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

Bonnie MacKellar mackellb at stjohns.edu
Mon Sep 12 12:59:01 UTC 2011


Hi,

I am coming very late to this thread. When I saw Heidi's post, I wanted to reply immediately, but I was bogged down with the start of classes and with getting a conference paper out. Now, I am finally going to post on this topic.

Heidi is spot-on in her description of some of the battles. I don't think these battles are just part of teaching open source though. I encounter these battles constantly, whenever I need to teach using a new piece of software. It is a real time sink.

When I first heard about the POSSE workshops, my reaction was "Why aren't they doing these for university/college IT staff?". And I still feel strongly that some kind of workshops or training needs to be organized for the IT folks if any real headway is going to be made. Why? Consider the situation at many smaller teaching oriented schools. At these schools, many of the people teaching computer science do not have computer science backgrounds. Often, they are primarily mathematicians or physicists or business educators, who have been asked to teach computer science courses.  This is the case at my current school, and at the school where I last taught.  At these schools, the faculty teaching CS tend to be very dependent on the IT staff. Unless the IT staff can install the software and show the faculty how to use it, they simply won't use it in their courses.

At my current school, we are very Microsoft-centric because the IT staff are all trained and comfortable with Microsoft products. They recommend Microsoft products and our faculty go along with it. With a 4 course/semester teaching load, they simply do not have time to do otherwise. For the most part, they do not know Unix/Linux, have never heard of version control systems, and have never installed major software systems. I was able to get involved in HFOSS in part because I have worked in the software industry and am very familiar with the tools, but also because we had one person on our IT staff who was  interested, and who already was a Linux guru. Without him, I could never have done it. I did not have the time to install and configure the systems. Now, he was very interested but was not familiar with the open source world. His department has training budget for the staff. If we had offered a one or two day workshop aimed at university IT staff, he would have done it in a moment, and then perhaps would have become a guru of open source within our IT department. This would have encouraged other faculty to give open source a try.

Remember that the majority of people teaching in CS do not go to SIGCSE or to the CCSC conferences. They are either focused on research, or swamped with teaching responsibilities. At many schools, the IT staff are the drivers of new technology and do all of the systems support work. It would really help if we could get some of those folks interested and knowledgeable. They have their own conferences and training sessions - perhaps the TOS people should do some outreach in those venues?

Thanks,
Bonnie MacKellar

-----Original Message-----
From: tos-bounces at teachingopensource.org [mailto:tos-bounces at teachingopensource.org] On Behalf Of Joel Sherrill
Sent: Friday, September 09, 2011 4:33 PM
To: tos at teachingopensource.org
Subject: Re: [TOS] Fwd: An experience report....

Hi,

I have been reading this list since its inception and sometimes
popping my head out from under the rock to post.  After lurking on
this thread for a while, I couldn't help but wade in.  I am the
maintainer of RTEMS (free real-time operating system) and very
interested in it being used in educational environments.

But what I don't want is for talented, stretched instructors to flail
attempting to do so.  Allen and Heidi are the experiences I do not
want to happen when you all try to
take RTEMS into a class room or lab.  Yes you have to do some
preparation work that is specific to your educational goal.  But no,
you should not suffer.  It really
pained me to hear what Heidi went through.  Avoiding that type of pain
is critical to FOSS use in educational settings.  And bridging the gap
to FOSS projects to get help is a big step.

Please approach the projects to get help avoiding pitfalls.  Karsten
hinted that the
FOSS community will help.  I honestly believe most FOSS developers
would bend over backwards to help you all out.

I know for RTEMS we try to keep an up to date list of possible
projects, virtual
machines which are already set up to do development with, etc.  If you have
a specific class room goal, we will work with you to make it a success.

We all have a tendency not to want to ask for help or bother other
people. But in
this case, if you folks don't, then everyone loses.  You end up with
less time to
spend on maturing teaching material and projects for FOSS.  FOSS loses
an opportunity for contributions and future developers.

So I am begging all of you professors, instructors, etc.to please approach FOSS
projects for help.  We are happy to help you out.

--joel sherrill
RTEMS
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