#teachingopensource Meeting

Meeting started by mchua at 12:34:02 UTC (full logs).

Meeting summary

  1. What we're doing today (mchua, 12:35:50)
    1. Today is teaching day! (mchua, 12:35:58)
    2. Part 1: Getting involved & plugging in - how to continue *your* own growth in FOSS - Events (mchua, 12:36:14)
    3. Part 2: Teaching Open Source - curriculum - community - schedule - grading (mchua, 12:36:39)
    4. Part 3: Plans for your courses (mchua, 12:36:45)
    5. We're going to start by looking at the list of things we said we wanted to cover this week on Monday, to make sure we hit them all. (mchua, 12:37:07)
    6. http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/POSSE_RIT#Things_we_want_to_accomplish_this_week (mchua, 12:37:11)
    7. http://typewith.me/posse-rit (mchua, 12:39:09)

  2. Getting involved as a professor (mchua, 12:43:08)
    1. Chris believes that profs will have a better time getting their students involved if they themselves are involved with the community. (mchua, 12:44:35)
    2. Participation in a few FOSS events in person can be very beneficial in this regard - they're huge accelerators for involvement. (mchua, 12:44:38)
    3. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon (ganderson, 12:44:38)
    4. In Fedora, we get together 4x/year, in different parts of the world - so North America gets it once per year, and this is called FUDCon (Fedora Users and Developers Conference) (mchua, 12:44:51)
    5. The event this Saturday, FOSSCon, is in its first run this year, and is a local event, but another good opportunity to meet folks (mchua, 12:45:53)
    6. we also invite folks to cross the pond this fall for FSOSS (mchua, 12:46:12)
    7. http://fsoss.senecac.on.ca/2010/ (mchua, 12:46:15)
    8. http://gryphonscratches.blogspot.com/2010/06/posse-fossrit-list.html (ritsteve, 12:47:50)
    9. http://gryphonscratches.blogspot.com/2010/06/posse-fossrit-list.html (mchua, 12:48:06)
    10. Steve is going through the link above discussing what's happened at FOSS@RIT so far. (mchua, 12:48:26)
    11. Steve is discussing how FOSS work from the classroom has branched into independent studies and 501c3 co-ops (ganderson, 12:51:34)
    12. The Sugar class started as a seminar; students continued their work as co-ops (unpaid) if they wanted to, and were around to mentor students when the next round of the seminar was taught. (mchua, 12:53:22)
    13. Eventually, some of those projects got picked up as sponsored research projects; this is a way of getting FOSS work funded through existing mechanisms for undergrad research on campus. (mchua, 12:53:50)
    14. http://hfoss.org (ctyler, 12:55:59)
    15. The Sugar class at RIT is designed as an HFOSS course - humanitarian FOSS, FOSS projects that are code that benefit humanity (disaster management, etc) group (mchua, 12:56:08)
    16. http://hfoss.org (mchua, 12:56:22)
    17. http://code.google.com/soc/ (ctyler, 12:56:34)
    18. Summer of Code - students can get paid by Google to work on an open source project for the summer. (mchua, 12:56:54)
    19. There are other similar programs - not just for code work, not just run by Google (mchua, 12:57:48)
    20. For instance, Fedora Summer Coding (mchua, 12:58:01)
    21. http://iquaid.org/2010/06/07/summer-rolling-in-fedora-summer-coding/ (mchua, 12:58:05)
    22. One of the things HFOSS is working on is a certificate program for students who do good portfolio work in an HFOSS project... this is a work in progress (very, very draft-ish) - help is welcome, join the HFOSS list and say hello. (mchua, 13:02:22)
    23. FOSS@RIT folks have gone off to present at Barcamps, etc (mchua, 13:03:03)

  3. Steps to getting involved in FOSS (mchua, 13:10:44)
    1. Find out what the community's about, and how they work - lurk! (mchua, 13:10:54)
    2. Then *do* something. FOSS is a do-ocracy - those who do, decide. (mchua, 13:11:19)

