policy
Nick Shockey is the Director of the Right to Research Coalition (R2RC) and the Director of Student Advocacy at the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC). The R2RC is an international alliance of 31 graduate and undergraduate student organizations, representing nearly 7 million students, that promotes an open scholarly publishing system based on the belief that no student should be denied access to the research they need for their education because their institution cannot afford the often high cost of scholarly journals. We spoke to Nick about similarities in the open access and open educational resources movements, the worldwide student movement in support of access to scholarly research, and the benefits of adopting Creative Commons tools for open access literature.
Nick Shockey by Right To Research Coalition / CC BY
"It all started in a hotel room in Paris," explains Shockey, who while studying abroad at Oxford and on a brief trip to France happened to catch a CNN special about MIT's OpenCourseWare (OCW) program. Nick was immediately impressed by the idea of OCW, and upon his return to Trinity University campaigned to get his school to implement a similar program. For a number of reasons, OCW didn't catch on at Trinity, but the experience Shockey gained in advocating for it provided him with two crucial pieces that led to his work at SPARC: a deep interest in opening up the tools of education, and an introduction to Diane Graves, Trinity's University Librarian and then SPARC Steering Committee member. Shockey began advocating for open access to research at Trinity, and convinced the student government to pass a resolution supporting the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA), as well as a later resolution endorsing the Student Statement on the Right to Research. The statement calls for students, researchers, universities, and research funders to make academic research openly available to all. These principles formed the foundation for what was to become the Right to Research Coalition.
Growth of R2RC
In the summer after Shockey moved to Washington D.C., he was able to add new signatories to the Student Statement on the Right to Research, including the National Association of Graduate-Professional Students (NAGPS) and the National Graduate Caucus of the Canadian Federation of Students. It soon became clear that a larger impact could be made by organizing as a coalition that actively advocated for and educated students about open access, and Nick joined SPARC full time to lead the Right to Research Coalition.
R2RC has grown to include 31 member organizations and now represents nearly 7 million students worldwide. "The incredible diversity of our membership speaks to how important access to research is to students," says Shockey. R2RC's members range in size from groups with less than a hundred students to organizations with more than a million. But Nick notes that all the member groups have two things in common: they believe students should have the benefit of the full scholarly record (not just the fraction they or their institution can afford), and they recognize that the Internet has made unfettered access possible by driving down the marginal cost to distribute knowledge virtually to zero.
Federal open access advocacy
SPARC and the Right to Research Coalition have been supportive of the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA), a law which would require 11 U.S. government agencies with annual output research expenditures over $100 million to make manuscripts of journal articles stemming from research funded by that agency publicly available via the Internet. While FRPAA didn't pass in 2010, Shockey's very happy with the remarkable progress made, which culminated last year in the Congressional hearing on the issue of public access to federally funded research. Shockey, colleague Julia Mortyakova, and R2RC members have been advocating in support of FRPAA in various ways, such as letter-writing campaigns and in-person office visits. Shockey estimates his membership has reached out to well over two hundred Congressional offices.
Student support for OA around the world
Shockey describes that the current situation of limited access to academic research is a widespread problem that affects students all around the world. But, he explains that the real difference isn't between the United States and the rest of the world, but between the developed and the developing world. "Paying $30 for access to one article is expensive even for many researchers in the U.S.," says Nick, "but when you realize that $30 is an entire average month's wage in Malawi, you can see the huge disparities in access faced by huge swaths of people around the world."
At the end of last summer, R2RC began a concerted effort to expand their coalition to incorporate international student groups, and launched their Access Around the World blog series to feature stories and activities from students across the globe. In fall 2010, Shockey pitched the importance for student access to scholarly research to the European Medical Students' Association's General Assembly in Athens and the European Students' Conference in Berlin. "The students understood the issue right away and have gotten involved immediately," says Nick. The President of the European Medical Students' Association has already made a presentation on Open Access and the R2RC at a major international medical conference, and just this month, the coalition welcomed the International Federation of Medical Students' Associations (IFMSA), the world's largest medical student organization, which operates in 97 countries around the world.
Access is crippled by cost; OA enables novel downstream benefits
The high cost to users to access academic journals and educational materials is a criticism shared by advocates of open access (OA) and open educational resources (OER). Scholarly journal prices have increased at 200% the level of inflation, similar to that of college textbook prices. Shockey believes that the that the greatest value of open access is to help knock down the prohibitive barriers that high prices pose to individual users. "A singe U.S. university we studied spent about $900,000 for only 96 journal subscriptions–and that was at a well-funded school," says Shockey. "At less wealthy institutions, or those in the developing world, the price barriers often prove insurmountable. Students and researchers must make do with what their school can afford rather than what they need."
Nick explains that through open access, the entire scholarly record could be available for anyone to read and build upon, leading to innumerable public benefits. But he's most excited by the uses of open access scholarship we can't even think of at the moment. "Lawrence Lessig points out that the real 'secret sauce' of the Internet is that you don't need anyone's permission to innovate on it," says Shockey, "and I believe open access will finally bring this ability to academic research." Nick describes a world of open access in which researchers will not only be able to read any article, but also be permitted to perform semantic text mining to uncover trends no one person could discover and connect together. But for this promise to be fulfilled, he reinforces that researchers need access to the entire scholarly record, not just a selected subset, and the rights necessary to reuse these articles in new and interesting ways.
Open access and Creative Commons
Shockey explained that Creative Commons plays a crucial role within the OA movement by providing a standard suite of prepackaged open content licenses. "To make an obvious point," he said, "very few researchers are also copyright lawyers, and the CC licenses make it simple for scholars and journals to make their articles openly available. CC also helps prevents a patchwork system where it's unclear which uses are allowed and which are not." Nick notes that this sort of ambiguity can be very harmful–particularly to reuse of content, so it's important that the open access community leverages CC to ensure access and communicate rights.
Shockey says that the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license has become the gold standard for open access journals. In general, scholars want recognition for their work, and the CC BY license ensures attribution to the author while allowing anyone to read, download, copy, print, distribute, and reuse their work without restriction. Shockey notes that several studies have shown a strong increase in article views and citations when an article is made openly available. "This makes intuitive sense," Nick says. "If an article is available for more people to read and build upon, it's unsurprising that it will also tend to be cited more often. Given the importance of citation counts in academic advancement, the citation increase can be an important benefit that flows from open licensing."
OA support via the university
Open access (and increasingly, OER) initiatives at universities have been promoted in part through the university library. For example, at some schools librarians help educate faculty and students about the options available to them for scholarly publishing, including administering the Scholar's Copyright Addendum. Shockey thinks that the library is a natural central organizing venue for OA and OER work, and meshes well with the library's fundamental mission to provide their community with access to the educational resources they need. Nick also noted that libraries are perfectly positioned to play an OA/OER organizing role because they are one of the only institutions that reaches every department and every member of the campus community. Shockey said that some libraries have already taken the lead by supporting initiatives such as the Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity (COPE), which sets aside money to pay for the publication fees that some open access journals charge, in order to help transition to an open model.
OA and OER working together
Open access advocates argue that access to scholarly literature should not be limited to scientists and academics, but available to patients, parents, students at all levels, entrepreneurs, and others. Shockey believes that since the OA and OER movements are both working to enable free access to the tools of education, it's important to explore the ways in which these movements can work together. Even though the R2RC is centered on open access, it's begun to weave OER into its messaging alongside open data and open science. Nick thinks it's important for R2RC members to see the larger network in which they work. "When we hit roadblocks in one area," said Shockey, "there are often opportunities in others, and advancing one of these pieces (be it OA, OER, open data, open video, etc) opens the door for further progress in other areas. Furthermore, once you've convinced someone about one of these issues, be it a friend, colleague, or the U.S. Congress, it's much easier to engage them on the others."
