[TOS] Students reporting back on first contact with open source projects

Sebastian Benthall sbenthall at gmail.com
Wed Sep 18 06:15:20 UTC 2013


I just wanted to send you an update about the class I'm co-teaching this
semester on 'Open Collaboartion and Peer Production'.

It's aimed at Masters students and fulfils a management requirement for
them, so it's quite a bit different from a computer science course.

But what I hope you'll find interesting is that their assignments involve
making a contribution to some external project and reporting back on how it
goes in light of the literature we provide in the course.

Assignment 1 was due today.  It's about how they went about making first
contact with the community.  Here's the entries so far:

http://courses.ischool.berkeley.edu/i290m-ocpp/site/

Students are submitting their assignments via pull request on GitHub to a
site backed by Pelican (a Python static site generator).  I'm hoping that
their encounters with this new technology give them a feel for
collaboration through their coursework.

https://github.com/sbenthall/i290m-ocpp-site

Weekly labs are run to teach them about technical tools -- pull requests,
Github, Pelican, Markdown, IRC.  Soon we will be moving the lab on-line to
IRC and turn it into a virtual meeting about the course collaboration.  We
aim to end the semester with the site as a collaborative report on open
source participation (ambitious, but we'll see how it goes).

The syllabus is still a bit in flux.  As you can imagine, it's a bit
logistically complicated and we are making up a lot as we go along.  But
the students so far seem very motivated, and I'm impressed by many of their
reflections on joining these communities.

If you like, I'll keep posting to this list about the course as it unfolds.

Best regards,
Seb
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