  4. Types of events (mchua, 13:13:18)
    1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BarCamp (mchua, 13:13:21)
    2. Rochester and RIT have had BarCamps before - come check 'em out! (mchua, 13:13:51)
    3. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJZQJRpC2_0 (mchua, 13:16:36)
    4. That's a FUDCon video - we're watching it now. (mchua, 13:16:43)
    5. Mel notes that barcamps, fudcons, these sorts of little conferences, etc - are great first presentation opportunities for students. (mchua, 13:17:06)
    6. FOSS@RIT projects have presented at barcamps and unconferences and participated in hackfests in Rochester, New York City and Boston are hoping to head to one in Albany (ritsteve, 13:20:35)
    7. Hackfests - getting people together to sprint on Making A Thing! (mchua, 13:21:28)
    8. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FAD (mchua, 13:21:34)
    9. Another event like FAD with respect to coding is the Ubuntu Papercuts project https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PaperCut (ganderson, 13:22:08)
    10. also like FUDCon, there is Ubuntu Developer Summit (for us Ubuntu folk ;)) http://summit.ubuntu.com/ (ganderson, 13:23:47)
    11. foss@rit possibly hosting hackathon here to work on civx stuff with nyscio end of july, early august (ritsteve, 13:24:00)
    12. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing_FAD_2010#Photos (mchua, 13:24:11)
    13. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Events_FAD_2010 (mchua, 13:24:31)

  5. Teaching-specific topics (mchua, 13:32:04)
    1. What to do when someone comes in and closes your students' ticket for them? (mchua, 13:32:09)
    2. What to do when your student can't move forward because someone else is blocking their work? (mchua, 13:32:13)
    3. If your student submits work but a maintainer won't push it, or someone's unresponsive, or people disagree, etc - and they just can't go any further, what do they do? (mchua, 13:33:18)
    4. Profs need to be coaches - teach their students how to not get stuck. (mchua, 13:34:35)
    5. at RIT, when we have a project-based course, we can have issues where things "fall apart". The best way to grade this process is to grade based on the effort put forth into the classroom, not necessarily the end result. (ganderson, 13:39:39)
    6. It's very strange to, as a student, come into a class and have a prof tell you "finishing the project is not the goal." (What is, then?) (mchua, 13:40:27)
    7. A lot of FOSS is about starting something well *and* leaving something well. (mchua, 13:40:57)
    8. One of the more important aspects of grading this type of course is how well-documented it is, and how immersed the individual students got into the OSS community (ganderson, 13:41:15)
    9. Either students have to get involved in someone else's project, or build community around their project. (mchua, 13:42:39)
    10. The better a student documents their project-based work in a course can allow the OSS community to easily pick up the project, even if the student can't finish it (ganderson, 13:43:06)
    11. Chris: another question - where do you position such a course in your program? When are students ready for such a course, and where is your curriculum flexible enough to allow it? (mchua, 13:44:28)
    12. Seneca has a very locked-down core curriculum; we have a FOSS participation high-level elective. (mchua, 13:45:39)
    13. However, fardad has recently added TOS principles to his intro C++ class - he doesn't get them into a FOSS community, but makes them use the tools while they learn the material (turn homework in with version control, wiki for course website, etc) as a "pre-TOS class" (mchua, 13:46:28)
    14. RIT tends to start having group projects 3rd quarter freshman year (early, compared to most) (mchua, 13:49:21)
    15. , depends which program as well. (ritsteve, 13:49:55)
    16. What to do when your student blocks others? If you're really in a FOSS context, community people will start to complain, give feedback. (mchua, 13:56:49)
    17. One idea is peer review, but students are often hesitant to criticize each other. (mchua, 14:00:48)
    18. but that's why we have "class participation and creativity" *wave hands* as 10% of our grade or something. (mchua, 14:01:31)
    19. Another suggestion was having a class participation grade so that, if some students fail to perform in their group, the class participation part of their grade will reflect it (ganderson, 14:02:13)
    20. last week, vertical integration was another suggestion - have students from upper classes come back and evaluate/work-with/mentor students from younger classes, specifically pair courses with each other (mchua, 14:02:51)
    21. even have more advanced classes writing spec / managing development / etc for earlier classes (mchua, 14:03:04)
    22. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand-up_meeting (ganderson, 14:03:19)
    23. < kis> Has anybody used CATME (www.catme.org)? That's an online tool for evaluating contributions to team work. (mchua, 14:03:57)
    24. Vertical integration - if it works, it's great - it can also FAIL HORRIBLY (and be a huge workload for the prof) (mchua, 14:07:19)
    25. Student blogs are very, very useful for figuring out what your students are thinking - that you don't necessarily hear yet. (mchua, 14:19:25)
    26. Students working in FOSS communities produce *tons* of material that's a huge firehose for instructors to keep track of... but you don't have to read/grade everything! be strategic! (mchua, 14:20:15)
    27. It's a paradigm shift - "don't plagiarize, do your own work, know everything there is to know about a subject" - this all gets turned around (mchua, 14:24:40)
    28. It's ok to use the code of others, ask questions, you can't *possibly* know everything because the project is so big (mchua, 14:24:58)
    29. a list of paradigms/habits that one needs to address/abandon in the open source environment would be useful as an introductory tool. (Dave_S, 14:26:30)
    30. mchua (Dave_S, 14:31:04)
    31. It's not plagiarizing if you use the information in accordance with the license. (mchua, 14:32:24)
    32. think of it this way... students need to learn how to properly cite their sources, andthis *forces* them to do it, puts them right up against the notion that people are writing this material *right now* that they are using, and that their work will *also* perhaps get remixed, and that's part of why we build that web of citations, as opposed to "bleh, I guess I'll have to figure out whether I type 'Mark Twain' or 'Twain, Mark' or (mchua, 14:32:28)
    33. : Setting up a format for reports, documentaion, design docs, requirements docs or whatever that they can just edit fixes most of these issues (ritsteve, 14:34:27)

