[TOS] Seb Benthall on FOSS vs academic culture

[Sabin, Mihaela]

Jim, 

I'm teaching an web application development course http://unhmwebappsdevel.wordpress.com this semester, in which the tools and practices are open source. 

I have had three open source developers and teachers present in my class on topics ranging from "the open source way" in general to specific aspects, such as version control, issue tracking, and unit testing. The presenters are involved with open source community projects CivicCRM, Drupal, Public Laboratory, and FarmHack, and client-oriented open source projects Ronald McDonald homebase and homeroom. We use Skype and a 40 minute format that include 10-15 minutes Q&A. 

This is to invite you to present in my class. It runs Thursday nights, 5:30 - 8:30 PM EST. I'll be happy to tell you more about my experience with TOS. 

Looking forward to making a teaching/learning connection,
Mihaela

-----Original Message-----
From: tos-bounces at teachingopensource.org [mailto:tos-bounces at teachingopensource.org] On Behalf Of Jim Bowring
Sent: Friday, March 09, 2012 8:02 AM
To: Discussions about Teaching Open Source
Subject: Re: [TOS] Seb Benthall on FOSS vs academic culture

Mel -

Some thoughts:

1. Most people in most communities (academy, business, opensource, civic, etc.) believe in what they do and look for ways to improve what they do.
2. When people in or out of a specific community advocate for "the best way to do things" they are bound to make little progress converting others.
3. The agile development process models for software evolved from understanding #2 both implicitly and explicitly : choose the tools appropriate for the job, remembering the adage that "a poor worker blames their tools."
4. The academy is primarily concerned with teaching undergraduates, not with research or Ph.D.s.
5. There is no generic academic culture, just as there is no generic culture for any other diverse group of professionals.
6. In Computer Science, we have no-fee conference and journal publication via ACM and IEEE Computer.
7. In my experience, Computer Science academics are willing to share code after publication.  Learning how to do so effectively can be/is a goal of TOS.
8. Intellectual property rights make the world go round, whether we like it or not.
9. Lest we think ourselves too important, 29,000 children under the age of five –  21 each minute – die every day.
10. Let's commit to improving the world together.

Dissertation research idea brainstorm #1: develop a taxonomy of open source activities and conduct studies that compare and contrast these activities with their closed source counterparts in order to discover the effectiveness of each in doing X,Y, and Z.


Cheers, Jim




On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 11:16 PM, Mel Chua <mel at purdue.edu> wrote:
>> On Mar 7, 2012 2:36 AM, "Jim Bowring" <bowring at gmail.com
>>    Why the closed-minded vitriol about the academy?  Positive actions
>>    are required!
>
>
> Jim -- I can see how this might not have come through in my original 
> message on this thread, but I've found that I'm a harsh critic of the 
> things I love the most. If I didn't have such high regard for the 
> academy and its power to affect the world, and had no hope or 
> intention of changing it for the better, I would not be sitting in the 
> ivory tower right now. :)
>
> As Seb pointed out, identifying the problems in anything is the first 
> step to improving them; positive actions tend to stem from visions of 
> how something could be better than it currently is. Since this mailing 
> list tends to have a lot of academics on it, my writing here tends to 
> be skewed more towards the "here's what FOSS does right and academia 
> does wrong; let's transfer goodness in that direction!" theme (perhaps sometimes unfairly so).
>
> Conversely, when I'm in a group of mostly-hackers, I tend to talk more 
> about the things that FOSS is doing wrong and academia is doing right, 
> and argue that FOSS should adopt those practices. For instance, FOSS 
> projects tend to have ridiculously high failure-and-dropout rates due 
> to poorly designed scaffolding (or a lack thereof), and schools are 
> more proactive about identifying and aiding newcomers who are 
> struggling. I guess I should say these sorts of things here more as 
> well -- thanks for inadvertently pointing that out.
>
> Either way, the first step to change is understanding -- and I think 
> what Seb and I are trying to do, as relative newcomers to the academic 
> world (and experienced denizens of the FOSS world) is to understand 
> and make sense of our new environment -- and part of that is fumbling 
> around and saying
> (seemingly) stupid things and learning from how folks respond to them. 
> The comments on my blog post
> (http://blog.melchua.com/2012/03/07/foss-thinking-vs-academic-thinking
> /#comments) have likewise been illuminating food for thought -- I 
> totally didn't expect this big a reaction, but hey... that's how we 
> learn.
>
> Ideas for specific positive actions to take are welcome. I mean, I do 
> need a dissertation someday. :)
>
>
> --Mel
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