[TOS] POSSE 2011 cohort admissions - new applications, 12/15 seats remain

[Mel Chua]

Thanks to your feedback, we've now got 3 out of 15 professors selected - 
welcome to Nannette Napier from Georgia Gwinnett College 
(http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/POSSE_2011_applicants#Nannette_Napier), 
who joins Steven Huss-Lederman and Kristina Striegnitz in the POSSE 2011 
cohort.

We also have two new completed applications. Here they are, with my 
comments:

http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/POSSE_2011_applicants#Karl_R._Wurst 
- Karl has taught his Software Development course in FOSS before, so 
he'd come to POSSE knowing exactly what resources he needs to fill the 
gaps he saw last year. In particular, he mentions course 
materials/assignments and infrastructure, which may help us anticipate 
and find/setup those sorts of resources for the entire cohort well in 
advance (for instance, discussing how to utilize the SoftHum course 
materials repository Greg Hislop and Heidi Ellis and others have been 
building, and making sure professors have access to a turnkey custom 
Planet aggregator for their students blogs or a set of very easy 
instructions to install them on their school's servers, to bring up two 
things Karl mentions in his application).

I'm actually even more excited about the Freshman Seminar; it might be 
neat to have a group of first-year students watching the work of the 
other POSSE professors' classes, looking for larger 
cultural/sociological themes and having the time to do the readings and 
discussions on historical/legal/etc. aspects of the open source 
movement, since they won't be so focused on producing software. In fact, 
they could bring that sort of knowledge *to* the other POSSE professors' 
classes... one potential cool assignment might be to read the blogs of 
all those classes for a week or two, then point out several blog posts 
that fall into a theme from a reading (the difficulty of picking a 
license as a non-lawyer reading legal text for the first time, 
language/timezone challenges of an international community, etc.) 
Someone in Nannette's class might not realize they're a perfect example 
of the advantages of "release early, release often" until it's pointed 
out to them, for instance.

http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/POSSE_2011_applicants#Andrea_Hickerson 
- I'm personally excited about the potential here for giving Andrea's 
students PR and journalism experience while *simultaneously* generating 
tons of coverage for every participating school. If Andrea's Newswriting 
students can be grouped into small teams, and each team assigned a POSSE 
professor, that professor's class will effectively have their own 
personal news crew for interviewing students, chronicling the class, 
digging into the backgrounds of the project communities the students are 
working in and the community mentors they're working with, interviewing 
those folks... and getting that press out through RIT, through the PR 
dept of the professor they're assigned to cover, *and* through Red Hat's 
PR department (so the work of the Newswriting students chronicling the 
work of the other classes would be seen even more widely).

This might be overly ambitious, but if timelines match up... perhaps for 
a final assignment, Andrea's students could take the role of newswriting 
teachers and guide Karl's first-year students through a round of 
interviews and editing - both sides would learn firsthand about the 
remote apprenticeship process that's so common in FOSS communities, the 
freshmen would benefit from that sort of 1:1 mentorship with 
upperclassmen, and the Newswriting students would get to see how much 
they'd learned about writing during the course of the term. (And 
Worcester and Rochester aren't so far apart that a mid-point meeting 
class field trip is totally unthinkable.)

Comments, questions, etc. would be most appreciated. I'm starting to see 
the pieces and threads of an amazing summer cohort come together, and 
I'd love to be able to admit them both.

There are 12 seats remaining in this summer's cohort; see 
http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/POSSE#Apply to apply. If we get 
both Andrea and Karl, we'll have 10 seats left, so send those apps in 
now! Please holler if you've got any questions.

Cheers,

--Mel

PS: Thanks to NeoPhyte Rep for linking in the userpages of the 
professors on the wiki page of applicants - it was a wonderful surprise 
to get back from POSSCON and find that done!