Shockey is optimistic with regard to the future of the student open access movement, but stresses the need to move ahead with the clear vision that advancements in education, science, and scholarship require access to raw research materials. "We must always remember what it is we're fighting for," said Shockey, "academic research is the raw material upon which not only education but also scientific and scholarly advancement depend. When we allow these crucial resources to be locked away, it hinders the entire mission of the Academy – student learning suffers, scholarly research is impeded, and scientific discoveries are slowed." Nick says that widespread open access promises to benefit science and scholarship in radical ways that are almost unimaginable today. "Open access will improve how we teach, learn, and solve problems in ways that are impossible within a closed system."
While there are many ways to get involved with the Open Access movement, Shockey stressed that the most important was simply to learn about this issue of access to research and start conversations with friends, colleagues, mentors, and students to raise awareness. The R2RC website has an individual version of their Student Statement on the Right to Research open for anyone to sign, as well as a host of other education and advocacy resources for those interested in Open Access.Comments Off
CC Talks With: Jeff Mao and Bob McIntire from the Maine Department of Education: Open Education and Policy
Maine has been a leader in adopting educational technology in support of its students. In 2002, through the Maine Learning Technology Initiative (MLTI), the state began providing laptops to all students in grades 7-8 in a one-to-one laptop program. In 2009, Maine expanded the project to high school students. The one-to-one laptops paved the way for open education initiatives like Vital Signs, empowering students to conduct their own field research in collaboration with local scientists, and make that research available online. Recently, Maine has been engaged in some interesting and innovative projects around OER as a result of federal grant funds. For this installment of our series on open education and policy, we spoke with Jeff Mao and Bob McIntire from the Maine Department of Education. Jeff is Learning Technology Policy Director at MLTI, and Bob works for the Department's Adult & Community Education team.
One part of the $700 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) was dedicated to creating technology-rich classrooms. This funding was distributed through the existing No Child Left Behind Title IID program. With their one-to-one student laptop program, Maine was already ahead of the game with regard to technology in the classroom, so they decided to focus the ARRA funding on OER projects. "We wanted to create something that had a longer shelf life," said Bob. Maine's grants were broken into two initiatives: research to identify and annotate high quality OERs, and the creation of professional development models using OER.
Curate metadata, don't stockpile resources
Maine is a "non-adoption" state, which means that teachers at the local level determine the educational resources they wish to use in their classrooms. Most other states adopt educational materials at the state level. For instance, for a class like 9th grade world history, states will approve multiple textbook titles from multiple publishers, and schools will be able to choose from among the state approved list. Since it's up to local teachers to determine which educational resources are good for their teaching, part of the Maine OER grants is devoted to researching the rough process that teachers step through when evaluating content. MLTI has been working on a type of educational registry. This registry will be a website that can house the metadata teachers collect around the resources they wish to use. This website–still in development–will help teachers to be able to find, catalog, categorize, and add other informative data to quality resources. Perhaps as important, it will allow teachers to share with others what they did with the content, whether the material worked (or bombed), and other sorts of useful descriptive information. Right now the team is using the social bookmarking service delicious to add metadata to high quality OERs that they find online. This project is coordinated by the Maine Support Network, a professional development and technical assistance provider, and all the resources are linked through one delicious site at http://www.delicious.com/syntiromsn.
Weaning teachers off of printed textbooks
Jeff talked about a way to restructure the traditional textbook adoption cycle that would result with an end product of 100% OER. Currently, the Maine textbook adoption process goes something like this: After six years of using the same textbook, teachers realize their turn is coming up to place an order for a new textbook. In the springtime, they call publishers and ask for demo copies of new books to potentially be used the following fall. Teachers peruse the books sent to them, and settle for the one that is the least flawed. Teachers use the book for five and half years, after which the process repeats itself. Jeff hopes this inefficient process can be changed. He suggests that rather than waiting until the final year to seek out new, pre-packaged educational materials, why not spend the interim years seeking out individual learning objects to replace every piece of their static textbooks?
Such a process could work to improve some of the content that teachers don't like (and don't use) in their traditional textbooks. And, through this iterative, piecemeal process, they can share their illustrative discoveries (and dead ends too) with other teachers. The Department itself could pitch in providing the tools, software, and other infrastructure to help teachers keep track of which resources have been reviewed, replaced, or modified. Jeff thinks that enabling teachers to operate in a constant revision mode is a better way to structure the acquisition of teaching and learning materials, rather than reviewing textbooks only once every five or six years.
As most open educational resources are digital, Jeff said there's an increasing need to be able to deal with strictly digital materials. Digital materials can be leveraged better because Maine students and teachers already have the laptops to access and manipulate the content (which can't be done with physical books), digital materials can help integrate other best-of types of technology and interactive pedagogy into their lessons, and digital materials helps set up the conditions to support embedded assessment mechanisms.
Share your process as OER; everything is miscellaneous
Maine hopes its work on OER can be used by other states and communities, considering the research and resources will be produced using federal dollars. They will publish their process and offer the resources they create as OER itself online. Jeff said, "the more we can demonstrate this process is effective, the better it speaks to the efficacy of OER." And, publishing information about resources and processes should be something natural to share. "If a teacher expends six hours finding a great OER for teaching students polynomials," said Jeff, "it just needs to be done once." But at the same time, with the diversity of resources available online–and with clear rights statements through the use of Creative Commons–variations on the sets of resources can be nearly infinite. Teachers can have their own educational "iMixes," just as iTunes users create playlists of their favorite music.
The future classroom
As Maine continues its work on OER research and professional development, Jeff and Bob offer a vision of a classroom where students gather in small groups, talking, exploring and building projects and investigating ideas together. There is no lecturing, and open educational resources integrate with classroom instruction seamlessly. As most kids are naturally inclined to try to find information online, teachers can guide students in using high quality, adaptable OER. Jeff also suggests that we should be investing time and effort into more direct support for students, building or extending the tools being built for teachers, and proactively including students in the resource evaluation and review process.
The success of Maine and others' OER projects is not assured. Dwindling budgets will remain an ongoing challenge, and while there's been some recognition of OER in policy initiatives such as the National Education Technology Plan, Jeff and Bob question whether current budget woes will derail national and state efforts for change. Teachers are increasingly overburdened, and the development and support for a hands-on process like Maine's requires ongoing teacher participation, feedback, and practice.
In the long run, Jeff thinks that OER will challenge the educational content industry in much the same way that the music industry was challenged by–and eventually succumbed to–Apple's "buy-whatever-you-want" model of music distribution, where users could break apart the album format and simply purchase the songs they wish. Jeff predicts that the textbook industry will be forced to break apart their offerings too, and sell individual chapters or lessons, where before they offered only packaged content to a captured education audience. And Jeff says the benefits apply to publishers too–"If they sell you Chapter 1 and it's really good," he said, "maybe you'll want to buy the whole book."1 Comment »
Letter from featured Superhero Andrew Rens, former Lead for CC South Africa
I'm delighted to introduce Andrew Rens, one of our exceptional CC Superheroes, who will tell you in his own words why he supports Creative Commons and why you should too. Rens, the founding legal lead of Creative Commons South Africa – a volunteer position he held from 2003 to 2009 – possesses particularly adept superpowers when it comes to facing tough issues around intellectual property and education in Africa. Here is his story. Join Rens and become a CC superhero – donate today.
Andrew Rens
"Since its inception Creative Commons has been instrumental in enabling so much diverse creativity, from music to design, from science to education, from business to philanthropy that I won't attempt to refer to it all. Instead I'll reflect on my personal experience of supporting CC, and why I think that you should seriously consider joining me in supporting Creative Commons.
From the day I first heard about Creative Commons I believed that it would be immensely helpful to two things which I am passionate about: Africa and education. Shortly thereafter I became the first legal lead for the Creative Commons South Africa project. I worked as legal lead, a volunteer position, from 2003 until 2009. What motivates someone to keep working as a volunteer for six years? What motivated me was the immense privilege of contributing to the work of others, of playing a part, however small, in some of the most inspiring initiatives I've ever seen.
