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Introducing college freshmen to FOSS and the FOSS community

  • July 8, 2010 13:54

I’ve been toying with the notion of encouraging faculty that teach our “welcome to the IT major” courses to include information on FOSS and the FOSS community.  Specifically, I’d like to see students exposed to IRC, blogs, wikis, etc., earlier on so that they can tap into the wealth of knowledge available out there and (hopefully) give back to the community.

I discussed this idea with some folks from TOS and they’re all for it.  Unfortunately, after discussing it with a professor in the IST department here (at RIT), he opened my eyes to the flip-side of what may occur when pushing students to access these resources: the “cheating” aspect.  This certainly poses a challenge because, as I was talking to Mel about this, I was able to clarify that there are some hardships that students need to go through in academia to genuinely grasp some of the material they need to learn.  Having access to the various FOSS resources, like IRC, may allow them to skip the hardship that would detriment the learning process.  The example I made was how in our Computer Science department, students need to code different data structures by hand while students in Information Sciences and Technology department don’t need to code data structures by hand.  Being an IT student myself, I still don’t necessarily know which data structure might be best for certain situations (regardless of how much I’ve read up on them), while some of my friends who went through the CS curriculum know it like the back of their hand.  My point is that directing freshmen to access to different FOSS resources might cause them to skip the ‘hardship’ of learning how something genuinely works.

The primary solution I see to this conundrum would be introducing students to the FOSS resources and community later on in their academic career. (say…sophomore or junior year).  The reason I feel this would be more effective is because students have gone through the initial learning experiences/hardships and may be a little more independent when solving problems without automatically falling back on the community as a crutch.  I feel that this would also allow them to be more effective in giving back to the community.

Mel pointed out that by having students blog about their experiences with an academic hardship and how they fell back on the community may also be a solution, but I still feel there might be some loss in the educational value of some content if students are readily able to fall back on a community resource to solve their problem.

Thoughts?  Please comment and give me feedback!  I’m hoping to get some other perspectives and thoughts on this so I can find the best way to help the FOSS community and resources penetrate into our curriculum earlier.

RIT POSSE Day 3

  • June 17, 2010 08:34

So Wednesday was a lot more interactive and seemed to really pick up with getting into the tools that students would need to learn in order to become fully immersed in helping out the open source community.

The first thing we started on that I thought was very important was the “Rose-Bud-Thorn review” that Chris had us all do.  It allowed everyone in the group to express their opinions on the week thus far and, more importantly, provide feedback for Chris and Mel on how they could help improve POSSE for other people.  Next up was a hefty walkthrough of the Bugzilla interface, which I found to be particularly interesting (seeing as I’ve previously used Trac :P ).  It was also interesting to interview with some students during our lunch hour so that we could all try to shed light on our perspective of Open Source and how we feel it could be integrated in the classroom.

Beyond that, we broke off into project groups and I found myself talking with Luke an awful lot about python (<3) before we started working on the Measure activity.

Ohhhh the Measure activity….:P  We ended up debugging issues that were already “resolved” though…they weren’t marked “resolved” on the bug tracker.  Anyhow, it got us to better grasp how the code for an activity works and after a little more bug hacking, personally, I lost interest in measure because I wasn’t sure what else I’d be able to contribute.  That’s when I decided to help out a student debug his work on the IRC activity and well…I got about 2 hours deep into that and still got some work to do today :)

Also…dinner tonight…mmmmmmmmmmmmm

RIT POSSE Day 2

  • June 16, 2010 00:08

Alrighty….now that we’re through the second day of POSSE, time for a second reflection!

Looking back on today, it was nice to get a little more into the technical side of some of the open source world.  I feel that parts of the stuff we covered today might’ve been a little rushed and at the same time, some parts dragged out a little as well.  All in all, it was nice to get our hands into the Sugar stuff and also to start toying with git and patching.

As for some of the suggestions I was thinking for the organization of the wiki…I’ll point to Prof. Jacobs post on a way to improve the outline –> http://gryphonscratches.blogspot.com/2010/06/rit-posse-day-2.html

Beyond that, for my project I’m thinking of probably doing a spin off distro tomorrow :)

RIT POSSE Day 1

  • June 14, 2010 13:28

Sitting through the first day for POSSE at RIT.  One of our ‘homework assignments’ is to write a blog entry reflecting on today’s activities.  This post will be a placeholder until I fill in the rest of it :)

As per the deliverables for POSSE day 1 (http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/POSSE_RIT#Deliverables)

Accounts I’ve got registered:

And looking back on today….the history and lecture bit at the start was pretty interesting.  It definitely got better when Mel had us collaboratively writing stuff down on piratepad because I feel like more of us were actively involved.  While the IRC bit was a review for me and the Wiki stuff was pretty simple, I’m looking forward to writing some python for Sugar during this week (and maybe getting a little more involved with that community!).

Beyond that, I got all the accounts I needed, registered (as seen above) and I had some nice idle chat during lunch with some of the other participants at this thing.  Tomorrow sounds to be more confusing and leading to a state of being ‘productively lost’.