Hi Matt, I read through your very impressive analysis of the conversation and couldn't agree more--especially with your point about scaffolding:
*In conclusion, "Productively lost" is a wonderful thing... but I suspect that * *more than 95% of potential contributors are lost simply because the * *community has no way of scaffolding their entry. * Background: I'm currently teaching a "FOSS 101" course at Trinity ( http://www.cs.trincoll.edu/~ram/cpsc110/<http://www.cs.trincoll.edu/%7Eram/cpsc110/> ). It's my third try and I still can see many ways in which it falls well short, although this attempt has been better than the previous two. This is a distribution, non-majors course with 12 students (4 first year). About 2/3 or the course focuses on programming and 1/3 on discussion of FOSS and related topics . We've read and discussed pieces by Stallman, Fogel, Lessig, Benkler, and others and look at contemporary issues like the recent ACLU lawsuit challenging Myriad's patents on breast cancer genes. The students will have written a three-tiered web app in PHP/MySQL by the end of the term by making fairly small scale modifications to examples we've studied and written together. They are all running MAMP or WAMP on their laptops. The beginning of the term coincided with the earthquake in Haiti and acting on a call for volunteers we got involved in helping Sahana deploy its software in Haiti. I participated in a few IRC chats and was glad that I didn't try to get the students directly involved in that. I was mostly lost! Instead students helped with testing a development version of Sahana and reporting errors and feature requests in Trac. I think it was a useful exercise and the students seemed to get something out of it -- as evidenced by their forum posts -- both as a humanitarian contribution and a look at how an open source community operates. Obviously our Sahana/Haiti experiment was completely serendipitous and it's not easy to see how to replicate it in any sort of general way within a college course. So the lesson I draw from it and from other attempts to get students engaged with FOSS during a CS course is that such efforts have to be heavily mediated by faculty and other go-betweens (e.g., experienced students, seasoned mentors from the FOSS community, etc.). Given the challenges we as faculty face in the classroom and during the hectic march through the 14 week semester and given the highly "non free and open" nature of the traditional CS classrooms -- where sharing code is usually treated as plagiarism -- we are placing most of our engagement effort on summer internships with students. This has given us (faculty) a chance to learn how things work ourselves -- and we're still pretty far down on the learning curve -- while at the same time getting students engaged and contributing. Thanks to a discussion we had a while back with Mel and Greg about how POSSEs are organized, we're going to try to make better use of IRCs this summer -- pulling all of the 25 or so students and 8 or so faculty together into the IRC, together with mentors from the various FOSS communities we're working with (Sahana, OpenMRS, GNOME, Tor). Hopefully, without the pressure of a course and grading and all that, relationships can be established that will perhaps carry over into the classroom. I think it would be great if there were resources ($$) to support more summer efforts. GSoC is great, but, as far as I understand it, faculty aren't involved in that so you don't really have the mediating necessary if we're going to bridge the gap between the FOSS development communities and our faculty colleagues and our classrooms. Short of that, the best we can do is to follow Matt's example and look carefully and critically at our various pedagogical experiments until we come up with some techniques and approaches that work. Regards, -- ralph On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 2:00 PM, Matthew Jadud <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi Mel, > > On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 08:58, Mel Chua <[email protected]> wrote: > > I'm not quite sure what to do with this sort of thing. Here's a > > conversation log explaining a concept covered in the textbook (in this > > case, version control) to a student asking questions about it. > > > > http://teachingopensource.com/index.php/Talk:Getting_the_Code > > > > Participants: > > Annie Morino (morinoa) > > David Nalley (ke4qqq) > > Robyn Bergeron (rbergeron) > > > > Is there a way we can use these sorts of questions and explanations to > > improve our explanations in the text? Might it be helpful for students > > to read these kinds of logs and see what sorts of questions others ask? > > Possibly -- except my impression was that that particular conversation was > > 1. Poorly timed, and perhaps > 2. Inappropriate given for what the contributor was trying to do. > > That is, I think it serves more as a learning tool for the community > than for the participant. Specifically, we are currently working with > contributors who have zero background in any of the technologies of > the community: they've just learned IRC and wiki editing, and just > joined the mailing list. Then, several community members dive into > telling them about an alphabet soup of git, DVCS, and a host of other > terms that have absolutely zero meaning or context for the nascent > contributor. > > At the end of the day, we're trying to help students engage > successfully in a stepwise manner. Complex, technical information that > isn't useful at the wrong time is a deterrent to successful capturing > of future contributors. (Claim.) > > I've replied in more depth on the talk page: > > http://teachingopensource.com/index.php/Talk:Getting_the_Code > > Specifically, I've gone through the conversation and pointed out > exactly where I think it did well and where it fell short. My goal was > to provide some concrete reflection that we can respond and react to. > If we were to remove all of the names in the conversation, I would > have the exact same comments: the community did poorly in this case in > supporting the newcomer, and I, as a member of the faculty, had to > step in on this end and say "none of this matters to you now, and it > might not matter to you at all -- unless you want it to." And, > regardless of educational context or not, I think my answer was the > right one. (Debate!) > > Please, though, read the analysis before responding. I'm buried in the > actual execution of the experiment you're blogging on in real-time, so > for me stopping and spending an hour writing this up has a real cost. > That, if you like, is another problem with the firehose -- I struggle, > as a member of the faculty, to keep up in the radically transparent > way that the community expects. > > Cheers, > Matt > _______________________________________________ > tos mailing list > [email protected] > http://teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos >
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