[TOS] Revising the POSSE pledge?
Mel Chua
mel at redhat.com
Thu Feb 25 20:42:23 UTC 2010
I've been thinking about the POSSE Pledge lately,
http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/POSSE_Pledge - "I pledge to be a
bridge between the world of academia and Teaching Open Source. This
coming school year, I will commit to bringing The Open Source Way into
my school's curriculum by getting all the students in at least one of my
classes in the coming school year actively involved in contributing to
an open source project for their coursework."
Maybe we're asking the wrong question - right now we ask people to
commit to actually teaching open source during the next school year, but
with classes for that next school year already blocked out before you
set foot into a POSSE, that might be a commitment people are nervous
about making, because they're not sure if they can keep it, because
they're not sure what that entails. I am speculating here.
But after spending a week with Remy and his Storytellers team at RIT,
I'm coming to realize that what we actually want is stories - either "I
taught open source!" or "here are the blockers that kept me from doing
so." The second one is fine, and in some ways while we're still in the
early stages of this, sometimes more valuable - because then we can
start to help clear them.
So what if we changed the pledge to "I pledge to come back online a year
from now and report back to my POSSE class what I've done in the TOS
realm over the past school year," or similar? I like the idea of last
year's POSSE attendees making a virtual gallery/expo of work of sorts at
the end of their first post-graduation school year, to show the next
round of POSSE attendees - this could be very simple, just a summary
reflection blog post to Planet TOS. But we'd all get to find out what
people did after their POSSE.
Thoughts?
--Mel
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