[Osdc-edu-authors] Possible ideas

[Matthew Jadud]

Hi all,

It might sound like a downer series suggestion, but one that's been
kicking around in my head since the POSSE last summer is a
presentation or set of articles exploring the lives/pressures under
which college faculty operate today. If open communities are really
keen on supporting faculty in introducing students to community-driven
open projects, I feel there should be some understanding as to what
faculty must demonstrate to their institutions regarding teaching,
research, and service.

1. [PUBLISHING] The mantra is "publish or perish." This has been
written about lately on the ACM blog and elsewhere[1], and I'd like to
recast some of it in terms of how one should be thinking when
approaching a faculty member at a college. Two (personal) examples:
does blogging for opensource.com "count" for anything for me as a
professional academic? Does writing and releasing a CC-licensed text
(even if I'm using it with my students in my classroom) "count" as a
book?

2. [TEACHING] I want to talk to humph/ctyler more about this before I
write it, but it would follow up a bit on the "independent study"
article I wrote. Whether we like it or not, academics work in 14-week
chunks, and are expected to demonstrate learning
semester-after-semester like clockwork. They've made it work, but
they're in a large space, and it took a long time to get there. What
do you do in a 3-to-5-person department? We need to present the value
proposition in terms of enrollment and placement into jobs/grad
school, not "contributing to the commons is good."

3. [RESEARCH] There are plenty of academic projects that are "open,"
but what they are is a research group's code placed under the GPL.
"Open" means one thing to people working in the bazaar, and another to
a member of the faculty who is trying to land that next grant.
Further, how does involving community (or trying to do research that
crosses into a community) further your research? Why should the
researcher care/make the effort?

4. [SERVICE] Local community vs. global community. Faculty don't win
points with the institution because they write documentation or commit
patches. If their students do great things, that might be good... but
faculty earn points for serving on committees, or leading local
workshops, etc. I don't mean to set up a "vs" here, because that's not
how I want to cast it.

All of these sound negative. I don't want to develop them that way, by
any stretch. Greg started to explore these ideas in [2], as there
clearly does exist a critical tension between introducing students to
a community of practice and... the local community of practice that
they're paying to be a part of. I don't claim to have any answers, but
I want to try and exploring some of these themes in a
reflective/critical way that get people thinking and debating. (Or,
perhaps this has already been explored elsewhere?)

Those are all half-finished thoughts, but they represent a possible
arc for a series of posts. I'll definitely want to be kicking them
around here, and doing more research/having conversations with others
elsewhere.

Feedback welcome,
Matt

[1] http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2009/12/52820-cs-woes-deadline-driven-research-academic-inequality/fulltext
[2] http://opensource.com/education/10/2/open-source-dangerous-computing-education