[Osdc-edu-authors] Possible ideas

[Greg DeKoenigsberg]

On Tue, 23 Feb 2010, Matthew Jadud wrote:

> 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?

*Does* it count, or *should* it count?  Perhaps two different lines of 
inquiry -- but the *should* question is, I think, more interesting.

In the case of the CC text, here's the key question from my perspective: 
what's the difference between this and a real text?  Should they be 
regarded differently by academia?  Why?  Can't a compelling argument be 
made that, so long as the text itself performs an identical function, 
shouldn't licensing be completely up to the professor?

> 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."

I think this would be a *brilliant* article, because this is precisely the 
kind of discussion that we *need* to jumpstart.  Cross-pollination between 
this article on OSDC and the teachingopensource mailing list could be 
awesome.

> 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?

This goes right to the heart of how research works, doesn't it?  Is 
research better when it's competitive, or collaborative?  Are open 
licenses a useful tool in building more collaborative research models, or 
not?  Are more collaborative research models even desirable?  And who is 
eligible to do the collaborating?  Is a research project "tainted" if you 
have an interested non-academic who wanders into your project and becomes 
a contributor?  Is there value of extending the traditional research model 
to any bright 17-year-old in the world?  I can see a great article coming 
out of this.

> 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.

Is there a way to do both?  That's what HFOSS tries to do with some of 
their chapters.  Are they successful?

> 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

Any or all of these are great topics.

--g

--
Educational materials should be high-quality, collaborative, and free.
Visit http://opensource.com/education and join the conversation.