One of those is Free High School Science Texts which offers curriculum compliant peer produced CC licensed school textbooks in math, physics, chemistry and biology. Another great project is Siyavula, a platform which enables teachers to co-create lesson materials. Then there is Full Marks, another teacher friendly site that enables teachers to co-create math and science quizzes. Astonishingly these three projects were all begun by one very smart and determined guy: Mark Horner. Yet another great project is Yoza, a self publishing platform that enables mobile access to novels and short stories, and so encourages literacy in a generation of Africans who have no ready access and whose only computers are mobile phones.
These are all good examples of the creativity of the open educational resources (OER) movement. The OER movement draws its inspiration from the Cape Town Open Education Declaration which speaks of "developing a vast pool of educational resources on the Internet, open and free for all to use." Enabling sharing eliminates one barrier to education: highly priced learning materials. It also begins something else, described in the Cape Town Declaration as "planting the seeds of a new pedagogy where educators and learners create, shape and evolve knowledge together, deepening their skills and understanding as they go."
One of the first seeds to sprout is Peer to Peer University (P2PU), a volunteer driven project to create a peer to peer driven learning community. P2PU bills itself as the "social wrapper around open educational resources." Peer learning may well be the key innovation that helps resolve the crisis which tertiary education is experiencing worldwide.
Each new development is only possible because of the development before it; peer learning is only possible with open educational resources; open educational resources are only possible with open licences such as the Creative Commons licences. Each layer relies on the continuing viability of the layer which it builds on. That is one important reason that I support the ongoing work of Creative Commons, because the fundamentals of easily understood, easily used, open copyright licences need to be maintained.
Another reason I support the ongoing work of Creative Commons is the urgent need for work on patents and databases to enable people to research collaboratively and share their results. Yet another reason is because Creative Commons is committed to expanding the network of Creative Commons projects in Africa, supporting Africans not just to port Creative Commons licences to their jurisdictions but also to provide trusted local expertise to their educational communities.
I've had the satisfaction of seeing that the time sacrificed as a volunteer to port the Creative Commons licences has been more than repaid; the South African CC licences have been used vastly more times than any other technical legal document I've drafted. This is typical of how Creative Commons has worked; for every license ported there have been thousands if not millions of works using that license. The outpouring of human expression and ingenuity enabled by Creative Commons has been a huge return on every hour of volunteer time and every dollar spent on the staff who support the volunteers and keep the website working. These investments of time and money are small only relative to the creativity they've enabled. Every dollar donated, every hour spent could have been used to another end, and yet without them the return would not have been as great.
Although I have been privileged to participate in these exciting developments, I don't believe that my experience is exceptional. Everyone who contributes to Creative Commons has the opportunity to be involved with a plethora of fascinating individuals and world changing projects. Please join me in supporting Creative Commons today."Comments Off
IEEE teams up with Connexions to deliver high-quality, peer-reviewed engineering OER
Rice University's Connexions and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Signal Process Society (IEEE-SPS) recently announced the release of a set of open educational resources on signal processing. The materials allow engineering instructors to mix and match to build customized courses, textbooks and study guides, and are useful for practicing engineers for their own education and career growth. The high-quality resources are peer-reviewed and available for free on the Connexions IEEE-SPS portal.
From the press release:
While the open-education movement has grown rapidly in recent years, critics have questioned how open-access publishers can ensure the quality of freely authored and edited materials. An oft-proposed option is adapting peer review — the process academic researchers have used for centuries to vet and certify research papers and books.
"All materials must pass thorough a rigorous quality evaluation before they appear on the IEEE Signal Processing Society's branded portal in Connexions," said Roxana Saint-Nom, chair of the society's Connexions Lens Subcommittee.
This collaboration is one of the first between a major professional society and an open educational resource provider. Connexions is one of the largest repositories of OER in the world, and all its materials are available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license. IEEE is the world's largest technical professional organization, with over 395,000 members.2 Comments »
Stories of people & projects using Creative Commons in education, government, and data
The significance of Creative Commons and its licenses is often overlooked, embedded as it is into the fabric of sharing culture on the web. The current superhero campaign attempts to bring CC's role to the forefront, by highlighting people and organizations that have made extraordinary contributions to this culture. But there are many more excellent stories of people and projects employing our CC licenses for educational, humanitarian, scientific, artistic, and just plain interesting uses. Some of these are currently reflected in our Case Studies on the wiki, but there's a lot of work left to be done in making these more accessible and useful to the rest of the world.
Part of that is improving the entry points for people new to CC, so we are highlighting case studies for different areas. We just added one for open educational resources (OER) case studies, focusing on the most compelling CC education project or implementation in policy from each country. Examples make the jobs of those advocating for OER at the policy level much easier, and we often notice a surprising lack of knowledge that many of the most compelling examples are to be found around the world. So we started this page to help everyone who is supporting OER advocacy efforts, and we encourage you to go ahead and add your own case study and write up its story; the more developed a case study is, the more likely it is to be featured and shared.
Other areas we have highlighted include Government use of Creative Commons and CC0 use for data. These case studies are also far from complete, so we encourage you to add to and improve them.
We've added a few more fields to the Case Studies template as well. For instance, have you ever tried to implement CC licensing into a publishing platform? Then you know that it would have been helpful to know how other platforms have done it. Alex mentions that we've gone ahead and added a field for technical implementations to Case Studies. See the Blip.tv case study as an example. In addition, we've added a field for "Impact"—what is the effect of this project or resource being under a CC license? What has it enabled that otherwise would not exist? Etc.
Like the rest of our content, the Case Studies are under CC BY, so do add, improve, remix, translate, print out and pass around, show them to your mom, or otherwise reuse them!Comments Off
Letter from featured superhero Gautam John of Pratham Books
I'm pleased to introduce Gautam John, one of our exceptional CC Superheroes, who will tell you in his own words why he supports Creative Commons and why you should too. Gautam John is Manager of New Projects at Pratham Books, a children's book publisher in India that truly embodies a spirit of openness and innovation on the web. They've now released 105 children's books (in English, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Marathi and Gujarati) as well as loads of delightful illustrations under a CC-BY license so they can easily be shared and even remixed to create new content relevant to other languages and cultures. Here is Pratham's story. Join Gautam in supporting Creative Commons with a donation today.
Gautam John
"As a children's book publisher, we have always struggled to be as inclusive as we can. However, as a small non-profit, we do function under severe constraints of time, money and ability to live up to this ideal and it was the Creative Commons model of licensing that allowed us one of our biggest moments of joy — when our books were made available as Braille and Audio Books for print impaired children across the world. Without the Creative Commons licensing model and philosophy, we would not have been able to engage with multiple organizations to help build inclusion and scale.
At Pratham Books, we have a very simple mission – "A Book in Every Child's Hand" and this drives all of our work and we constantly test what we do against this goal. The mission has two parts, one is to create more reading matter such that there is more available for children to read and the second really is a corollary – that we need to be able to get books to where children need it the most and that the books need to be culturally and linguistically relevant as well.
This is where our challenge lies – to massively scale the production of high quality, low-cost children's books for a massively multi-lingual and multi-cultural market. Looking at this challenge it is fairly obvious that this is not a problem that any one organization can solve. The solution has to be scalable, flexible and catalyse our fundamental mission as well.
At this point, we realised that there were several internal questions to answer and some of them painfully introspective. Questions as to whether the books we create and distribute have to be a Pratham Book, whether it implied that every book must be paid for by either the reader or an intermediary and, from being a publisher, questions as to whether we are gatekeepers of content or content curators, how we could create infinite good with finite time and resources and most importantly, how we can create more value than we capture?
