[TOS] Fwd: An experience report....

[Ralph Morelli]

Forwarding bounced message.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Ralph Morelli <ram8647 at gmail.com>
Date: Mon, Sep 5, 2011 at 10:10 PM
Subject: Re: [TOS] An experience report....
To: Heidi Ellis <heidijcellis at gmail.com>
Cc: Karsten Wade <kwade at redhat.com>, TOS List <tos at teachingopensource.org>


Hi Heidi,

You've articulated well what we (those attempting to teach FOSS) have all
felt to
some degree and what has clearly emerged as a significant hurdle to more
widespread acceptance of this approach.   If experienced faculty, such as
you and Allen and I, have problems incorporating FOSS into our courses,
it's even worse for young faculty who have to worry about tenure.

In addition to the suggestions about best practices and sharing resources,
one thought that occurred to me is that maybe interested faculty could spend
something
like a summer (or a month?) directly engaged with a FOSS project and
community
as developers (or contributors in some other way) as an orientation and
preparation for bringing the project into their courses.   I'm guessing that
finding resources for such a program would be pretty difficult.   But short
of having textbooks and other ready-to-use resources that to
make our courses more manageable,  I think something like that would be the
next best thing.

I like your idea of getting the students engaged with the set up problems.
That will
give them a true picture of the FOSS development world!

Good luck with the course.

