Since a good portion of the academics on TOS are starting up the new
school year right about now, I thought it might be a good time to update
each other on our fall term plans.
I'm starting the 2nd year of my PhD at Purdue (Grad School: RETURN OF
THE GRAD SCHOOL) and am still learning how to settle into 5+ year
marathons (as opposed to the 6-month release cycle sprints I'm used to
from FOSS development). This semester I am preparing for my quals, and
so I may end up with a reading list that's of interest to others here.
I've been playing around the space of theories about learning, community
development & formation, motivation and recruitment, and resistance to
change that seem particularly relevant to FOSS; not so much "research
about FOSS," but more like "research that, if FOSS practitioners were
aware of it, would keep them from reinventing so many wheels." You may
see more of that sort of thing creep into answers I give to other people
asking questions on this list -- so please, please ask questions about
FOSS culture/learning/etc on this list and give me a chance to try
flexing those new muscles. :) (I'm particularly curious about questions
folks on the FOSS/industry side might have about why or how something
they do works or doesn't work, or whether there's anything in the
literature about how it might be improved.)
I'm also taking a class on R (the open source statistical programming
language) to fulfill my statistics requirement and looking at my digital
infrastructure for doing scholarly work (LaTeX and Zotero and some other
stuff), and some classmates have asked for help forming an open hardware
hacking group on campus, but these are definitely more side things that
take back seats to the supposed "laserlike focus" I'm (hypothetically)
developing on my dissertation-to-be.
I still don't know what that dissertation will be, but I'm continuing to
walk towards a convergence I don't see or feel, but trust will come.
Radical realtime transparency and the idea of radically transparent
research/academia are still developing themes that seem to be
consistent, and I've confirmed my affinity for small-scale qualitative
research on faculty (as opposed to large-scale quantitative research on
students, say). I'm still frustrated by the phrase "the open source way"
not being backed up by anything other than anecdotes. What the heck does
that mean? I want to make sure that, when we talk about "teaching open
source," we're not just waving our hands around excitedly about shiny
stuff -- so I'm sidestepping to look at how other groups in other areas
have built deep, rich, enduring understandings and transformations,
because the approach of getting frustrated and burnt-out banging my head
against *just* the TOS wall seems counterproductive. Mmm, learning.
I will be at FIE in October. Other than that and my college reunion, I'm
going to be a surprisingly stationary Mel this fall (conferences are
expensive!) partially in preparation for my semester at Ohio State in
the spring, where I'll be doing a deep-dive into deconstructivist
feminist qualitative research methods (I'll let y'all know when I can
explain what the heck those are). If you know anyone or anything cool in
the FOSS/hacking/making and/or STEM edu spheres in the Columbus area,
let me know. And if anyone finds themselves in the Indianapolis or
Chicago area this year, I'd love to hang out.
What is everyone else up to?
--
Mel Chua
[email protected]
PhD student, Open Source & Education focus
Purdue University, Dept. of Engineering Education
_______________________________________________
tos mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos
