[Osdc-edu-authors] POSSE article draft - maybe 85% ready

Thu Aug 19 13:32:09 UTC 2010

Thanks for doing this, Colby!

Mel, is this ready to go live?

thanks,
MAB

----- Original Message -----
From: "Colby Hoke" <choke at redhat.com>
To: "Mary Bitter" <mbitter at redhat.com>
Cc: "Mel Chua" <mel at redhat.com>, "OSDC Education authors" <osdc-edu-authors at redhat.com>
Sent: Tuesday, August 17, 2010 3:54:53 PM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern
Subject: Re: [Osdc-edu-authors] POSSE article draft - maybe 85% ready

  On 8/17/10 2:08 PM, Mary Bitter wrote:
> Thanks for the article update, Mel!
>
> If you are interested in giving input / feedback to Mel, please have 
> it to her by Wednesday, 8/18 by 4p EST.  I'd love to get this posted 
> no later than Friday.
>
> Colby, can you get us a screenshot of the video please?
>
> thanks everyone.
> Mary Ann
>
> Mel Chua wrote:
>> I've got my draft up at 
>> http://openetherpad.org/osdc-edu-posse-article so it's easier to 
>> edit, but the full (current) text is below. I'm not entirely happy 
>> with the ending and want to figure out how to include the youtube 
>> video of ctyler and myself, and there's no image (screengrab from 
>> video?) but otherwise I think it's close to being done.
>>
>> Thoughts?
>>
>> --Mel
>>
>> --------
>>
>> One of the challenges of working in the space between academia and 
>> open source communities is translating between the cultural and 
>> timescale differences between the two spaces. One approach to 
>> bridging the gap is to empower people already in the academic space - 
>> professors - to navigate the FOSS world and bring that knowledge back 
>> to the institutions they come from. The weeklong <a 
>> href="http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/POSSE">Professors' Open 
>> Source Summer Experience (POSSE) workshop</a>, sponsored by Red Hat, 
>> aims to do just that. Professors spend a week immersed in a FOSS 
>> project as new contributors, learning the tools and practices (IRC, 
>> version control, ticket tracking, patch reviews, etc) of that 
>> particular community as one example of a working FOSS ecosystem 
>> (participants may choose to participate in other open source projects 
>> after the week is over).
>>
>> As a POSSE instructor, one of my favorite things about the week is 
>> that you learn more than you teach; as professors discover the 
>> cultural norms of the open source community, they help experienced 
>> FOSS contributors look at assumptions that we tend to take for 
>> granted. When tentured professors of computer science struggle to get 
>> IRC clients up and running, you start revising your assumption that 
>> publishing a help channel is sufficient for all newcomers. You 
>> remember that schools sometimes block ports, and that lab machines 
>> may not allow you to, say, recompile your kernel.
>>
>> This summer's POSSEs were hosted by Worcester State College in 
>> Worcester, MA and Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) in 
>> Rochester, NY, with a third 2010 POSSE slated to run at the Cape 
>> Peninsula University of Technology in Cape Town, South Africa, this 
>> October. Attendees included faculty members from software engineering 
>> and computer science, but also technical writing and journalism, and 
>> student FOSS developers, IT staff, and grad students also came by. 
>> Each POSSE had a pair of instructors and a tech guru, the latter 
>> being responsible for leading technical deep-dives into the community 
>> and showing attendees what their work in FOSS looked like on a daily 
>> basis.
>>
>> Red Hat engineer <a href="http://lewk.org/blog/POSSE-RIT";>Luke 
>> Macken</a>, an experienced Python hacker within the Fedora community, 
>> served as the tech guru for his alma mater, RIT. "Being an alumni, I 
>> was excited by the opportunity to be able to go back [to RIT] and 
>> teach some of the people that taught me. Going into it, I really had 
>> no idea what to expect. All I knew is that I was going to help lead 
>> the 'deep dive' section of the course, where I would teach professors 
>> how to dive in head first and get productively lost in a strange 
>> codebase... The next day both of the patches that we sent upstream 
>> were applied by [Executive Director of Sugar Labs] Walter Bender... 
>> This is not something that can be accomplished with a set of 
