Hi Seb,
I agree with Jim’s comment that having students produce a FOSS project from scratch is too large a chunk to take on in a single semester. Students would better learn about open source culture and practices by joining an existing, on-going project. This would give them hands-on experience with a real FOSS project while learning from the practitioners in the field. Students could easily learn about project management infrastructure, and community self-governance through open source participation in this manner, and I have found that their learning can far exceed a typical classroom experience. In other words, rather than you trying to create a FOSS environment within a single semester in an academic environment, which might not be entirely successfully, having students participate in an ongoing, successful project would be more exciting and less risky. Just my two cents. Heidi Heidi J. C. Ellis Chair and Associate Professor Department of Computer Science and Information Technology Western New England University 1215 Wilbraham Road Springfield, MA 01119-2684 [email protected] http://mars.wne.edu/~hellis From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Jim Bowring Sent: Saturday, March 09, 2013 7:28 PM To: Discussions about Teaching Open Source Subject: Re: [TOS] looking for feedback on ideas for an open source development course Hi Sebastian - I teach an undergraduate course "Software Engineering Practicum" that has students form teams and join existing H/FOSS projects. I think it not practical to have students produce an open source project in a semester as the engineering tasks involved in any robust, meaningful, and maintainable project take at least a year in an academic setting to provide a serious first release. I recommend having students join a project and learn how to participate in an existing community/ecosystem. link to this year: http://csci462-2013.wikispaces.com/ link to last year: http://csci462-2012.wikispaces.com/ Cheers, Jim Bowring Principal Investigator, www.CIRDLES.org <http://www.CIRDLES.org%20> Computer Science College of Charleston 66 George Street Charleston, SC 29424 Google Voice: 843.608.1399 (preferred) Google Email: [email protected] Office: JC Long room 222 843.953.0805 http://stono.cs.cofc.edu/~bowring/ <http://stono.cs.cofc.edu/%7Ebowring/> [email protected] R. Buckminster Fuller (1972): If humanity is to survive aboard our planet, it must become universally literate and preoccupied with inherently cooperative Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science in which every human is concerned with accomplishing the comfortably sustainable well-faring of all other humans. On Sat, Mar 9, 2013 at 6:14 PM, Allen Tucker <[email protected]> wrote: Hi Sebastian, I've been teaching a hands-on FOSS course over the last four years with small groups of advanced CS majors. Check out this site for some ideas about resources, projects, and structuring such a course over a semester. http://myopensoftware.org/textbook I'll be teaching this course again in the fall with three new projects serving local non-projfit organizations. Let me know if you want to talk more directly about these experiences. Best, Allen Tucker On Mar 9, 2013, at 5:23 PM, Sebastian Benthall <[email protected]> wrote: Hi list, I'm a PhD student at UC Berkeley's School of Information <http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/> and have been getting encouragement here to teach a course on open source development targeted at students in our Masters program. Our Masters students come from a variety of backgrounds and are required to pick up some coding skills during the program (though some come in with more engineering background). It's a professional degree that culminates in a technical project. Often the emphasis of these projects is on design, but many of the students have expressed frustration at not having more of an opportunity to hack with constructive supervision. I'm coming from a background of FOSS development, project management, and business, but have never taught a course on this before. I wanted to send out my rough ideas for a course proposal and invite any feedback of any kind on it. I'd be really interested to see any currently existing course syllabi or material, but am not sure where to look. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Summary: This course is a hands-on exploration of the theory and practice of free and open source software (FOSS) development. Students will collaborate on the design, development, and marketing of a new open source software project. Practical work will be organized around themes of project management infrastructure, community self-governance, and engineering education through open source participation. Supplemental readings will explore business models for open source software organizations, the open source "ecosystem", and hacker culture. The (admitted ambitious) goal of the class is to launch a broadly usable open source project that can be used as part of iSchool Masters projects, faculty-directed research, and beyond. [There's going to be a lot of prep work on my end figuring out what a plausible project for this might be. I'm thinking something along the lines of a lightweight pluggable mailing list solution, but I'm open to other ideas...] Format: The class will meet twice a week: Once in a classroom to discuss readings, and once in an IRC channel to discuss progress on development. Grading: Grading will be based on X% class participation, Y% on open digital participation (blog posts, issues, mailing list participation, commits) and Z% on student's assessment of their peers [according to some algorithm I've haven't put enough thought into yet]. Readings and Topics: for everything practical and then some: Fogel, K. Producing Open Source Software what else? governance: Freeman, J. The "Tyrrany of Structurelessness" Ostrom, E. Governing the Commons (?? haven't read yet, looks good. I'm thinking excerpts) business models: Pentaho's Beekeeper stuff: http://wiki.pentaho.com/display/BEEKEEPER/The+Beekeeper Asay, M. something by him like http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10244853-16.html -- stuff about Red Hat? -- stuff about Twitter, GitHub? -- stuff about Mozilla? classical (?) texts: RMS. Something. Or maybe just stuff from here; http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/ ESR. The Cathedral and the Bazaar culture: Coleman, G. something? Kelty, C. Two Bits. (excerpts) international participation: Tahkteyev, Y. Coding places. (excepts) something on gender in open source? _______________________________________________ tos mailing list [email protected] http://lists.teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos _______________________________________________ tos mailing list [email protected] http://lists.teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos
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