[TOS] [Osdc-edu-authors] POSSE SA lead-in article on opensource.com

[Mel Chua]

>> (This is why I think having multiple people from an
>> institution/department take part in a POSSE is a Very Good Idea. It
>> eliminates some/many of these concerns.)
>
> That wisdom we really should consider applying, at least in terms of
> removing the (I think Red Hat supplied) prejudice of multiple
> institutions being preferable at one POSSE.
>
> I reckon that we brought that multiple institutions to the table
> because of the way we think of creating scalability.

I'm packing for South Africa right now, but I wanted to reply to this 
point specifically. I fully agree that having multiple people from an 
institution/department participate in a POSSE is a Very Good Idea - that 
way, you're not going back alone. It's something I'd love to

I'd still love to see multiple (local) institutions represented at at 
POSSE, though. Why? Two reasons:

1. Financial sustainability. POSSEs are expensive right now - $5-7k per 
event - so we want at least 5, ideally 10-15, attendees at each (also, 
imo, it's more fun to share the learning experience). Can we get enough 
professors from one institution interested to have a one-institution 
POSSE? RIT did, but I haven't seen indications of this happening any 
other places yet... I could be (and hope I am) wrong here, though. 
Looking at the TOS audience, it seems to mostly be 1-2 professors at 
each school who are interested in initially exploring open source 
communities with their students.

2. Local collaboration. Being able to do cross-institutional projects, 
student events, hackathons, etc. is cool, but the big win here, I think, 
is being able to use local FOSS communities and their existing resources 
as neutral collaboration points for multiple local schools, because 
individual campus communities are likely to be small to start with, so 
pooling resources/interest will help catalyze everyone's activities 
faster. I'd like to find ways to get local non-academic FOSS folks more 
involved in POSSEs than our current "come for Thursday night dinner" 
practice. (Then again, this might not be an institutionally helpful 
model - would you rather have students get involved with local FOSS 
communities, which likely include developers from different area 
companies - or build a community within your campus? I honestly don't know!)

Given a choice between multiple people from a school represented at a 
POSSE and multiple institutions represented at a POSSE, I'd pick the 
former, assuming class sizes can be big enough. Maybe we should try 
holding POSSE info sessions on campuses we'd like to have a one-school 
POSSE at - Steve Jacobs and I did this at RIT, which seems to have 
drummed up a lot of interest. Maybe spring semester gearing up for 
SIGCSE (and immediately post-SIGCSE) we should be doing "POSSE Info 
Tours" to run a bunch of those info sessions on different campuses... 
just brainstorming here.

(And by "we," I mean everyone here - I can't possibly give sessions 
everywhere, but we can make materials/slidedecks for folks from the TOS 
community to remix and present locally, and toss some TOS/POSSE alumni 
funding towards gas/travel/pizza/etc for info sessions.)

>> I AGREE that we need to introduce students to working in this way,
>> because it relates well to the notion of "lifelong learning," which is
>> a popular buzzword nowadays. But I don't think faculty need to be
>> introduced to being productively lost... they need to be introduced to
>> how to work it into their curriculum effectively, and still meet
>> curricular requirements or checking off boxes for accreditation while
>> doing so. I felt we got this from Dave/Chris in the first POSSE,
>> because both of them have been integrating FOSS into their classrooms
>> for so long.
>>
>> Others might object/disagree, but I think the focus needs to be on
>> practical strategies for integrating this idea into the classroom
>> context. That's my 2p, anyway.

Before we can cover how to work FOSS tools and processes and community 
participation into classrooms, we need to have participants know about 
these tools and processes and have experienced at least some of that 
community participation themselves first. For faculty who have 
experienced radically transparent, decentralized communities /and/ know 
the lingua franca and tools of FOSS development /and/ are comfortable 
plunging into unfamiliar FOSS communities and starting to ask questions, 
I think we can immediately start focusing on classroom integration - but 
not everyone has that context; I've had to teach the concepts of release 
cycles, ticket trackers, and other basic software engineering principles 
to CS profs who for various reasons haven't been exposed to them before. 
And it seems to take a while for *all* attendees to get comfortable 
asking questions in a project's channel (rather than 
#teachingopensource) without a TOS mentor there to shoulder-surf and 
guide them.

When Heidi visited POSSE Worcester State, one idea that came up was 
having her curriculum design workshop (which is, afaict, about 
integrating these things into a classroom context) be a specific 
follow-up to POSSE - POSSE as the immersion week to get a sense of what 
it's like to swim in that ocean, Heidi's workshop as the followup "now 
here's how you can bring it back to academia" one. Or blending the two 
into a single week... which is what I've tried to move towards in 
http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/POSSE_South_Africa#Schedule, as 
best as I can as a non-professor. In fact, I think it may have been Karl 
who had gone to Heidi's workshop first, and POSSE second, and said the 
two should have been in the opposite order for precisely this reason.

All righty, I'd better finish putting things into the freezer and 
packing up my bags for Cape Town... I'm about to spend about 40 hours in 
transit. (Long layovers, how I both love and hate thee. Hopefully I can 
get out of the Frankfurt airport and spend part of my 9-hour layover 
there in the actual city.)

See you folks from Africa!

--Mel