[Osdc-edu-authors] ARTICLE READY: What percentage of time should students expect to spend "on-task"?

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 too 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! But first... they had to learn 
HTML. No problem. Wait - but first... to check out the 
webpage's HTML, they needed to learn git. But first... 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 is 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 you think a new contributor should 
expect to spend "working on tasks" compared to other activities in their 
first open source project?