[TOS] Scope of TeachingOpenSource.org

Timothy A. Budd budd at eecs.oregonstate.edu
Fri Mar 13 16:21:58 UTC 2009


Yes, I have found that with a sympathetic committee Open Source  
projects work well as Masters Projects. I had one student two years  
ago work on natural language interface for Chandra, and have another  
student working right now on a module for Sahana. You are correct that  
for a masters student you can expect a project that is much larger  
than for undergraduate students - also it actually helps if it starts  
out less well defined because then you can have the requirements  
definition be part of the project, as well as the implementation.

Quoting Rob Cameron <cameron at cs.sfu.ca>:

> Chris. can you add a section on teaching graduate students?
> Graduate students are often very sympathetic to open source
> and have an extended period of time for work on a significant
> thesis project.   They can also be the bridge between the research
> programs of professors and the open source community.
>
> A second aspect is that graduate students can serve as
> teaching assistants.  In my initial experience with an open
> source project course for undergraduates this term (mostly
> Mozilla code base), the work of my TA and another grad student
> in my lab is a critical success factor.
>
> I think the issues for teaching grad students are also quite
> different.   Grad students tend to have one-on-one instruction
> from their senior supervisor.   This also brings up the question of
> whether and how to have  open source community members
> on graduate student supervisory committees.
>
> On Thu, Mar 12, 2009 at 6:39 PM, Frank Hecker
> <hecker at mozillafoundation.org> wrote:
>> On Thu, Mar 12, 2009 at 2:15 PM, Chris Tyler <chris at tylers.info> wrote:
>>> I propose that we focus on equipping and supporting each other to teach
>>> people how to:
>>>
>>>        * effectively operate in an Open Source community.
>>
>> +1
>>
>>> Or, to put this another way, if you break down "open source" into two
>>> words, the "source" part is a given (and well-covered by existing
>>> programs) and the "open" part is the new, challenging, and interesting
>>> piece, involving distributed collaboration at both a social and
>>> technical level.
>>
>> To put it another way, the term "open source" has been used in
>> reference to a particular type of software ("open source software")
>> and also in reference to a particular way to develop such software
>> ("open source development"). I agree that the focus of TOS should be
>> on the latter.
>>
>> Frank
>>
>> --
>> Frank Hecker
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>>
>
>
>
> --
> Robert D. Cameron, Ph.D.
> Professor of Computing Science
> Simon Fraser University
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Timothy Budd, budd at eecs.oregonstate.edu, http://www.eecs.oregonstate.edu/~budd



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