Pratham Books
Having answered most of these questions using "openness" (whereby, we asked ourselves whether allowing unrestricted access to use and re-use our content furthered our mission) as a test and finding that it did fit our mission, the second set of questions to answer was more technical – how, as a small non-profit, do we do this and not find ourselves overwhelmed. It was at this point that we had a moment of realization – that reading is an extremely social activity and that there are communities and organizations who were more than ready to help us achieve our goals.
It was at this juncture that we hit upon the Creative Commons licensing model as one that would help us achieve many of our aims of flexibility, scalability and being able to help catalyse our mission of a book in every child's hands. In particular, three things stood out – a shared value system of sharing and openness, a community that was deeply embedded in these ideals and, from our perspective, it was scalable because it allowed us to license content to multiple organizations and individuals, both known and unknown, with a one time effort of releasing them under a Creative Commons license as opposed to the traditional model which involves time consuming negotiations and discussions with each known organization or individual who wants to use our content.
As an organization, we did spend some time choosing a license and, from our perspective, a choice between openness and sharing which reduced to a choice between the Attribution and Attribution-Share-Alike license. We have decided that the Attribution license will be our default license with a fall-back to the Attribution-Share-Alike license in cases where needed. It is best said by P2PU "it emerged that our choice lay between two licences: Creative Commons Attribution and Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike …chose to use Creative Commons licences because Creative Commons have become a global standard and are supported by a large international community. Both licences are Free Culture licences and are more permissive than any of the other Creative Commons licences. In other words, the choice was not between two extremes but between two open licences at the same end of the licence spectrum." Given that our goal was being as open as possible, it followed that our license choices were essentially around licenses that allowed for the greatest possible use and re-use because our initial hypothesis was, and continues to be, that being open allows us to fulfill our mission better than a traditional copyright model allows.
We now use Creative Commons licenses everywhere! We license entire books under CC-BY and CC-BY-SA licenses, we license our illustrations similarly and even photographs and other publicity material too. Over the last year we have been building the foundations for a social publishing model – where we curate communities that are passionate about reading and help us create content. Such a model rests on the idea of a participatory culture and an essential ingredient is a permissive licensing strategy – Creative Commons licenses offers us this, a large community with shared values and an ecosystem to tap in to.
While this licensing and publishing model works well in theory, it has been extremely heartening for us to see it come to life – our communities have created multiple derivative works ranging from iPad and iPhone applications, to porting our works to OLPC laptops, to creating entirely new books from existing illustrations and, my personal favourite, creating versions of our books for the print impaired – from DAISY and Braille books to rich audio books such that our mission truly does encompass every single child.
I firmly believe that we would not have been able to achieve what success we have had without the help of Creative Commons licensing. These licenses and the values that they stand for are vital to building and strengthening a digital commons from which we all benefit. I hope you will consider supporting Creative Commons and licensing content that you own or control such that we all benefit from the growth of the commons."
Follow Gautam on Twitter.
Special thanks to Maya Hemant from Pratham Books for getting all content (books, images) up online and for managing the Pratham community.
CC to talk at Global Education Conference
CC BY by Joi
The Global Education Conference is a week-long, online event hosting keynotes and various education tracks to "significantly increase opportunities for globally-connecting education activities and initiatives." CC board Vice Chair, Esther Wojcicki, will give a keynote on "How to Spread Your Ideas Globally Using Creative Commons Licenses," focusing on how CC licenses promote global sharing in education. The keynote is scheduled for November 15 at 10am PST and will be broadcast live via Elluminate. There is no need to register for the conference which will be held all next week, November 15-19. For a preview of Esther's and other talks, see http://www.globaleducationconference.com/keynotes.html.2 Comments »
Barcelona Events Wrap-up
CC BY by mozillaeu
Since we last blogged about CC in Barcelona, we've been very productive. Two weeks worth of open events have yielded several talks around open educational resources (OER) search, discovery, and policy at Open Ed, recommendations and tools for greater open content reuse at the Mozilla Drumbeat Festival, and a 12 month plan for the future of the Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU).
In addition to an excellent talk by board member Cathy Casserly, CC staff members Nathan Yergler and Timothy Vollmer both gave talks that led to fruitful side conversations that will be helpful going forward. Nathan's talk on "Search and Discovery: OER's Open Loop" spurred conversations about one of the underlying issues of OER search, which is, "how do you (software, crawlers) know what's an OER and what is not?" Timothy Vollmer's talk on the "iNACOL survey: An inquiry into OER projects, practices, and policy in U.S. K-12 schools" identified how OER is being used in K-12 online education and investigated the existing OER models at the state, district, and school level. The survey revealed the widespread knowledge of OER among the respondents, but also ongoing questions about the funding models and professional development needs to alert other teachers and administrators about the process and benefits of exploring OER. On the whole, survey respondents were optimistic about the potential for OER, wanting to see it implemented for a wide variety of functions, including the development of digital textbooks to replace hard copy texts, as a component in building better assessment mechanisms, to augment learning materials for struggling students, credit recovery, independent study, college prep and tutoring, special education, library tutorials, and to provide opportunities for students to engage in content and classes that the school doesn't offer.
CC BY by tvol
Mozilla Drumbeat Festival: Learning, Freedom, and the Web
CEO Joi Ito gave a keynote and CC's International Project Manager (and Drumbeat Festival program co-chair) Michelle Thorne worked closely with Mark Surman and other Mozillans to make this event happen–a huge shout-out to all the Mozilla volunteers! The Peer Learning Lighthouse tent, organized by CC Superhero Delia Browne, Alison Jean Cole (P2PU), and myself, focused specifically on overcoming barriers to reuse of CC licensed content and a future School of Copyright & Creative Commons at P2PU. One of the coolest outcomes of this tent was tech specifications around a CC attribution generator, a browser and platform plugin that would export the metadata around a CC licensed work to produce a formatted attribution. University of Michigan's Molly Kleinman and our CTO Nathan Yergler, in collaboration with Mozilla, are working to make this tool a reality. Discussions on the School of Copyright & Creative Commons revolved around increasing global and linguistic reach of the Copyright for Educators courses, and also adapting the course for librarians, policymakers, and creators.
All P2PU-produced content is under CC BY-SA. In order to more effectively educate P2PU participants and course organizers, the P2PU community are planning to integrate copyright and CC license education into its orientation process, in addition to emphasizing the P2PU value of openness as part of a "social contract" at the beginning of every course, which will be revised to explicitly call out the license. Additionally, the revamped P2PU platform will introduce values and licensing in the latest stage at the sign-up phase.
CC BY-SA by kiyanwang
Of course licensing was far from the only issue that was talked about. Governance, nonprofit incorporation, sustainability, course formats and content, quality control, research, and more were heavily workshopped, and all outcomes from the workshop are available at the P2PU wiki, under CC BY-SA of course. Immediately after the workshop, the P2PU techsprint, involving volunteer developers and designers, produced the next iteration of the P2PU platform–which you can preview here.1 Comment »
CC Talks With: Flat World Knowledge's Eric Frank: Open Education and Policy
At the beginning of this year we announced a revised approach to our education plans, focusing our activities to support of the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement. In order to do so we have worked hard to increase the amount of information available on our own site – in addition to an Education landing page and the OER portal explaining Creative Commons' role as legal and technical infrastructure supporting OER, we have been conducting a series of interviews to help clarify some of the challenges and opportunities of OER in today's education landscape.
One major venue for the advancement of OER is through the development and support of businesses that levage openly licensed content in support of education. Eric Frank is Founder and President of Flat World Knowledge, a commercial publisher of openly-licensed college textbooks. We spoke with Eric about faculty perceptions of open textbooks, customization enabled by open licensing, and the future of "free online and affordable offline" business models.
Eric Frank by Flat World Knowledge / CC BY
Why did you start Flat World Knowledge and how did you decide to approach this business using open content?