>> powerpoint slides." <a 
>> href="https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Pbrobinson";>Peter 
>> Robinson</a> of NTT Europe Online, a Fedora packager and a member of 
>> the <a href="http://sugaronastick.org";>Sugar on a Stick</a> release 
>> team, served as the tech guru for POSSE Worcester State.
>>
>> As professors shared their stories from the academic world, the POSSE 
>> staff began to learn what makes it so difficult to integrate the open 
>> source way of doing things into a school's curriculum. "I come from a 
>> tradition of the isolated programmer who does it all by himself and 
>> has to be  independently self-sufficient," explained RIT professor Al 
>> Biles. "When I got to RIT in 1980 and was thrown into UNIX for the 
>> first time, the resident UNIX guru (a fellow faculty member) answered 
>> my first question about how to do something with, “it’s in the UNIX 
>> programmers manual; look it up.” I thought he was kidding; he wasn’t. 
>> This is a sea change for me," continued Biles. "I’ll have to get over 
>> my natural reticence and put myself out there with the  realization 
>> that not already knowing how to do something is okay but not asking 
>> for help is not."
>>
>> Perspectives began to shift on both sides. "I never thought I’d ever 
>> consider this approach to computing," blogged technical writing 
>> professor <a 
>> href="http://chronicgadgetosis.wordpress.com/2010/06/16/posse-day-two-oy/">Dave 
>> Shein</a>. "It’s been just too daunting.  Too large a knowledge base 
>> to learn, too frustrating to just hack around in... I felt like I was 
>> working in an utter vacuum.  When I was stuck, I was really stuck. I 
>> had no one to ask for help, or to answer my questions. So this is 
>> different. I still do not like the feeling of being stuck, but that 
>> is ameliorated somewhat by the less unpleasant feeling of going to 
>> ask for help... access to expertise, to help, makes me think -- for 
>> the first time -- that I could actually get into working with 
>> software 'under the hood.'"
>>
>> Some professors, like Kristina Striegnitz from Union College, jumped 
>> into action immediately, recruiting her summer student Kirk Winans to 
>> change his project proposal and work within the Sugar Labs community. 
>> Others have longer-term plans. "I plan on introducing an elective 
>> upper level course to teach what we learned in this workshop," noted 
>> Fitchburg State professor Nadimpalli Mahadev. "I also wish to 
>> introduce in a couple of years open source development at a freshman 
>> level at least to encourage the geeks who are hacking-hungry." In a 
>> world where curriculum revisions can be measured in decades and 
>> courses are planned multiple semesters in advance and used for years 
>> after their creation, the rapid release cycles of open source 
>> projects can be a challenge to keep up with, but these professors and 
>> a community of like-minded faculty at http://teachingopensource.org 
>> continue to find ways to translate between the two domains.
>>
>> Planning for Summer 2011 POSSEs is already underway; contact 
>> posse at teachingopensource.org if you're interested in having a POSSE 
>> at your institution or alma mater or centered around the open source 
>> project you're involved with. Prior POSSEs have focused on Fedora, 
>> Mozilla, and Sugar Labs, but for our third summer we are looking for 
>> projects interested in getting new contributors into technical 
>> writing, design, translation, and other subjects that fall outside 
>> the usual "computer science and software engineering" focus often 
>> attributed to open source projects. POSSE and Teaching Open Source 
>> will have a presence at the upcoming <a 
>> href="http://fie-conference.org/fie2010/">Frontiers in Education</a> 
>> and <a href="http://www.sigcse.org/sigcse2011/">SIGCSE</a> academic 
>> conferences, and we hang out in the #teachingopensource channel on 
>> irc.freenode.net for those with questions.
>>
>>
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>
>
I made an image, now known as EDUCATION_posse.png

If that's good enough, then you're all set! (I did it quickly, don't hate.)

-- 
Colby Alexander Hoke

People + Brand: PRODUCER
Red Hat || 1801 Varsity Drive || Raleigh, NC

choke at redhat.com
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