[TOS] Textbook: Getting the Code IRC log

[Matthew Jadud]

Hi David,

On Thu, Apr 15, 2010 at 00:03, David Nalley <david at gnsa.us> wrote:
> I largely agree with your analysis of the conversation from the talk page.
> Looking back, I have seen this exact conversation occur previously
> (and similarly disastrously (and I don't have any qualms saying that
> as 1. I was part of the problem in the referenced incident and 2. I
> was the one charged with shepherding the students through the entire
> 'get involved with the community' phase in the earlier instance I am
> aware of, and actively watched that train wreck occur))

Your reply is thorough, and deserves more than what I'll say here and now.

I think we agree we agree (on most points). And my point in the
analysis was less about the individuals, or (perhaps even?) the
specific incident. But Mel offered it up as a good conversation point,
and it gives us a point of reflection. There will be more; some of our
reflections will be uplifting, some will give us more to think about.

I actually don't consider it a train wreck. I don't, actually, see
anything going poorly about our experiment so far. In fact, I think
we're doing a great job on both sides. That's a temporal/local
assessment: we dove in. We're trying it. We're going to have failure
points, and we're going to have successes.

At this end, we have two classrooms full of students who are engaging
on a consistent basis with an open source community leading up to a
release. This is a non-trivial time for you to be working with us
(thank you!), and it is a non-trivial time for the students (the last
five weeks of the semester). Everyone, I think, is doing an awesome
job, full stop. Given the nature of the first-year seminar, I cannot
be happier than to see students engaging fully in questions they don't
understand, and working together (and, online, with y'all) as
productively as they can. I mean, how many first-year Psych/Neuro
majors wrestle with alpha Fedora 13 disks, trying to get them to boot
either on their machine or under VirtualBox? I know of one right now,
and she's doing a great job of trying to kick the living daylights out
of her initial problem in an attempt to move forward with the task she
really wants to do.

Unless the teams want it to be a one-time experiment, this won't be.
My intention is to spend the summer getting to know the teams better,
and come back next term with two different groups, and more
scaffolding in place to help the students ease into the community.

1. CMPSC 303: Human Centered Design. Usability/interface design. We'll
kick students at open projects that want people to do paper
prototyping and heuristic analyses to improve their software.

2. FS101: Leadership, Creativity, and Communities of Practice. I'm
guaranteed 18 students, but I have no idea who they'll be. They will
have just arrived on campus, and we'll be reading things like
"Starfish and the Spider" (Mel's recommendation), "Getting the Yes"
(also Mel's recommendation), "Whack on the Side of the Head" (a
favorite of mine), and "The No Asshole Rule" (another favorite of
mine). I'm thinking that we can focus on the "on-boarding process" for
one or two projects with this group, and literally attack the
challenge of compressing the "productively loss" cycle.  (We have
months to discuss this, here and/or elsewhere... so I'm not fixed on
any particular idea yet.) It would be a meta-project, but it might be
a good project to look at post-release-14. (We could gear up on things
until the 31st, and then join in for the month of November, applying
what we learned about wikis, IRC, etc., as well as the readings.)

Hm. I wandered into "where I think I'm going" rather than responding
to more of your message. The reason for that is to say "this is just
step one." As I've learned in other contexts this year, actual change
takes time. If we're interested in developing ways that make it easier
for faculty to include students in open projects, we're going to have
a few years of work ahead of us. Why? Because you can't count on CS
faculty to be engaging non-majors in projects that aren't about
code---there's vanishingly few of us who have those kinds of teaching
responsibilities. Hence, I want to help us get to the point that a
faculty member in the English department could, potentially, engage a
community around technical writing, and that we'll have a sense for
how to "on-board" both the faculty member and the students. I'll leave
it to Fardad to pioneer things that I can steal later for my CS
majors.

Hm. Another long/big message. If any of y'all are bored around 11AM,
feel free to join us in #allegheny on Freenode (or #fedora-mktg, or
wherever my students have gotten off to at this point...)

:)

Cheers,
Matt