My co-founder Jeff Shelstad and I come out of a long history in textbook publishing. We left a major textbook publisher because of what we perceived as exceedingly-high dissatisfaction levels among the primary constituents in that market—students, faculty and authors. These groups were scratching their heads wondering if the print-based business model was going to be able to serve them going forward. When we began thinking about how to build a new business model, we didn't actually know that much about open educational resources and open licensing. We started to bake a business model based on bringing prices down and increasing access for students; giving faculty more control over the teaching and learning experience; and providing a healthier and more sustainable income stream for authors. And then we started to meet people in the open community. We spoke to Open Education scholar and advocate David Wiley (and Flat World's Chief Openness Officer) who said, "It's funny, you sound a lot like me, except we use different words." This pushed us a little bit further. Ultimately, through a very pragmatic approach to solving real problems that customers were facing, we arrived at this open textbook model.
The cost of textbooks is something that's very tangible to students. Flat World Knowledge recently released information that 800 colleges will utilize Flat World open textbooks this fall semester, saving 150,000 students $12 million in textbook expenses. And, the Student PIRGs' recent report A Cover to Cover Solution: How Open Textbooks Are The Path To Textbook Affordability found that adopting open textbooks could reduce textbook costs by 80%–to $184 per year, compared to the average of $900. Beyond the important outreach on cost savings, what are the primary questions you hear from faculty and students around "open"?
For the most part, when the average faculty member hears "open textbook," it means nothing to them. In some cases, it has a positive connotation, and in other cases, it's negative. When it's negative, the primarily concern is one of basic quality and sustainability. Faculty question the entities making these open textbooks, and wonder whether the textbooks could be worth their salt if they're available for free under an open license. And of course, they confuse 'free' and 'open' all the time. "If it's free," educators say, "It can't be good. What author would ever do that?" Sometimes we see the opposite problem, such as when people know a little something about the publishing ecosystem and say, "It's too good to be true."
Through our marketing programs, we spend a lot of time educating faculty that we are a professional publisher, and that we focus on well-known scholars and successful textbook authors. We start by talking about what's not different from the traditional approach: we sign experienced authors to write textbooks for us, and we develop the books by providing editorial resources, peer reviewing, and investment. The end product is a high-quality textbook and teaching package. There's a real focus and emphasis on quality. What we change is how we distribute, how we price, and how we earn our revenue. We walk faculty through this process and let them know that 'open' is just about loosening copyright restrictions so that they can do more with the textbooks. We explain that free access is about getting their students onto a level playing field. We explain that affordable choices is about making sure students get the format and price that works for them. Once faculty understand these things and are reassured that we have a quality process in place, and that we are a real and sustainable enterprise that will be around to support them in the future, then it all starts to come together. We have to overcome either a total void of knowledge, which we prefer, or some other baggage that they carry into the conversation.
Customizability of digital textbooks is a key feature of Flat World Knowledge, enabled by the open license. How do teachers and students use this feature? And, how is Flat World's approach to remix different than other platforms and services that allow some adaptability of content without actually using open content as the base?
Of course, the license itself carries its own rights and permissions. People are able to do a lot more with open content than they can with all rights reserved materials. We keep building out our technology platform so that it ultimately enables faculty to take full advantage of that open license—to do all the things that educators might want to do to improve the quality of the material for their own purposes. Today, the most popular customization is relatively simple. For example, educators reorganize the table of contents by dragging and dropping textbook chapters into the right order for their class, and delete a few things they don't cover. This is easy and helps them match the book to their syllabus.
Then you move into exploring other areas. For example, instructors may want to make the textbook more pedagogically aligned with their teaching style. In that case, a teacher might integrate a short case study and a series of questions alongside the textbook content. Teachers may want to make the references and examples more relevant to their students by using the names of local companies. Timeliness is certainly important—something happens in the world and educators want to be able to integrate it into their teaching materials.
Educators have different teaching styles and approaches too. An adopter of one of our economics textbooks swapped out some models for other economic models that he prefers to use. An adopter at the University of New Hampshire added several chapters on sustainability and corporate social responsibility into an introduction to business book. Now, he's teaching the course through his prism and from his perspective. These are the kinds of things that people want to be able to do. The critical thing for us is to make the platform easy to use so that customizing a book is as effortless as opening up a Word document, making some changes, saving it, and delivering it to students.
Regarding how our approach differs from other platforms and services because we begin with openly-licensed content, at one level, the ability to take something and modify it is largely a technology question. We go further, and allow people to edit text at the word level. You don't see this sort of framework in other services because most of the time you're dealing with the all rights reserved mentality. Most authors sign up to write traditional textbooks with the understanding that, "This is my work and you can't do stuff with it." I think the first big difference is when the author says, "I want people to be able to do stuff with this." Having authors enter into a different publishing relationship by using open licenses allows us to go much further with the platform. That said, there's nothing really stopping another company from doing this with some kind of unique user license.
We see other benefits of open access when we think about outputs. You might be able to go onto a publisher's site and make modifications to a text, and maybe even integrate something that's openly-licensed on the Web. But ultimately, it's going to get subsumed into the all rights reserved framework, and won't propagate forward, so no one else can change it. And generally, these digital services are expensive and access expires after a few months, so the user no longer can get to the content. Things like digital rights management and charging high prices for print materials are fundamentally business model decisions around dissemination, but they're important.
I think the other big difference is what can happen away from the Flat World Knowledge site. Somebody could arguably come in and take our content and do something with it somewhere else. We're not locking it down and saying, "The only thing you can do is work with the content on our site, and only use our technology." We happen to make it easy to do this sort of thing on the Flat World site, but the open license allows others to use the content away from the original website. This leads to many more options that aren't possible with content that is all rights reserved or served under a very unique license.
Flat World Knowledge licenses its textbooks under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license. What were the considerations in choosing this license? How do you see the role of Creative Commons in open textbook and open education?
One of my pet peeves about this community that we're a part of is the frequent and sometimes contentious debates over licensing. The principle of enabling a range of licenses recognizes that copyright holders have different objectives for their creations. I have my objectives and you have yours, so we may choose different licenses to reach those objectives. That's perfectly fine. This is the way the world should be. For us, the choice of a license was very much predicated on building a sustainable commercial model around open. We invest fairly heavily with financial resources, time, and intellectual capital to make these textbooks and related products something that we think can dominate in the marketplace. If we didn't use the non-commercial condition, in our view, we'd be making all the investment and then someone else could sell the content at a dramatically lower price because they didn't make the initial and ongoing investment. The non-commercial condition is the piece of the model that enables us to give users far more rights, to provide free points of access, and protect our ability to commercialize the investment we made. The ShareAlike clause ensures that this protection continues forward.
Our decision to use this license also relates to authors. The sustainability and financial success argument starts with the people who have the most value in the market: the authors who create the books. Our discussions with authors always include a financial component. They want to know how we are going to capitalize on this venture. Authors want to do good, but they also want to earn income and be fairly compensated. When we explain our model and how the licensing works, they feel very comfortable.
Last month Hal Plotkin released the paper Free to Learn: An Open Educational Resources Policy Development Guidebook for Community College Governance Officials. That document suggests that community colleges are uniquely positioned to both take advantage of OER opportunities and to become pioneers in teaching through the creative and cost-effective use of OER, including through the adoption of open textbooks. How are Flat World's approaches different in working with universities as opposed to community colleges? What are the differences in terms of the benefits and challenges to faculty, students, and administration within each institution?