-- ralph


On Mon, Sep 5, 2011 at 6:53 PM, Heidi Ellis <heidijcellis at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Folks,
>
> I want to thank you all so much for your gracious and supportive comments,
> both on list and to me personally. You've all made some really good points
> and I appreciate the help. In particular, Karsten's comment about needing
> to
> capture the best practices resonates particularly strongly.
>
> My current status is that I have Fedora 15 and Cheese successfully
> installed
> in VirtualBox on an XP host. But I can't get VirtualBox to connect to my
> USB
> devices and Cheese is not finding my webcam.
>
> My plan is to turn the problem over to my students for the short term. If
> we
> cannot jointly figure out what the problem is, we'll look at another
> project.
>
> Thank you again for all the help.
> Heidi
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: tos-bounces at teachingopensource.org
> [mailto:tos-bounces at teachingopensource.org] On Behalf Of Karsten Wade
> Sent: Sunday, September 04, 2011 4:14 PM
> To: tos at teachingopensource.org
> Subject: Re: [TOS] An experience report....
>
> On Sun, Sep 04, 2011 at 07:13:27AM -0400, Heidi Ellis wrote:
> > Hi Folks,
> >
> >
> >
> > Let me start by saying that I'm torn. In the spirit of being open, I
> > was going to blog these thoughts. But upon reflection, I decided to
> > post them to this group. I want to use my experience to highlight
> > problems that I think are major roadblocks for instructors teaching
> > open source, but I really don't want to discourage instructors who may
> > read my blog. I also want to state that I'm posting problems for which I
> don't really have any answers.
> >
>
> I think this is a perfect use of the supportive community you are in.
> Perhaps from these discussions come solutions, or at least something to
> make
> your eventual blog post lest scary to read. :)
>
> You also have an immediate need for a solution, so I'm going to try to give
> some immediately useful suggestions. At the minimum, let's set ourselves a
> goal of getting you a few ideas of how to proceed by Monday afternoon.
>
> > I am teaching a software engineering course this fall. I was
> > approached by the GNOME Assistive Technology community with a cool
> > project involving magnification of video using Cheese. I decided to
> > explore the project and initially my concern was lack of knowledge
> > about how video is processed. The platform for Cheese is GNOME 3. Note
> > that I wrote my dissertation on Unix and have had some form of Linux
> > on VirtualBox for two years now. I wouldn't call myself a Linux expert,
> but I am relatively knowledgeable.
> >
> >
> >
> > So here are the roadblocks. The first is time. I spent at least 80
> > hours in August trying to get VirtualBox on XP to host Ubuntu 11.04 with
> GNOME 3.
> > After countless installs and uninstalls of VirtualBox and Ubuntu and
> > lots of banging my head against the wall, someone from the GNOME A11y
> > community kindly pointed out that Ubuntu and GNOME 3 don't play well
> > together.  OK, time to retrench.
> >
> >
> >
> > I have now spent some 20 hours installing a Fedora 15 guest on
> VirtualBox.
> > This only required four different install attempts, but I have at
> > least been successful. I've also spent four hours installing Cheese
> > and I still haven't been successful. Panic is setting in.
>
> The other comments about setting yourself time limits to success, then punt
> and move on ... that is a sound method.
>
> What I instantly saw here was the pile-on of communities with you required
> to be the central authority - for yourself, for the class, etc. When we've
> worked with student classes in Fedora, such as within the Docs Project,
> we've tried to assign a mentor who is that authority. That's who you appeal
> to when 15 minutes to an hour doesn't solve what you are looking for.
> Writing a document can include using MediaWiki, DocBook XML, and the
> Publican toolchain. Getting the students a working writing environment was
> a
> challenge the mentor had to work through. It all would go better if that
> work was done with the instructor first, then repeated with students but
> the
> instructor having been through it.
>
> At this point, my temptation is to tell you to run away from the Cheese
> effort. I might have recommended that at the 1/2 week-spent mark. The
> problem is that once you have it working for you, you have to duplicate
> that
> with students where the problems may continue to multiply. Video in a
> virtualized environment, wow.
>
> >
> > The second roadblock is lack of concrete directions. Let me explain. I
> > have found FOSS communities to be very supportive within that
> > community. However, what I'm trying to do is get a variety of
> > applications from different communities to play together. I got my
> > original idea for the project from the A11y community. In order to get
> > as far as I did with VB/Ubuntu/GNOME 3, I had to join the VB
> > community, interact with both the Ubuntu and the GNOME communities. I
> > am also interacting with the Cheese community to get that installed. I
> > have also spent many hours Googling my specific problems. While all of
> > these communities have been helpful, many of my questions remain
> unanswered.
>
> For right now, you could switch to a web app at a relatively low cost
> effort. For example, you could use a no-cost platform-as-a-service -
> (PaaS) such as Red Hat's OpenShift Express http://OpenShift.com - and load
> up a Java, Ruby, PHP, Perl, or Python FOSS app
>
> To work more meaningfully (at a deeper technical or social level) may
> require you to continue spending time in one or several communities. I look
> to how OLPC and Sugar Labs have coalesced a number of project upstream bits
> under a single umbrella with room to grow more under there. That gives
> Stephen a place to continue getting more for his investment, year over
> year,
> with the same being true for his classes.
>
> So GNOME A11y could be a great group to do that with, it just might need
> more time. You may also want to look for some way to start with them that
> doesn't require so many layers (VM + OS + quite-fresh-GNOME3
> + Cheese).
>
> >
> > The third is changing application during development. I want my
> > students to be able to make a contribution to a FOSS project. In order
> > to do so, they must be working on the most recent version of the
> > product. However, this means that I can't stabilize the application
> > before class starts, creating a risk that I'll be trying to teach
> > students with an application that I can't get working. In addition,
> > Updates tend to break things, requiring more time to figure out what to
> fix.
>
> Being closer to upstream can only help here.
>
> The key I think to that whole paragraph is at the end, the tendency for
> things to break on updates. Each project is going to do this differently,
> but that really shouldn't happen with the same frequency. I would hope that
> closer interaction with upstream would help here, so they can warn of
> changes landing in the HEAD that might break things.
>
> If things do break, isn't that part of the FOSS contribution experience?
> Even if it's right at the start, it creates in instant chance to contribute
> - spend 15 min working on it, get backtraces, file bug reports, go on IRC -
> all in the class it happens in.
>
> The more you and the class know the codebase, the easier it will be to make
> breakage from updates part of what you do. Perhaps plan for that to happen?
> Being pleasantly surprised when it doesn't ...
>
> > OK, so I am now starting my second week in the semester and I have a
> > working platform, but have been unable to install the application that
> > I want students to use and get it running. In addition, I haven't had
> > any time to work with the actual application. I consider myself more
> > tolerant of risk in teaching than many of my peers and much more
> > likely to let students learn in an environment where I don't know the
> > answers than most of my peers. This is definitely panic time!!!
>
> Can you punt for a different application? Preferably a web app?
>
> Is there something you can punt for that is bundled under an umbrella where
> you can get some mentoring? For example, the Fedora Project? Or with an
> upstream that has its act together, such as Wordpress or Drupal?
>
> > These are some of the reasons why instructors get a text and follow
> > the exercises at the end of the chapter and have students work on toy
> projects.
> > And I find myself pondering where to go from here. Without any way to
> > know how much more time and effort it will take to get Cheese to work,
> > I can't tell whether to risk continuing. If I don't continue, what do
> > I do for a project? I don't have time to handle the learning curve for
> > a new FOSS project..
>
> Is there a way to scale back to what is working? Something A11y just within
> a working GNOME3?
>
> For that, you can use the distro resources (users at fedoraproject.org,
> #fedora, and lots of personal connections) to get help with ANYTHING that
> arises. The distros try to work out these integration issues directly and
> with the upstreams, so they are your advocates.
>
> Perhaps we could look for upstream mentors that can work better with you?
> Not to knock anyone you've worked with, but there might be a few other
> people around the Fedora Desktop team who could be bribed in to being on
> hand for the semester, and would love to see the additional work for
> GNOME3.
>
> > It is not my intent to deter folks from involving students in FOSS.
> > Quite the opposite. But I also think that if we don't identify and
> > find ways of handling these sorts of issues, We won't be able to get
> > more instructors on board.
>
> I'm also concerned that our best practices after these several years are
> still not captured in a useful way. Maybe we can take a direct approach of
> aggressively writing wiki articles with an agreed upon taxonomy
> (categories)? Something that can grow, but with processes to reveal to
> other
> authors AND readers what is going on, where to find what is there, and how
> it all can fit together. Something knowledge-base-ish.
>
> - Karsten, so enterprisey it hurts
> --
> name:  Karsten 'quaid' Wade, Sr. Community Gardener
> team:   Red Hat Community Architecture & Leadership
> uri:             http://communityleadershipteam.org
>                        http://TheOpenSourceWay.org
> gpg:                                       AD0E0C41
>
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