[TOS] Infrastructure Team: Can haz?

Heidi Ellis heidijcellis at gmail.com
Wed Jan 12 18:29:36 UTC 2011


Hi Folks,

I too agree that we want both profs and students involved with real
communities and making real contributions. This is the attraction of the
approach! However, if the goal is to get more profs involved, anything that
lowers the barrier to entry is a good thing. 

>From a prof's point of view, if the learning curve is too steep, profs won't
try things in class. I've been doing this for a while and my biggest
constraint is time. Computing profs already have to keep up with the latest
technology changes. Involving students in OSS is a change in teaching
approach combined with a learning curve for the prof. So if there is a
solution that gets me started that doesn't involve lots of time or
frustration, I'm all for it.

I don't think that this will mean that Profs will always take the easy way
out. Professors are very self-directed and they will definitely want to
customize for their own environment. In addition, profs typically assume
that they're on their own. We're used to having to learn new technologies
and approaches independently so POSSEs are definitely an improvement on our
usual approach to learning new things. Profs will definitely use TOS
community to help solve problems in the manner of an OSS community. But they
will have just learned about how OSS communities work and will assume (or
should know) that they should make all efforts to solve problems on their
own before asking a question. 

I think that the best approach would be to provide a reasonable solution
that works within the POSSE setting (time and resource constrained) as well
the alternatives so that once profs understand the approach, they can find
the technology solution that best fits their environment. 

Just my 2 cents.
Heidi


-----Original Message-----
From: tos-bounces at teachingopensource.org
[mailto:tos-bounces at teachingopensource.org] On Behalf Of Chris Tyler
Sent: Wednesday, January 12, 2011 9:10 AM
To: Karlie Robinson
Cc: tos at teachingopensource.org
Subject: Re: [TOS] Infrastructure Team: Can haz?

On Wed, 2011-01-12 at 08:27 -0500, Karlie Robinson wrote:
> By creating a shopping list of instant solutions, you're telling POSSE 
> participants that TOSS and the people who lead their POSSE will be 
> available, indefinitely, to solve their problems.  Instead you should be 
> looking at how to successfully tell someone "Do it yourself" by creating 
> a situation where they are able to tap the community on their own, 
> outside of TOS, to have their needs met.

Karlie, I'm completely with you on this: I agree wholeheartely that we
should not create sandboxes to play in, and that students should be
working with real open source communities in real open source projects
rather than creating their own toy projects in git instances that aren't
really used by anyone else.

However, we have had profs tell us that they can't get the
infrastructure access they need at their schools -- some can have root
on an internal server, or a server connected to the public Internet, but
not both (root and an accessible IP), and some can't even get a fraction
of that. So being able to provide some things such as a Planet very
quickly could have value.

(Of course, the other side of this is just hosting TOS.o on a
higher-bandwidth link with higher availability for the wiki etc, which
is also important).

-Chris

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