This is a great question, but it's a little hard to answer, because we must consider another variable—the book itself. Sometimes a book is aimed at a community college course and demographic, and sometimes it's aimed at a four-year research university. For example, our Exploring Business book has a big community college market, while our Introduction to Economic Analysis title out of Caltech has very much a top-50, Ph.D.-granting institution market. So, this confuses things a little bit. That said, I think it's fair to say that there is generally a correlation between where the financial pain is greatest (which tends to be at community colleges and state institutions) and where the faculty are closest to that pain (where teaching is their primary emphasis, and they spend more time with students). This is where we see the greatest pull for this solution. There's less of a pull from wealthier demographics and/or with faculty who spend more time doing research than teaching. While there's more ideological and intellectual understanding of the value of sharing on the research side, pragmatically, the financial pain tends to be on the community college side.
In the recent First Monday article, A sustainable future for open textbooks: The Flat World Knowledge story, Hilton and Wiley suggest that in testing Flat World's textbook model ("free online and affordable offline"), nearly 40% of students still purchased a print copy of the textbook. And Nicole Allen mentioned in our interview with her that the research of the Student PIRGs shows that "students are willing to purchase formats they value even in the presence of a free alternative." So, print materials are not going away overnight, as long as the resources can be tailored in ways that teachers and students want to use them. But, as powerful digital technologies offer so many new ways to interact with educational content, how do you foresee the distant (or near) future in which print-on-demand may no longer be a core part of your business model?
We agree with the findings in those reports that print is going away more slowly than pundits proclaimed it would. We're totally committed to what I think of as platform agnosticism. We never want to be in a position of having to guess which technologies or trends will win or lose. Part of our solution was to build a very dynamic publishing engine which could take a book—which is really a series of database objects and computer code that gets pulled together—and transform it through computer software programs to a certain file format. Today, one format goes to a print-on-demand vendor to make a physical book; another is an ePub file to be downloaded to an iPad or other mobile device; another is a .mobi file for a Kindle. We can afford to be on the leading edge and make formats available that may have low penetration today. And if they grow faster, we'll be there with a salable format for those devices that will proliferate.
The most important improvement we can make to learning outcomes across our society right now is access. People sometimes ask me, "Isn't the textbook itself a dead paradigm?" I tell them no, because billions of dollars per year are spent on textbooks. Right now you could create a really killer learning product, and I could take the one that's already being used by millions of people and make it much more accessible. Enabling greater access is going to have much bigger short-term impact. Going forward, improvements in learning outcomes beyond access will come from things that aren't content. They will come from experiences—whether it's an assessment I take and get immediate feedback to inform a specific learning path, or whether it's a social learning experience in which I'm dropped into a community of learners with a challenge and we draw upon each other to come up with solutions. Content supports those things, but isn't as important in some ways as the experience.
Our view of the world is to get into the market where there's pain today, establish a large base of users, and then keep evolving the product to be an increasingly better learning tool. That will inevitably take the form of integrating more unique services that can't be copied. That's the long-term goal for us, and probably critical for any business operating in the digital medium, to be financially successful. Kevin Kelly, the technology writer and founding executive editor of Wired, said it best: "When copies are super abundant, they become worthless. When copies are super abundant, stuff which can't be copied becomes scarce and valuable." I believe that.
What does a successful teaching and learning environment implementing the power of open textbooks and OER "look like"? Do you have any lingering thoughts — worries, hopes, and predictions?
I don't worry too much because if we keep our finger on the pulse of what people want to do, we'll figure it out. One potential danger is the expense of providing this abundance of integrated tools, formats and options for users. It's easy to imagine the expense of systems that incorporate things like an assessment engine built on adaptive learning and artificial intelligence to guide users to the best resource, all the while connecting them to other users to foster a richer learning experience. This has the potential to be very expensive, and ratchets up the imperative for players in the open community to help figure it out.Comments Off


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JEFFERSON CITY — A House committee is revisiting a cellphone tax to remedy diminishing funds for 911 call centers in Missouri. The call centers are supported by an existing tax on landlines; the measure would also impose a tax on cellphones.
House committee seeks new tax on cellphones to support 911 call centers
Wednesday, November 9, 2011 | 9:17 p.m. CST; updated 11:19 p.m. CST, Wednesday, November 9, 2011
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subset: commoncrawl


text:
Gretna, Virginia
For population 25 years and over in Gretna:
For population 15 years and over in Gretna town:
32 residents are foreign born (0.6% Europe).
Median real estate property taxes paid for housing units with mortgages in 2012: $523 (0.4%)
Nearest city with pop. 50,000+: Lynchburg, VA (32.9 miles , pop. 65,269).
Nearest city with pop. 200,000+: Greensboro, NC (65.5 miles , pop. 223,891).
Nearest city with pop. 1,000,000+: Philadelphia, PA (310.6 miles , pop. 1,517,550).
Nearest cities: Motley, VA (2.9 miles ), Chatham, VA (3.0 miles ), Hurt, VA (3.2 miles ), Altavista, VA (3.5 miles ), Penhook, VA (3.9 miles ), North Shore, VA (4.3 miles ), Union Hall, VA (4.3 miles ), Blairs, VA (4.4 miles ).
Latitude: 36.95 N, Longitude: 79.36 W
Area code: 434
City-data.com crime rate counts serious crimes more heavily. It adjusts for the number of visitors and daily workers commuting into cities.
(click on a table row to update graph)
Crime rate in Gretna detailed stats: murders, rapes, robberies, assaults, burglaries, thefts, arson
Full-time law enforcement employees in 2012, including police officers: 4 (4 officers).
Unemployment by year (%)
Population change in the 1990s: -190 (-13.1%).
Work and jobs in Gretna: detailed stats about occupations, industries, unemployment, workers, commute
Average climate in Gretna, Virginia
Based on data reported by over 4,000 weather stations
Tornado activity:
Gretna-area historical tornado activity is near Virginia state average. It is 29% smaller than the overall U.S. average.
On 7/12/1964, a category F2 (max. wind speeds 113-157 mph) tornado 5.7 miles away from the Gretna town center caused between $500 and $5000 in damages.
On 6/25/1977, a category F2 tornado 6.3 miles away from the town center caused between $5000 and $50,000 in damages.
Earthquake activity:Gretna-area historical earthquake activity is significantly below Virginia state average. It is 96% smaller than the overall U.S. average.
On 12/9/2003 at 20:59:14, a magnitude 4.5 (4.5 MB, 4.5 LG, Depth: 3.1 mi, Class: Light, Intensity: IV - V) earthquake occurred 91.5 miles away from the city center
On 10/21/1998 at 05:56:47, a magnitude 3.8 (3.8 LG, 3.3 LG, Depth: 8.3 mi, Class: Light, Intensity: II - III) earthquake occurred 62.4 miles away from Gretna center
On 5/5/2003 at 16:32:32, a magnitude 3.9 (3.9 LG, Depth: 3.1 mi) earthquake occurred 90.1 miles away from the city center
On 3/15/1991 at 06:54:08, a magnitude 3.8 (3.8 LG, Depth: 10.9 mi) earthquake occurred 96.6 miles away from the city center
On 4/22/1991 at 01:01:20, a magnitude 3.5 (3.5 LG, Depth: 9.1 mi) earthquake occurred 82.6 miles away from Gretna center
On 9/22/2001 at 16:01:20, a magnitude 3.2 (3.2 LG, 2.5 LG, Depth: 1.2 mi) earthquake occurred 91.2 miles away from the city center
Magnitude types: regional Lg-wave magnitude (LG), body-wave magnitude (MB)
Natural disasters:The number of natural disasters in Pittsylvania County (15) is greater than the US average (12).
Major Disasters (Presidential) Declared: 11
Emergencies Declared: 4
Causes of natural disasters: Floods: 4, Hurricanes: 3, Storms: 3, Winter Storms: 3, Storms: 2, Droughts: 2, Ice Storms: 2, Heavy Rain: 1, Mudslide: 1, Snowfall: 1, Tornado: 1, Winter Storm: 1, Blizzard: 1, Tropical Storm: 1 (Note: Some incidents may be assigned to more than one category).