  6. Licensing (ctyler, 15:11:47)
    1. It's important - look at the OSI (open source initiative) for code licenses, Creative Commons (CC) for content. (ctyler, 15:12:09)

  7. Plans for the next school year (ctyler, 15:12:39)
    1. last week's attendees plan (ctyler, 15:12:49)
    2. http://piratepad.net/ep/pad/view/posse-friday/latest (posse_projector, 15:20:40)
    3. Those are last week's posse participants plan (hey, kis_afk and pfroehlich and others - my laptop has been fussing with the projector, so if you want to say anything about your plans/if your thinking has changed in the meantime, now is good :) (posse_projector, 15:21:13)
    4. We'll be doing the same thing here at.... (posse_projector, 15:21:38)
    5. http://typewith.me/posse-rit (posse_projector, 15:21:46)
    6. http://typewith.me/ep/pad/view/posse-rit/latest (mchua, 16:18:44)

  8. Wrapping up (mchua, 16:18:50)
    1. Everyone's got a pretty good idea on where to go next (mchua, 16:18:59)
    2. Please subscribe to the TOS list if you want to continue this conversation (mchua, 16:19:36)
    3. http://teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos (mchua, 16:19:40)
    4. And..... that's all, folks! (mchua, 16:19:47)
    5. http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/TeachingOpenSource_Mailing_List (ctyler, 16:20:28)


Meeting ended at 17:16:59 UTC (full logs).

Action items

  1. (none)


People present (lines said)

  1. mchua (194)
  2. Dave_S (76)
  3. ganderson (57)
  4. JonathanD (32)
  5. ritsteve (22)
  6. ctyler (18)
  7. kis (15)
  8. quaid (12)
  9. Sparks (12)
  10. pfroehlich (11)
  11. posse_projector (7)
  12. zodbot (6)
  13. gary_at_RIT (6)
  14. Andrea_H (5)
  15. skuhaneck (5)
  16. paulproteus (1)
  17. willhoft (0)


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