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

Mel Chua mel at purdue.edu
Sat Sep 21 06:39:18 UTC 2013


First of all: Seb, you rock. Thanks for the course stories; this sounds 
*fantastic*. Are you happy with the way it's going from a teacher point 
of view, and what's surprised you the most about it so far?

> back on how it goes in light of the literature we provide in the course.

Ooh, you have a reading list / bibliography? Where is it? I cannot find 
it in your github repo.

> 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/

I love the prompt towards reflective writing. (The original assignment 
document seems to be 
https://github.com/sbenthall/i290m-ocpp-site/blob/master/content/assignment1/assign1.md)

In case you're doing more reflective assignments in the future (and I 
hope you do -- they're valuable for the learning of the students, and 
it's fascinating for me to read them from the outside), Christine 
Hogan's SAID model might help with writing up assignment templates. In 
particular, your students have a lot of Interpretation in their entries, 
but seem to only very briefly skim by Affect (if at all), and only some 
richly describe the Situation, and very few of them have a Decision section:

[S]ituation: what actually happened?
* what images/scenes do you recall?
* which people/words/comments struck you?
* what sounds/smells/sensations do you recall?
* were there any other elements?

[A]ffect: incorporating your feelings and intuitions is important
* what was the high/low spot?
* what was your mood/feeling?
* what was your gut reaction?

[I]nterpretation: what did you learn?
* what can you conclude from this experience?
* what was your learning?
* how does this relate to appropriate concepts, theories, skills?

[D]ecision: what will you do as a result?
* what do you need to do before this sort of thing happens again?
* what should you do differently next time?
* what would you say to people who weren't there?
* what was the significance of this experience in your life?

Christine Hogan, (1995) "Creative and reflective journal processes", The 
Learning Organization, Vol. 2, Issue 2, pp. 4-17

(obviously she wasn't writing for open source online journals, so some 
bullets could use a bit of editing, but still; not bad.)

> 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

Ok, this is super-cool. If you still like this setup by the end of the 
semester, I'd like to talk with you about cloning it for the next coding 
class I teach. :)

 > 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).

I am curious how the specification of that will evolve... would love to 
hear more about what this means to you/the-class (at whatever point in 
time we have that discussion).

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

Yes, please! I would like.

--Mel


More information about the tos mailing list