POSSE is Professors Open Source Summer Experience
and it's a one-week intensive bootcamp for professors designed to solve a problem
We realized a while back that many students who were getting involved in open source
weren't doing so as part of a formal schooling program.
And, at the same time there was a lot of value to
learning in open source.
There's a huge code base to experiment with,
a community of collaborators that can support
and encourage and aid learning. The problem was that
there were very few professors who were involved with
open source, and POSSE is designed to address that by
encouraging professors to, themselves, get deeply involved
in an open source community. It's not really
very different from developing software in another context,
except that in open source you've got the communications
and the community aspects. So, it's almost more cultural
than technical learning.
One of the participants from the first POSSE is a
professor with you at Seneca, Fardad.
Can you tell me a little about what he's doing now?
Fardad has taken a third semester programming course,
one of the core courses in our programming program
and added an open source component, almost as a
pre-open source course, so that students, rather than work
on their own little projects are instead collaborating
in small groups using open source methods and communication tools.
And it's really transformed that course. He's offered that
course for one full semester and he's into the second semester
and so far, the results are really quite astounding.
The student engagement is dramatically increased,
and the students are... pop into the IRC channel and you'll
see them late at night or on the weekends and hacking
away and by introducing open source concepts earlier
I think that we be able to prepare students to become
more deeply involved when they reach the later semesters.
One of the things that was interesting that came out
during the first POSSE was that, for me, I watched a lot of
the professors come in and go "We were thinking about
computer science senior capstone projects." But another
one was "Well, wouldn't this stuff be great for students to
learn how to write technical documentation?" Or if you're
studying human/computer interaction, have your designs
actually in a product by the time you graduate. Or if you're...
If you want to do QA when you get out, learn how to do
that on a real product that's shipping and you find the bugs
in. And so, broadening to a couple of other disciplines
and a couple of other teams that we know how to handle
very well, and in Fedora and in other open source projects,
that's going to expand the... instead of just reaching the
computer science majors and the computer science
department, we'll be able to get students that study other
things as well.
One of the Seneca students wrote the animated PNG
implementation for Mozilla. There was no animated version
of that except for the MNG format which was very rarely
implemented. So, one of our students, with the urging of
the Mozilla community, implemented a lightweight animated
format for that and since then that format's been adopted by
I think all of the major browsers.
Oh, wow!
So, there's more than 300,000,000 people directly using
that student's code and then many other people using the
Internet that have been impacted by it.
To go into an interview and be able to point to that and say
"Yeah, actually I wrote that software," or "I added a feature
to that software, fixed a bug, or wrote some documentation
for it," and then for the interviewers to be able to verify that,
and be able to see everything that they have done is
very powerful.
If there are professors that are interested in teaching
open source, are there other people that they can talk to about this?
The web presence that we created is called
teachingopensource.org and in fact the POSSE program
is accessible at http://teachingopensource.org/posse
So there's a fairly easy way for people to get in touch,
find out what's going on with the POSSE program, get
involved, and perhaps even host.
If professors are interested in doing something like that
at their school later on, then come, join the fun, say they're
interested, and can go from there.