Hi all: As I mentioned in the recent meeting on IRC, I think The Open University *could* be a good place to run a POSSE. I've gotten in touch with one pal in computing (message copied below) to try to assess the interest level of the faculty.
I'm at the Knowledge Media Institute here as a Research Student. Obviously I'll need some serious institutional support to get anything going. Those who have contacts at OU should email me w/ their info :). To those who wonder if this has something to do with my research: the answer is yes; for example, here's the abstract of my latest draft prospectus: «This is a project about the social and technological contexts that support learning. It deals with questions about how to make technologies that adapt to users and that users can adapt to their needs. The work itself is a sort of dynamic anthropology, and is concerned with the range of issues that apply in real learning communities. The project's development goals include a new system for web-scale collaboration, and specialized tools to support computer-mediated interactions with mathematics. Mathematics and other special cases will be used to approach the main question: *how do learning communities work in practice?*» Here are some slides for a well-received talk I gave here recently on Crowdsourcing Education: http://metameso.org/~joe/docs/crowdsourcing-continued.pdf -- actually this version contains one extra slide -- when I was writing that slide today, it struck me that rather than trying to "crowdsource" PlanetMath (I'm on the board of directors) on a massively-multiple level, it would be really effective to run a semester-long class for 3rd or 4th year undergrad students in math or computing, and just give them the project "do something cool with PlanetMath". If there's anyone interested in working with me on *that*, I have lots of time and ideas :) Eventually perhaps entire undergrad degrees in math could be taught that way :) That's the scoop. Joe PS. I've hooked my 'group blog' http://hyperreal-enterprises.posterous.com/ into the TOS Planet. I wasn't able to refine it to just use a tag b/c Posterous doesn't have feeds for tags yet. Most of the content should be relatively closely related anyway. -------- Original Message -------- Subject: teaching open source Date: Mon, 29 Mar 2010 20:19:03 +0100 From: Joe Corneli <j.a.corn...@open.ac.uk> Hey, this is something I'm becoming interested in, and I'm thinking it might be a good fit at OU. "There are more professors than ever hoping to teach the open source development process to their students -- but working in the open source world can be a daunting proposition. Professors themselves have only a limited amount of time to learn about open source, and are often unsure about how, exactly, to get started. POSSE (Professors' Open Source Summer Experience) is designed for these professors." Do *you* think it's something that OU Computing folks would be interested in? (Interested enough that it might even be worth organizing a big event around this topic here or in London?) More info is here: http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/POSSE My own interest is rocketing because I'm thinking that the best way to get work done on PlanetMath.org (where I'm on the board of directors) would be to run a class for advanced undergrads in maths and computing where the class project is just "do something cool with PlanetMath". Joe PS. This is what a professor has to submit to attend a POSSE; it just happens to be the most informative looking snippet of text from the above-mentioned web page. Name Email Institution What do you teach? (Optional: link to your faculty homepage.) Why do you want to come? (3-8 sentences) What do you want to get out of POSSE? (3-8 sentences) What do you think you will contribute to the classroom? (3-8 sentences) What prior experience (if any) do you have with open source? (3-8 sentences, or an URL) Which POSSE session(s) you can attend, in order of preference, with any schedule restrictions Any other notes? _______________________________________________ tos mailing list tos@teachingopensource.org http://teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos
