[TOS] My intro

[Mel Chua]

Hi, Junaid - and welcome to the list!

> I understand that teaching open source is yet another educational
> innovation similar to several others which communities who are
> interested in an innovation are exploring to bring them into mainstream
> and promote them for a widespread adoption. This provides me another
> real context to study what issues are involved in change for the
> adoption of an educational innovation. I plan to stay tuned to this
> mailing list to learn about the stories and possibly identify some new
> cases that will be interesting to study from the perspective of
> institutional change and faculty development.

I had a great chat with Junaid about this last week... one of the things 
that I've heard as a common theme in every conversation I've ever had 
with a TOS prof is "so, y'know, Mel, changing academia is *hard*."

To which I reply: oh yes. But academia has been changed before. (I mean, 
the discipline of CS didn't exist not all that long ago.) And I'm 
wondering if Junaid, with his slightly different perspective than most 
of us (who hail either from open source communities or are directly 
trying to teach our students to contribute to them) might be able to 
shed some insight into how we might be better able to navigate and tweak 
the systems we're within.

One starting question on this front - faculty members who are trying to 
introduce something new to their teaching have to balance their time 
between a lot of different things:

* skill-building in themselves to teach "the new stuff" (here, it's 
stuff like "attend a POSSE" or "go to a FOSS conference in addition to 
the conference of my research field")
* classroom teaching "the new way" and dealing directly with 
transforming students (who are potentially confused by your weird new 
approach)
* analysis of personal classroom teaching results ("is this making a 
difference?")
* advocacy and resource-finding within the school itself (talking with 
admins, other faculty members, promotion on-campus, etc)
* advocacy and resource-finding outside the school (external grants, 
company partnerships/sponsorships, etc)
* presentation of teaching results/curricula at external events 
(conferences, journals)

...atop their "normal" teaching/research/service load. Which... may 
explain why most profs here seem (to my eyes, used to the high volume of 
open source project lists) pretty quiet, perpetually hosed, and "pop in 
with announcements/updates" message types more often than "let's have a 
sustained conversation on this mailing list." There's literally no time 
for any of those conversations; you're having a million others at the 
same time to actually get open source to happen at your schools in the 
first place.

0. How do individual profs figure out how to best balance their time 
between these activities, and how can a community of practice of these 
profs help lighten the load (and what factors determine whether 
participating in that community gives you more help than the time you 
have to put into it)?

I ask because I *know* there have been some POSSE alumni teaching cool 
classes involving open source, and nobody else on this list knows about 
it, I'm *guessing* this is because the other bullet-pointed activities 
above are more high-value/vital to their teaching and the external 
community feedback is a rich bonus but a "nice-to-have" so we simply 
don't find out. So:

1. Is anything external to one's institution to some extent 
semi-optional (and therefore we're already hitting the maximum 
usefulness of the TOS community-of-practice to most profs, keep doing 
what we're doing and we'll see change in a few years)?

2. Or is there something the TOS community could do to help with 
whatever faculty currently deem to be more important than posting to a 
mailing list? Basically, is there "core" work we're missing the chance 
to help out with, because we're unknowingly concentrating on the 
"nice-to-haves"?

I feel like I'm on standby a lot, willing to help but unable to see what 
there is for me to help with unless people post to Planet / write to 
list, and I suspect a bunch of non-faculty on this list might feel the 
same way.

--Mel