[Osdc-edu-authors] DRAFT: Teaching Open Source has a POSSE

[Mel Chua]

Assorted notes, etc. written in more or less article format with inline 
hyperlinks for nearly everything, and spaces for photographs that 
Sebastian Dziallas (or anyone else) took during the event.

I'm not tied to the title, but can't think of a better one.

Comments/thoughts, especially from others on this list who were there 
that weekend?

---
Title: Teaching Open Source has a POSSE

Graphic idea: spoof on the "<X> has a POSSE" style graphic, possibly 
using the new POSSE owl?

<em>microphone static crackles</em>

Hi, everyone -- Mel Chua here, reporting live and exhausted from a hotel 
rooom in Portland, Oregon. I'm recovering from <a 
href="http://communityleadershipteam.org/posse">POSSE</a>, the 
Professors' Open Source Summer Experience, where we just kicked off our 
<a href="http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/POSSE_2011_cohort">our 
2011 cohort of professors</a> over in Raleigh, North Carolina. Each of 
the faculty members here has committed to getting the students in at 
least one of their courses involved in open source community 
contribution during this coming school year, and they're off and running 
now after a weekend of intense cultural immersion. Let's recap the high 
points of POSSE Basics 2011, shall we?

*going-back-in-time sound effect, hazy visual shimmers*

<GROUP PICTURE>

First order of business: learning to talk. Where do the smartest people 
in the open source world hang out, and how can your 18-year-old students 
rub elbows with them on a level playing field? The current answer is to 
<a 
href="http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/IRC_and_wiki_introduction_exercise">plunge 
into IRC</a>, which gave us a rich and chaotic introduction to the 
dynamics of remote communication. When Bryan Behrenshausen and a team 
from <a href="http://opensource.com">opensource.com</a> intermittently 
pulled professors out for mini-interviews, leaving their collaborators 
momentarily baffled until they looked up and realized their colleague 
was no longer at their desk, we saw the need to explicitly signal your 
status online; when questions to one's partner were answered by random 
channel passers-by, we saw the power of "open by default" in a public 
room. Our group was fortunate to have <a 
href="http://fedoraproject.org">Fedora</a> Project Leader <a 
href="http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Jsmith">Jared Smith</a> and <a 
href="http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Design">Design Team</a> lead <a 
href="http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Duffy">Mo Duffy</a> present to 
model good open source online presence -- how to ask questions, how to 
find answers, how to navigate a swarm of messages and find the signals 
threading through the noise.

<PHOTO OF FOLKS AT THEIR COMPUTERS>

POSSE is less a class and more an individual coaching session that 
happens in the same room as 15 other people learning the same thing, so 
the rest of the day was filled with hacking and conversations of all 
sorts. When <a 
href="http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/POSSE_2011_cohort#Elinor_Madigan">Elinor 
Madigan</a> discovered that <a href="http://pygame.org">PyGame<a/> 
development had slowed dramatically with the library's maturity, she 
started rummaging through development tutorials to see if her students 
could make <em>learning</em> PyGame easier for others. <a 
href="http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/POSSE_2011_cohort#Allen_White">Allen 
White</a> and <a 
href="http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/POSSE_2011_cohort#Mihaela_Sabin">Mihaela 
Sabin</a>, professors from very different schools (an Oklahoma 
university devoted to Native American students and an urban New England 
commuter college with an undergraduate student body in their 
mid-twenties), found common ground in their desire to give students the 
confidence that they could "make it" in the tech industry. We 
brainstormed ways to do this; could a consultant come in and run a small 
version of their corporate training workshop, so students would clearly 
see the level they would be expected to operate at once they graduated 
-- and that it was achievable? After a popsicle break to compensate for 
the scorching Raleigh July, <a 
href="http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/POSSE_2011_cohort#Matt_Jadud">Matt 
Jadud</a> and <a 
href="http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/POSSE_2011_cohort#Karl_Wurst">Karl 
Wurst</a> discussed ways to incorporate off-campus events into their 
freshman seminars; a keysigning in Boston inspired the reading 
assignment of <em>Little Brother</em>, and a farmers' market turned into 
a public speaking practice venue where students could act out public 
domain texts.

<PHOTOS OF RELEASE CYCLE GROUPS>

Sunday morning kicked off with twin sessions on social signalling; how 
can you diagnose whether a project is good for a certain type of course 
participation, and what flags do community members use  to determine 
whether a new contributor (for instance, a professor or their student) 
is worth their time to teach? The short versions are that faculty should 
look for a well-connected core group of 3-15 people whose friendly 
conversations can be easily overheard, and project leaders are looking 
for "persistent presence," both of which can be displayed in a variety 
of ways. We'll write more about both in future opensource.com/education 
articles, so stay tuned.

What happened next surprised me; the faculty took over and started to 
weave together a disciplinary commons on teaching open source. These are 
a pattern within academia for transferring teaching practices among 
practitioners and across institutional lines, a sort of BitTorrent for 
the human action of teaching in certain ways, as opposed to digital 
data. I watched as a monthly blogging circle and discussion, a common 
simple instrument for pre-and-post assessments of student confidence 
across the broad range of classes and institution types present, and 
ways to work with data privacy laws and institutional research approval 
took shape.

<PHOTO OF FEEDBACK SESSION>

This confirmed something we've long known; professors already know how 
to collaborate. It's just that the culture and politics and legalese of 
academia are such that the "transparent by default" behaviors open 
source software communities recognize as "collaboration" are 
extraordinarily difficult to gather critical mass for. To that end, the 
faculty asked if we could run unconferences for Teaching Open Source at 
POSSE and perhaps events beyond, where more collisions between ideas 
could occur. Next summer's POSSE workshop is likely to feature an 
unconference midway through as a direct response to that; this was the 
first time we'd mixed POSSE veterans (5) amongst the cohort newcomers 
(11), and an unconference would take direct advantage of that experience 
diversity.

The goodbyes came too soon; we gave each professor a POSSE video camera 
for capturing stories from their class, and amidst a haze of taxis, 
hugs, and the clatter of re-stacking chairs, everyone departed to the 
institutions from whence they came. (With the exception of a few 
professors who zoomed off to dinner to continue curricular discussions 
over Asian fusion food.)

<PHOTO OF KARL WITH CAMERA>

This is only the beginning, though. The point of the weekend was for 
everyone to get to know each other and begin to see collaboration 
threads that might emerge; it's the kickoff of a conversation that will 
last throughout the whole upcoming school year. Each professor has been 
assigned a coach from the open source community, and we'll be following 
and working with their individual classes through twice-monthly coaching 
sessions, so if you want to hear more stories from the trenches as we go 
along, choose your format; you can either read the <a 
href="http://communityleadershipteam.org/posse/blog">POSSE blog</a>, 
follow <a href="http://identi.ca/posseowl">@posseowl</a> on <a 
href="http://identi.ca/posseowl">identi.ca</a> or <a 
href="http://twitter.com/posseowl">twitter</a>, or find us on IRC in 
#teachingopensource on Freenode <WEBCHAT LINK GOES HERE>. (Or all of the 
above!)

 From Portland, Oregon, this is Mel Chua signing off. More stories 
coming from the trenches in the months to follow, now that <a 
href="http://teachingopensource.org">Teaching Open Source</a>... 
<em><dramatic pause></em> ...has a POSSE.