[TOS] Start of the school year -- what are people doing for fall semester?

[Mel Chua]

Since a good portion of the academics on TOS are starting up the new 
school year right about now, I thought it might be a good time to update 
each other on our fall term plans.

I'm starting the 2nd year of my PhD at Purdue (Grad School: RETURN OF 
THE GRAD SCHOOL) and am still learning how to settle into 5+ year 
marathons (as opposed to the 6-month release cycle sprints I'm used to 
from FOSS development). This semester I am preparing for my quals, and 
so I may end up with a reading list that's of interest to others here. 
I've been playing around the space of theories about learning, community 
development & formation, motivation and recruitment, and resistance to 
change that seem particularly relevant to FOSS; not so much "research 
about FOSS," but more like "research that, if FOSS practitioners were 
aware of it, would keep them from reinventing so many wheels." You may 
see more of that sort of thing creep into answers I give to other people 
asking questions on this list -- so please, please ask questions about 
FOSS culture/learning/etc on this list and give me a chance to try 
flexing those new muscles. :) (I'm particularly curious about questions 
folks on the FOSS/industry side might have about why or how something 
they do works or doesn't work, or whether there's anything in the 
literature about how it might be improved.)

I'm also taking a class on R (the open source statistical programming 
language) to fulfill my statistics requirement and looking at my digital 
infrastructure for doing scholarly work (LaTeX and Zotero and some other 
stuff), and some classmates have asked for help forming an open hardware 
hacking group on campus, but these are definitely more side things that 
take back seats to the supposed "laserlike focus" I'm (hypothetically) 
developing on my dissertation-to-be.

I still don't know what that dissertation will be, but I'm continuing to 
walk towards a convergence I don't see or feel, but trust will come. 
Radical realtime transparency and the idea of radically transparent 
research/academia are still developing themes that seem to be 
consistent, and I've confirmed my affinity for small-scale qualitative 
research on faculty (as opposed to large-scale quantitative research on 
students, say). I'm still frustrated by the phrase "the open source way" 
not being backed up by anything other than anecdotes. What the heck does 
that mean? I want to make sure that, when we talk about "teaching open 
source," we're not just waving our hands around excitedly about shiny 
stuff -- so I'm sidestepping to look at how other groups in other areas 
have built deep, rich, enduring understandings and transformations, 
because the approach of getting frustrated and burnt-out banging my head 
against *just* the TOS wall seems counterproductive. Mmm, learning.

I will be at FIE in October. Other than that and my college reunion, I'm 
going to be a surprisingly stationary Mel this fall (conferences are 
expensive!) partially in preparation for my semester at Ohio State in 
the spring, where I'll be doing a deep-dive into deconstructivist 
feminist qualitative research methods (I'll let y'all know when I can 
explain what the heck those are). If you know anyone or anything cool in 
the FOSS/hacking/making and/or STEM edu spheres in the Columbus area, 
let me know. And if anyone finds themselves in the Indianapolis or 
Chicago area this year, I'd love to hang out.

What is everyone else up to?

-- 
Mel Chua
mel at purdue.edu
PhD student, Open Source & Education focus
Purdue University, Dept. of Engineering Education