Birthplace of: Clarence Pickrel - Major League Baseball player, Allen Calloway - College basketball player (Virginia Tech Hokies), Les Barley - Football player.
Hospital/medical center in Gretna:
Other hospitals/medical centers near Gretna:
Political contributions by individuals in Gretna, VA
located in Gretna:
Colleges/universities with over 2000 students nearest to Gretna:
Public high school in Gretna:
See full list of schools located in Gretna
Public elementary/middle schools in Gretna:
Drinking water stations with addresses in Gretna and their reported violations in the past:GRETNA, TOWN OF (Population served: 2500, Surface_water):
Past health violations:LATRELLE'S RESTAURANT (Population served: 200, Groundwater):
Past monitoring violations:
Percentage of residents living in poverty in 2012: 22.8%
(20.8% for White Non-Hispanic residents, 29.9% for Black residents, 0.0% for Hispanic or Latino residents, 0.0% for American Indian residents, 0.0% for other race residents, 53.6% for two or more races residents)
Average household size:
Percentage of family households:
Percentage of households with unmarried partners:
Likely homosexual households (counted as self-reported same-sex unmarried-partner households)
Detailed information about poverty and poor residents in Gretna, VA47 people in nursing facilities/skilled-nursing facilities in 2010
87 people in nursing homes in 2000
Gretna compared to Virginia state average:
Banks with branches in Gretna (2011 data):
Educational Attainment (%) in 2012
School Enrollment by Level of School (%) in 2012
Most commonly used house heating fuel:
Presidential Elections Results
1996 2000 2004 2008 2012
1996 Presidential Elections Results
2000 Presidential Elections Results
2004 Presidential Elections Results
2008 Presidential Elections Results
2012 Presidential Elections Results
Graphs represent county-level data. Detailed 2008 Election Results
Religion statistics for Gretna town (based on Pittsylvania County data)Percentage of population affiliated with a religious congregations: 46.97%
Breakdown of population affiliated with a religious congregations
Tables represent county-level data.
Food Environment Statistics:
Number of grocery stores: 9
Number of convenience stores (no gas): 6
Number of convenience stores (with gas): 38
Number of full-service restaurants: 19
Adult diabetes rate:
Adult obesity rate:
Low-income preschool obesity rate:
Gretna government finances - Expenditure in 2002 (per resident):
Gretna government finances - Revenue in 2002 (per resident):
Gretna government finances - Debt in 2002 (per resident):
Gretna government finances - Cash and Securities in 2002 (per resident):
5.11% of this county's 2006 resident taxpayers lived in other counties in 2005 ($32,954 average adjusted gross income)
10 or fewer of this county's residents moved from foreign countries between 2005 and 2006.
Top counties from which taxpayers relocated into this county between 2005 and 2006:
5.29% of this county's 2005 resident taxpayers moved to other counties in 2006 ($30,373 average adjusted gross income)
10 or fewer of this county's residents moved to foreign countries between 2005 and 2006.
Top counties to which taxpayers relocated from this county between 2005 and 2006:
Strongest AM radio stations in Gretna:
Strongest FM radio stations in Gretna:
TV broadcast stations around Gretna:
FCC Registered Cell Phone Towers:2 (See the full list of FCC Registered Cell Phone Towers in Gretna)
FCC Registered Antenna Towers:59 (See the full list of FCC Registered Antenna Towers)
FCC Registered Private Land Mobile Towers:4
FCC Registered Broadcast Land Mobile Towers:1
FCC Registered Microwave Towers:14 (See the full list of FCC Registered Microwave Towers in this town)
FCC Registered Amateur Radio Licenses:21 (See the full list of FCC Registered Amateur Radio Licenses in Gretna)
FAA Registered Aircraft:9 (See the full list of FAA Registered Aircraft in Gretna)
Detailed HMDA statistics for the following Tracts: 0106.00
HMDA - Conventional Home Purchase Loans
HMDA - Conventional Home Purchase Loans - Value
2006 National Fire Incident Reporting System Incidents:
Incident types - Gretna
See full 2006 National Fire Incident Reporting System statistics for Gretna, VA
Businesses in Gretna, VA
Gretna on our top lists:
Total of 1 patent application in 2008-2014.
Back to Gretna, VA housing info, Pittsylvania County, Virginia, VA smaller cities, VA small cities, All Cities.


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Walter Investment Management Corp. Completes Refinancing Of Senior Secured Notes And Revolving Credit Facility
TAMPA, Fla., Dec. 3, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Walter Investment Management Corp. (NYSE MKT: WAC) ("Walter Investment" or the "Company") today announced that it completed the refinancing of its senior secured debt.
Credit Suisse Securities ( USA) LLC, Morgan Stanley Senior Funding, Inc. and BofA Merrill Lynch assisted the Company with the execution of a senior secured first lien term loan facility in the aggregate principal amount of $700 million and a senior secured revolving credit facility in the aggregate principal amount of $125 million. The facilities bear interest at a rate per annum equal to, LIBOR plus 4.50%, with a LIBOR "floor" of 1.25% and mature on November 28, 2017.
The company used the proceeds of the new term loan to (1) repay all indebtedness outstanding under its existing first lien term loan (approximately $425 million at September 30, 2012), (2) pay related transaction costs and expenses, (3) provide liquidity for potential growth opportunities, including acquisitions, and for working capital and general corporate purposes.
Mark J. O'Brien, Chairman and CEO of Walter Investment said, "We are quite pleased to have completed the refinancing of our existing first lien term loan facility and revolving credit facility under the improved terms. The refinancing of these facilities not only enables us to take advantage of the lower rates available in the credit markets, significantly lowering our interest expense, but also meaningfully improves our financial flexibility leaving us well positioned to capitalize on the opportunities in our $500 billion active pipeline."About Walter Investment Management Corp.Walter Investment Management Corp. is an asset manager, mortgage servicer and mortgage portfolio owner specializing in less-than-prime, non-conforming and other credit-challenged mortgage assets. Based in Tampa, Fla., the Company has over 2,600 employees and services a diverse loan portfolio. For more information about Walter Investment Management Corp., please visit the Company's website at www.walterinvestment.com. Pipeline The term "pipeline," when used in this release, refers to opportunities or potential opportunities in the market for products within our strategic profile that we have identified as targets to add to our servicing portfolio through either the acquisition of MSR or sub-servicing contracts. In each case we have contacted the seller or its representative to register our interest, or are currently engaged in discussions or negotiations directly with the seller or its representative. The status of "pipeline opportunities" varies from early stage contact through exclusive negotiations. There can be no guarantee that any of the opportunities in our pipeline will result in purchases or contracts added by the Company.
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ALL On Epall the women on EP are sexy wonderful women, haven't found a single one ,that i couldn't or wouldn't chat with. would like to take it farther with a couple ,but don't see that happen. But GOD BLESS ALL the SEXY WOMEN on EP. ( GOD I didn't said anything out of the way.)
bquick 51-55, M 1 Response 1 Feb 9, 2008
Your so sweet. no offence taken.


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fiddlerLine breaks: fid|dler
Pronunciation: /ˈfɪdlə /
Definition of fiddler in English:
1 informal A person who plays the violin, especially one who plays folk music.
Example sentences
- I have a recording of a very attractive violin concerto with fiddler Louis Kaufman and Bernard Herrmann conducting.
- All young whistlers, flautists, fiddlers and other musicians are invited to play a few tunes in what should be an informal and uncompetitive setting.
- The next week they toured Europe with a Bartok third quartet that had virtuoso fiddlers agape with admiration.
Old English fithelere, from fithele (see fiddle).
