[TOS] FW: Teaching Open Source at 16 Months: A Forward-Looking Retrospective

Karsten Wade kwade at redhat.com
Fri Jul 30 23:51:40 UTC 2010


On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 10:44:00AM -0400, Sabin, Mihaela wrote:

> Is it possible to have a mini-version
> of POSSE in a workshop format at SIGCSE and SIGITE? Many faculty
> attend these conferences annually and we'll get the opportunity to
> stay POSSE-connected.

In fact, we discussed just such an idea with Alolita for OSCON.

The problem where some of us are stuck is that the principles taught
in a POSSE session are hard to cram in to a short period; five days is
already pushing it.

You can do a lot of *talking* about things in a one or two day
workshop, but it's harder for actual *doing*.  Timezones and the
participation structure of most FOSS projects means we could hit a
critical need that can't be resolved in an hour and sticks the whole
class.

So, one approach is to actually encapsulate things a bit more.  For
example, if we had a full set of infrastructure at tos.org all run by
us for teaching all the fundamentals but in a controlled way so a
subset could be taught in ~12 hours of workshop ... what would that
look like?

The target project receiving contributions would need to be very ready
for the onslaught.  What if the target project was
teachingopensource.org?  Can we create enough smaller project pieces
that help advance this FOSS project as a way to teach principles and
methods?

Thus:

* 5-day POSSE - a chance to co-teach with a community, so their
  technical expert can help a POSSE class get involved directly in
  that community as a teaching tool.

* 2-day POSSE - a chance to teach entirely with tos.org, so
  contributions by POSSE classes are not as widely felt (in the early
  days) but teach important principles and help advance TOS itself.

Anyway, just a first idea.  I'm sure that as we move toward an actual
prototype with textbook and infrastructure, we can see more ways to do
a shorter version.

A related idea is a two-hour workshop that is focused on getting
people knowing about POSSE and wanting to have one near them.

- Karsten
-- 
name:  Karsten 'quaid' Wade, Sr. Community Gardener
team:                Red Hat Community Architecture 
uri:               http://TheOpenSourceWay.org/wiki
gpg:                                       AD0E0C41
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