[TOS] Fwd: An experience report....

[C. Titus Brown]

On Tue, Sep 06, 2011 at 09:30:10AM -0400, Gregory Hislop wrote:
> I think the evaluation issue for untenured faculty is an excellent point.  But the issue that actually occurred to me first is teaching efficiency.  Time spent learning FOSS or solving FOSS problems takes time away from other tasks, and faculty time is scarce.  Teaching courses as already developed, and teaching straight out of a text just takes less time.  Too much time on the bleeding edge is likely to leave faculty with not enough time for other aspects of teaching and scholarship.  
> 
> Some faculty are willing to take higher risk paths and pursue things like student FOSS participation because they see the potential high payoff.  Many faculty will not do that.

Yeah, it's kind of funny that I missed that -- I think I just assumed that
my time is *already* gone, one way or another :).

It might be worth noting that "high payoff" is relative: presumably you mean to
the students in terms of learning and experience.  I don't think that many
administrators care one way or another exactly what the students are learning,
and without short-term measurable outcomes & metrics, it may be viewed as a
waste of time to put a lot of effort into FOSS.  ...which leads to a question:
what kind of metrics support teaching FOSS?

I'm a committed OSS developer, so I plan to teach it anyway.  But if a
colleague asks if they should "buy in", what arguments can I make to them?
Is there a list somewhere?

thanks,
--titus

> -----Original Message-----
> From: tos-bounces at teachingopensource.org [mailto:tos-bounces at teachingopensource.org] On Behalf Of C. Titus Brown
> Sent: Monday, September 05, 2011 11:05 PM
> To: Matthew Jadud
> Cc: tos at teachingopensource.org
> Subject: Re: [TOS] Fwd: An experience report....
> 
> On Mon, Sep 05, 2011 at 10:58:07PM -0400, Matthew Jadud wrote:
> > Hi Ralph,
> > 
> > 2011/9/5 Ralph Morelli <ralph.morelli at trincoll.edu>:
> > > widespread acceptance of this approach.?? If experienced faculty, such as
> > > you and Allen and I, have problems incorporating FOSS into our courses,
> > > it's even worse for young faculty who have to worry about tenure.
> > 
> > Could you explain more, for this community, why it is "worse" for
> > untenured faculty attempting to integrate FOSS projects into their
> > teaching?
> 
> Hi Matt,
> 
> because generally us untenured schlubs are more susceptible to negative
> student reviews like "this prof had no idea what they were doing".  For
> tenured profs, the consequences are generally not so bad unless performance
> is consistently bad; for untenured profs, bad performance is (or can be)
> factored in to promotion, raises, and teaching assigments more strongly.
> 
> If you have to worry about whether or not your ability to compile *this*
> version of the Linux kernel on the fly in front of class is going to
> have consequences, along with simply trying to get it to work in the
> first place, life will be stressful.
> 
> Personally I've found that my students are pretty happy to watch me fail,
> and that they learn the right lessons from it -- that every success is
> founded upon many failures.  But it's something I work hard to convey,
> and if I failed a lot in class I suspect it would make its way onto
> evaluations and hence be a subject of my annual review.
> 
> cheers,
> --titus
> -- 
> C. Titus Brown, ctb at msu.edu
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-- 
C. Titus Brown, ctb at msu.edu