7 Interview with Gabriel Higginbotham, Open Oregon State
7 Interview with Gabriel Higginbotham, Open Oregon State
Gabriel Higginbotham; IT consultant; and recent-former student at Open Oregon State
Gabe Higginbotham worked as a student project assistant on open textbooks for two years at Open Oregon State. He received his B.S. in Business Information Systems at Oregon State in early 2017. Currently, he works as an IT consultant for OOS. In fall 2018, he will go to grad school abroad to study Human Computer Interaction Design. In his career, he plans to continue contributing to the Open Education field.
Tell us about the role you played in open textbook creation at Open Oregon State.
I have been involved with the creation of roughly 10 textbooks at Open Oregon State, including A Primer for Computational Biology (set to go to print soon!), Introduction to Permaculture and Introduction to Microbiology.
I worked on converting professors’ texts (either Word or LaTeX) to HTML.
Some of our books were created from materials used in online courses; others were LaTeX books that became online books to increase their availability.
I also designed the books (using CSS) to cater to either the needs of the professor or the purposes of the book. I learned HTML, CSS, and LaTeX on the job, and was one of the first student workers in the department.
Books at Open Oregon State are created using PressBooks, a WordPress plugin. We use some other multimedia tools including video and, more recently, H5P. We also use a number of WordPress plugins such as a glossary, code highlighter, and broken link checker.
When I was first hired, I was tasked with making a list of open textbooks available online. I also found replacement materials that professors could use in courses. Over the course of a few months I made an Excel spreadsheet of 4,500 open textbooks available on the web, and this list is continually growing!
What did you learn and what skills did you acquire in the process?
As a student in information systems, learning HTML and CSS in my position were particularly useful as an introduction to programming before entering my actual programming courses. The tasks of my position allowed me to navigate the process of problem solving in a relatively risk-free environment. Conversely, my courses often introduced me to techniques and tools I could use in my position with open textbooks. For example, learning PHP in my programming course allowed me to edit a WordPress plugin to meet the unique needs of a particular programming textbook.
Troubleshooting design issues in my position introduced me to platforms such as Stack Overflow and GitHub, where I could interact with other contributors and find solutions to problems I came across. I was able to apply the solutions in one problem to a similar context in another problem, often with a creative and unique approach. These proved vital in my courses later on, where I would encounter more complex problems such as querying databases and creating UIs.
My position was also beneficial in the