[TOS] FW: introductions and teaching courses on free/open source software

Fri Apr 18 00:14:39 UTC 2014

Hi Folks,

I’ve reposted this to the teachingopensource list as there are folks on the list who may also have ideas to contribute.

Heidi 

From: Shauna Gordon-McKeon [mailto:shaunagm at gmail.com] 
Sent: Thursday, April 17, 2014 3:25 PM
To: Heidi Ellis
Cc: Williams, Chadd C.; Nic McPhee; Jeremy DeCausemaker; Bart Massey; Elena Machkasova; Kristin Lamberty
Subject: Re: introductions and teaching courses on free/open source software

I wonder if it might be useful to move this conversation to http://lists.teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos.  It's not a very active list but I believe it has a number of open source educators on it who might be interested in contributing to this discussion (or who might get a lot of use out of some of the resources that have been linked).

On Thu, Apr 10, 2014 at 8:36 PM, Heidi Ellis <ellis at wne.edu> wrote:

Hi Chad,

Heidi Ellis here. I agree that what you're doing sounds ambitious to me. But I think that there is huge opportunity for learning in what you're attempting. One thing that I have found is that it is helpful to actually join a project and I would suggest one for the entire class as this cuts down on your load.  The reason I mention joining a project is because it provides a community of professionals from which your students can learn. It also provides them with a resource to ask questions and get answers, as well as creating possible networking opportunities.  I have found that the resources of the community are far better and wider-ranging than I have myself and so provides a richer learning environment for students.

I am part of a team that is working to try to get instructors up to speed in humanitarian FOSS (HFOSS) projects.   Below is a link to the set of exercises that we use to introduce wikis, blogs, IRC and git. These are CC licensed and we would be really happy if you used them.

http://foss2serve.org/index.php/Category:Communication_and_Tools

Feel free to explore the entire site as the goal is to increase sharing of materials.

Lastly, I have taught a Software Engineering course for the past several fall semesters. You are welcome to borrow anything that you find useful.

http://mars.wne.edu/~hellis/CS490/

Syllabus and all materials here:

http://mars.wne.edu/~hellis/CS490/syllabus.html

I hope this helps!
Heidi

-----Original Message-----
From: Williams, Chadd C. [mailto:chadd at pacificu.edu]
Sent: Tuesday, April 08, 2014 1:08 PM
To: Nic McPhee; Shauna Gordon-McKeon
Cc: Heidi Ellis; Jeremy DeCausemaker; Bart Massey; Elena Machkasova; Kristin Lamberty
Subject: RE: introductions and teaching courses on free/open source software

Hi all,

Thanks to Shauna for the introductions.

Let me tell you a little bit about the class I am planning.  This is a Special Topics course (which counts as an elective) aimed at Fall Sophomores who have a year's experience with C++ in Visual Studio (more experienced Juniors and Seniors will also be enrolling).  This is a 4 credit course which at Pacific means three 65 minutes meetings a week for 14 weeks.

I plan on covering the theory (free vs open, the types of licenses, some history, etc.) but also focus heavily on the practical side (version control, build a patch, online collaboration and communication, downloading/building a project, reading/debugging code you did not write).

This practical side will be quite difficult for most students, I think, since the classroom development model they are familiar with is so different than working on an existing project.  To compensate for that, I plan to have as much in-class lab time as possible for students to work on activities.  Honestly, I hope to lecture for at most a third of the class meetings and let students work/present the rest of the time.

The first third of the semester I plan on a mix of lecture on theory and hands on practical work with open source development processes.  I'll have the students work on Git repositories I've developed for this course.  These repositories (on GitHub) are partially implemented projects with bugs seeded into them.  I've gone ahead and created some issues on GitHub to guide students on what needs to be fixed or added. These activities will allow students (using GitHub) to fork, clone, and build an existing project as well as submit a pull request and review each others' pull requests.  Additionally, I hope to have students make use of the OpenHatch missions to gain some experience with the command line tools, etc.  What I am lacking at this point are exercises to help students become familiar with communication tools such as IRC or mailing lists.

