[TOS] Need volunteers - Re: Peer-Reviewed Open Source Journal

[David Humphrey]

>> However, nothing gets done if we only look at the reasons why it should 
>> not be done.
> 
> I believe the biggest obstacle is lack of faculty time, and it's a 
> showstopper. Every instructor I know is already maxed out, so asking them 
> to put in extra hours isn't viable.  (Yes, a few people will always be 
> willing to put in heroic effort, but they will always be exceptions.) 
> Integrating open source into the classroom therefore means doing less of 
> something else.  We must identify the something (or somethings plural) and 
> persuade instructors who will be directly or indirectly affected by the 
> loss of what's subtracted that the tradeoff is worthwhile, or we will 
> never become mainstream.

A few threads on this list all have the same answer, in my opinion:

If you don't approach this through established routes, it doesn't scale.

For us here at Seneca, that has meant dropping any work on student clubs 
or other "extras" and instead moving the work directly into the 
classroom and creating courses where students must work on open source 
projects, and within open source communities.

For professors having to climb tenure mountain, I suspect that the same 
is true, and we need to find ways to take what they are already doing 
and find ways to have that integrate with open source.  What that means 
exactly (papers, conf talks, class projects, research, etc.) is going to 
look different in different places, and should be part of what we figure 
out here.

But my strong belief is that it is only doable when we take what we are 
doing and turn it into what we want to do.

Dave