[Osdc-edu-authors] ARTICLE READY: What percentage of time should students expect to spend "on-task"?
Mel Chua
mel at redhat.com
Mon Mar 28 21:05:42 UTC 2011
Another POSSCON talk, this one by David Nalley. It could use a better
title. Again, please edit and pick a header image and push without
blocking on me, I'm unlikely to loop back around to this anytime soon...
http://opensource.com/education/authors-schedule has been updated, btw. Woo!
--Mel
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What percentage of time should students expect to spend "on-task"?
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<a href="http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Ke4qqq">David Nalley</a> was
an unusual <a href="http://posscon.org">POSSCON</a> education track
speaker. "I'm not an educator," he told the audience at the outset. "I'm
a recovering sysadmin." David has spent years volunteering for FOSS
communities, and has seen his share of trainwrecks when students have
ventured in with expectations that community members will guide them the
same way their professors do.
"Open source communities are <em>too</em> helpful," Nalley said,
pointing out the tendency for open source communities to support
individuals in their pursuit of a goal, regardless of how wise that end
goal might be. "If a student says 'I want to shoot myself in the foot!'
the community is likely to say 'Ok! We'll help you aim!'" Newcomers have
a hard time discerning how much work and skill a project will take, and
how big an impact it's likely to have on the users of their code, and
helping them constrain themselves to workable problems is particularly
important within the tight constraints of a semester schedule.
<a
href="http://projects.csail.mit.edu/gsb/old-archive/gsb-archive/gsb2000-02-11.html">Yak
shaving</a> is also a problem. Nalley described a group who wanted to
fix a project's webpage. Great! <em>But first...</em> they had to learn
HTML. No problem. Wait - <em>but first...</em> to check out the
webpage's HTML, they needed to learn git. <em>But first...</em> to
understand git, they had to learn about version control systems... and
so on down a long chain of material seemingly unrelated to their
original task. With all that startup cost, students often wonder when
they're going to "get around to real work."
According to Nalley, the key to avoiding the majority of pitfalls is
expectation-setting. Nalley referenced a guide on <a
href="http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_be_a_successful_contributor">how
to become a successful contributor</a>, which focuses almost entirely
about communication and culture rather than "technical skill." Students
should be told that learning tools and practices and communicating with
a project community <em>is</em> real work - as it is in the "real
world." "Expect that communication will take 50% or more of your time,"
he instructed the audience, "and the actual task you're trying to do
will take 33-50%."
Afterwards, <a href="http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/User:Walter">Walter
Bender</a> told me he'd thought these figures were optimistic for
seasoned FOSS contributors - after a year or so, you might get somewhere
between 30-50%. A newcomer, Bender predicted, would be ambitious to aim
for 10%.
What percentage of time do <em>you</em> think a new contributor should
expect to spend "working on tasks" compared to other activities in their
first open source project?
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