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

[Sebastian Benthall]

>
> 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?
>

Thanks for the encouragement :)

I'm very happy with the course so far, though it is just beginning.

I guess what's surprised me most is the energy and resilience of the
students even as I fumble basic aspects of instruction :)  For some of the
students, learning Git is a hard thing to be thrown into in the first lab
section.  But the students I've seen struggling with it have all worked *really
hard*, often in off hours, to get up to speed.  Maybe because turning in
the assignments mandates they need to learn it, or maybe because they know
it's a useful skill that they've always meant to learn anyway and this is
their chance.

A lot of their students are super motivated by their project work.  I can't
wait to get a class discussion going where people share their experiences,
though I'm not sure how to get it going.


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

Syllabus is here:
http://courses.ischool.berkeley.edu/i290m-ocpp/site/syllabus.html

Probably the stuff that will be most surprising to this list is that
material that Thomas, the post-doc I'm co-teaching with, has added to the
list.

Thomas comes from a management science background, and has taken an
interest in open source communities but from the perspective of somebody
doing community metrics, modeling them as complex systems.  He's
funny--ideologically "gets it", definitely wants to support FOSS in his
research, but never participated in a community of practice around.

So we wind up being a great team.  Thomas gives insights from 10,000 feet
up; I get down into the details of how to write a bug report.  In the
meantime, we learn from each other.  I'm looking to steer my own research
in Thomas' direction; he's been psyched to feel like he's becoming more a
part of the phenomenon he's studied from afar.


> 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:
>
>>
Oh, neat.  Yeah, definitely didn't have any sense of a framework for these
assignments.  I'll definitely see what I can draw from SAID moving forward.


> 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. :)
>

Great!  In general I'm still happy about this decision so far, in spite of
and in some ways because of the hangups.

For example: first lab had a "simple" task of having everybody add
themselves to the class roster:

https://github.com/sbenthall/i290m-ocpp-site/blob/master/content/pages/roster.md

Quickly, we discovered the harsh truth about merge conflicts.  Teachable
moment!



> 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).
>

Yeah, this is the high-risk part of the class in my eyes. Thankfully, we
have a lot of otherwise unallocated lab time for IRC meetings about this.

Actually, as we get closer to it, I'd be interested in getting more
feedback from this community about what kinds of results would be valuable
to it.  Is there a way to steer this collaborative field report in a way
that makes it more interesting to people interested in open source in
education?
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