Words that rhyme with fiddlerkiblah
Definition of fiddler in:
- US English dictionary
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Word of the day odium
Pronunciation: ˈōdēəm
widespread hatred or disgust for someone…


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At Techorama 2014 (Belgium), Jon corners Mark Rendle for a few minutes to talk about his new startup, Zudio, "the Azure Cloud storage toolkit," his keynote on the History of Programming, and other minutia.
Download / Listen: Herding Code 193: Mark Rendle on Zudio, developing with Angular and Typescript, The History of Programming, and Simple.Data
Show Notes:
Show Links:
This show is brought to you by Runscope – find out more at http://runscope.com/herdingcode
Jul 07This entry was posted on Monday, July 7th, 2014 at 2:50 pmand is filed under podcast. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
The Swedish Coder | One hour a day 336: Podcasts on Xamarin, Zudio, Angular and more
[…] up is a short chat, Herding Code episode 193, Mark Rendle on Zudio, developing with Angular and Typescript, the History ….Zudio is a web based tool for managing Azure storage. This is actually a great example of my point […]


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ResearchMicrosoft Azure: more partnerships, more databases
For many companies in the Big Data and analytics arena, Strata + Hadoop World was the climax of their Fall news cycles. For Microsoft, the pace and sustained duration of the… Read more »
For many companies in the Big Data and analytics arena, Strata + Hadoop World was the climax of their Fall news cycles. For Microsoft, the pace and sustained duration of the… Read more »
During the second quarter of 2014 we saw the rise of Docker as well as a few providers pushing harder to the cloud, the government finally beginning to make significant movement… Read more »
In the second quarter of 2014, new de facto standards emerged and galvanized, major cloud providers launched new analytics offerings, and mainstream databases began to take on attributes and capabilities of… Read more »
This quarter we saw more signs of maturity in the cloud computing market, including a new version of the OpenStack standard, more consolidation of cloud computing companies, and a scandal that… Read more »
Concerned about proprietary and expensive forks of Hadoop, T-Systems' Juergen Urbanski explains how to tell if you are buying an open version of Hadoop or something you might later regret. Read more »
Cloud computing is finally starting to add value to business, as those in charge of cloud within enterprises are moving from talking to doing. That much was very evident in the… Read more »
Today's most successful companies are the ones with the ability to capture and analyze all data available to them. Enter SQL-on-Hadoop solutions, which increase the accessibility of Hadoop and allow organizations… Read more »
Besides the skyrocketing growth of data itself, there are several key technology trends we will be watching in 2013. That list includes a renaissance in the database market, next-generation SaaS-based BI… Read more »
Established search technologies are being integrated with big data tools to meet real business requirements, both on-premise and in the cloud. Read more »
The delivery of real-time query makes Hadoop accessible to more users. Its significance goes well beyond delivering a database management system kind of query engine that other products have had for… Read more »


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|Sq ft
|2 beds
Pricing does not include other required monthly charges and can change daily. Please contact 4049299289 for exact pricing based on your needs This gorgeous two bedroom apartment features Maple cabinetry in the kitchen, designer countertops and black appliances, full size washer and dryer, undercabinet lighting and tile backsplash, chrome hardware throughout, ceramic tile floors, a fireplace with custom mantle, nine and ten foot ceilings, crown molding and arched cased openings, oversized windows and builtin bookcases, 36 inch vanities with raised panel cabinets, double vanity and oversized mirrors and tubs.... We provide chic apartment homes in the most sought after location in midtown Atlanta. Our fabulous location is right next to shopping and dining in Buckhead and just one mile from Emory University. Residents enjoy resortstyle amenities including a 247 fitness center, gorgeous swimming pool, and spectacular clubhouse with billiards room and resident business center. We also offer ...(show more)
|School Level
|Primary School
|Garden Hills Elementary School
|Middle School
|Sutton Middle School
|High School
|North Atlanta High School
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|30% less than
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What does MRAM stand for?
What does MRAM mean? This page is about the various possible meanings of the acronym, abbreviation, shorthand or slang term: MRAM.
We've found a total of 2 definitions for MRAM:
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Magneto-resistive Random Access Memory
Amubri, Costa Rica
Still can't find the acronym definition you were looking for? Use our Power Search technology to look for more unique definitions from across the web!
"MRAM." Abbreviations.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2014. Web. 18 Dec. 2014. <http://www.abbreviations.com/MRAM>.


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Co-op Membership
Add this 4-year membership to your cart if you are a current Dartmouth student You will get 10% off most every regularly priced item purchased from the Dartmouth Co-op (online or in-store). (Special Order Items are not eligible for a Co-op discount). This Membership can be used by any member of a student's immediate family.
Online you must tell us at Checkout that you are a member by using the 2014COOP promotional code and indicating in the Order Note the name the membership is under.
Item #: *DSTUD Your Price: $25.00
Copyright © 1996-2014. Dartmouth Cooperative Society Inc.
Dartmouth College, Dartmouth, Tuck, Thayer, the Geisel School of Medicine, their logos and symbols are Trademarks owned by the Trustees of Dartmouth College. They are reproduced on Co-op merchandise under license agreements with the Trustees. All of our items are under license from the Trustees of Dartmouth College and every purchase supports the students and programs of Dartmouth.
All Seuss merchandise TM & © 2000 Dr. Seuss Enterprises, L.P. All Rights Reserved.


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25 CFR 170.403 - What IRR Program funds can be used for transportation planning?
Funds as defined in 23 U.S.C. 204(j) are specifically reserved for a tribal government's transportation planning. Tribes may also identify transportation planning as a priority in their tribal priority list or TTIP and request the use of up to 100 percent of their IRR Program construction funds for transportation planning.
Title 25 published on 2014-04-01
no entries appear in the Federal Register after this date.


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World Radio Link Dana
Media insertion tool
DANA is a comprehensive system for media insertion with an integrated automated approach. It can manage from as few as one to hundreds of sites and automate scheduling, monitoring and reporting, all integrated in a unique collaborative environment provided by an intuitive user interface. Whether a signal arrives via satellite or terrestrially, whether used to provide 24/7 feed or interact with an existing feed, DANA manages and interacts with staff wherever they may be. It enables the insertion and broadcast of community content to exclusive areas. Broadcasters can easily localize and customize detailed broadcast content for those businesses, organizations and clientele that support or publicize their organization.
208-733-3551 Ext. 19
Do you have experience with this product? Share your comments below.
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Sha-albim, or Sha-alabbin
(home of foxes ), a town in the allotment of Dan. ( Joshua 19:42 ; Judges 1:35 ; 1 Kings 4:9 ) By Eusebius and Jerome it is mentioned in the Onomasticon as a large village in the district of Sebaste (i.e. Samaria), and as then called Selaba.


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Barcelona stars are in a tough situation especially after the arrival of the highly rated Brazilian Neymar; especially the wide players Alexis Sanchez and Pedro Rodriguez. Alexis Sanchez has done well in the absence of Lionel Messi due to injury but Neymar is yet to find his feet at the Camp Nou.
Also Barcelona's academy is full of such talent who want to break through the first team especially Tello.
Alexis Sanchez and Pedro Rodriguez are rumored to be seeking an exit door from Barcelona as they haven't had enough playing time and looking at this situation Arsene Wenger has decided to bid for the Chilean and the Spaniard in a sensational double swoop.
The Daily Mail has reported on Monday that Sanchez has been told he has no long-term future at the Nou Camp and will be sold-off this summer to the highest bidder, with the attacking midfielder valued at between £20-£25m.
Pedro would be just as brilliant a signing, but he won't be quite as easily attainable as Sanchez as the Spaniard has been with Barcelona his whole career and is believed to have a staggering buy-out clause of over £100m written into his contract despite of him being not a regular starter anymore.


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"This recipe is right up my ally. Being a fully time mother, wife, and nursing student I look for quick, delicious recipes to suit my busy schedule. I have made this 3x's now. This recipe is a definite keeper!"