[Osdc-edu-authors] Summer 2010 POSSEs article draft

[Mel Chua]

I promised I'd get a draft out to the list today, so here it is. And by "draft" I mean "I've marked the missing parts, and know this article is far from being ready to post, but think it's ready for feedback on general structure/direction, at the very least." It's mostly a recap with some quotes from blog posts made during the POSSE weeks, and I don't think it's quite found its focus yet.

Feedback? Where would you folks like to see this go?

--Mel

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* professors are interested in getting their students involved in FOSS because <list of advantages!>
* FOSS and academic culture very different, 

"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 community is the polar opposite.  If you don’t know how to do something, you’re supposed to ask, not try to look it up.  This is a sea change for me.  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..."

* This is where POSSE comes in, a one week bootcamp for professors looking to get their students involved as contributors to FOSS projects
* This summer: POSSE WorcesterWorcester was a CS POSSE; RIT was an inter-disciplinary POSSE, with technical writing, journalism, and publishing professors in attendance in addition to engineering/CS faculty.
* Thoughts so far:

"I never thought I’d ever consider this approach to computing," <a href="http://chronicgadgetosis.wordpress.com/2010/06/16/posse-day-two-oy/">blogged Dave Shein</a>, who taught the <a href="http://sugarlabs.org">Sugar Activity</a> developent course at <http://rit.edu">Rochester Institute of Technology</a> last spring. "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.'"

This summer's POSSEs were taught by Walter Bender (Sugar Labs), Mel Chua (Red Hat), and Chris Tyler (Seneca College). 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.

<transition into professor quotes and stories>

"...I got much more excited about integrating some teaching about open source in to my classes and getting students involved in open source projects," wrote Kristina Striegnitz from Union College. "But I got particularly excited about Sugar. In fact, I got so excited that I immediately recruited one of my summer students – Kirk Winans – to slightly change his project proposal and work within Sugar."

"For my part, I plan on introducing an elective upper level course to teach what we learned in this workshop.  I also have a plan to either introduce open source development into our Software Engineering course, or introduce a sequel to the existing SE course to incorporate Open source development. 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," noted Fitchburg State professor Nadimpalli Mahadev.

<summary of results from past POSSEs goes here>

Other professors are pursuing grants to study the effectiveness of POSSE; if these grants are obtained, their funds would help to run additional workshops. The <a href="http://teachingopensource.org">Teaching Open Source</a> (TOS) community is aiming for a POSSE/TOS Birds of a Feather session at the annual <a href="http://www.sigcse.org/">SIGCSE</a> gathering, one of the largest in the world for postsecondary CS education.

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