Since I can only rely on students knowing Visual Studio C++, there will be a short introduction to a scripting language (Python or Ruby) to allow students a wider range of in-the-wild projects to work with.  This will probably be the second third of the semester (hopefully about 3-4 weeks).

In the final third of the semester, I want students to have the opportunity to interact with real live open source projects.  This seems like the most important but also riskiest part of the course.  As a final project over the last few weeks, I plan on having students attempt to contribute to an existing open source project or, with team of classmates, build their own project using open source principles.  Being able to contribute to an open source project won't be a requirement (there are too many variables that go into whether or not a commit gets accepted).

This all seems very ambitious to me.  Any experience you all have on these topics would be great.

The github repositories I have built so far are here:
https://github.com/chaddcw
The ContactManager-Example-language repositories are the repositories we will be using for example projects.

The part I'm most worried about is interacting with a live open source project.  I know from my own experience that downloading a project, resolving dependencies, and reading the code can turn into quite a time sink.  On the other hand, I really want students to experience working with a live project.  This seems to me to be a vital portion of the course.

thanks!
chadd

--
Chadd Williams
Associate Professor of Computer Science
Pacific University
http://zeus.cs.pacificu.edu/chadd
________________________________________
From: Nic McPhee [mcphee at morris.umn.edu]
Sent: Monday, April 07, 2014 3:13 PM
To: Shauna Gordon-McKeon
Cc: Williams, Chadd C.; Heidi Ellis; Jeremy DeCausemaker; Bart Massey; Elena Machkasova; Kristin Lamberty
Subject: Re: introductions and teaching courses on free/open source software

We haven't taught anything like this, but have indeed discussed it.

I am currently teaching a Refactoring course, and the final project (which is starting right now) is doing refactoring work on an open source project (CraftBukkit - https://github.com/Bukkit/CraftBukkit). I don't know how it will all play out, but it's possible that some of the student work might be submitted back to the actual CraftBukkit project in the form of Git pull requests.

I'd love to learn more about the course that you're considering, as I think there might be significant interest here in developing something like this.

Thanks!

Nic McPhee - University of Minnesota, Morris

On Mon, Apr 7, 2014 at 4:37 PM, Shauna Gordon-McKeon <shaunagm at gmail.com<mailto:shaunagm at gmail.com>> wrote:
Chadd Williams is a professor at Pacific University who'll be teaching a course on free/open source development this fall.  He's still working out the curriculum and is looking for advice and resources.  I offered to introduce him to all the amazing faculty I know who have taught classes on open source (or who are interested in doing so).

In no particular order, I've CC'd:

- Heidi Ellis<http://mars.wne.edu/~hellis/>, who works at Western New England University and teaches "Software engineering, student involvement in FOSS, software engineering and online education".  She's involved with RedHat's POSSE program<http://www.redhat.com/posse/> and OpenFE/Foss2Serve<http://foss2serve.org/index.php/Main_Page> (my apologies, Heidi, I don't know your exact role).  While getting the above links I also found http://teachingopensource.org<http://teachingopensource.org/>, which seems relevant to your interests - I just joined the mailing list and IRC channel myself!

- Remy deCausemaker, who works at RIT where they've recently announced a minor in free/open source software<http://magic.rit.edu/foss/minor.html>.  He's taught a number of classes on FOSS topics, I believe.  His title, according to that page, is "Open Source Research Coordinator & MAGIC FOSS Evangelist" which sounds delightful.

- Bart Massey, a computer science professor at Portland State University, who has taught several classes on FOSS development<http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~bart/courses.html>.

- Elena Machkasova, Nic McPhee, and KK Lamberty of the University of Minnesota-Morris.  They haven't run any FOSS classes recently, that I'm aware of, but may be interested in doing so.

Please feel free to keep me CC'd on any discussions you may have!

best
Shauna

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.teachingopensource.org/pipermail/tos/attachments/20140417/c38edd34/attachment.html>