0:00:00.627,0:00:04.153 POSSE is Professors Open Source Summer Experience 0:00:04.153,0:00:12.904 and it's a one-week intensive bootcamp for professors designed to solve a problem 0:00:12.904,0:00:19.775 We realized a while back that many students who were getting involved in open source 0:00:19.775,0:00:24.189 weren't doing so as part of a formal schooling program. 0:00:24.189,0:00:28.264 And, at the same time there was a lot of value to 0:00:28.264,0:00:30.302 learning in open source. 0:00:30.302,0:00:32.940 There's a huge code base to experiment with, 0:00:32.940,0:00:35.944 a community of collaborators that can support 0:00:35.944,0:00:38.348 and encourage and aid learning. The problem was that 0:00:38.348,0:00:41.953 there were very few professors who were involved with 0:00:41.953,0:00:45.949 open source, and POSSE is designed to address that by 0:00:45.949,0:00:50.024 encouraging professors to, themselves, get deeply involved 0:00:50.024,0:00:52.297 in an open source community. It's not really 0:00:52.297,0:00:55.432 very different from developing software in another context, 0:00:55.432,0:00:58.619 except that in open source you've got the communications 0:00:58.619,0:01:01.701 and the community aspects. So, it's almost more cultural 0:01:01.701,0:01:03.739 than technical learning. 0:01:03.739,0:01:07.344 One of the participants from the first POSSE is a 0:01:07.344,0:01:09.172 professor with you at Seneca, Fardad. 0:01:09.172,0:01:11.445 Can you tell me a little about what he's doing now? 0:01:11.445,0:01:15.050 Fardad has taken a third semester programming course, 0:01:15.050,0:01:20.196 one of the core courses in our programming program 0:01:20.196,0:01:25.159 and added an open source component, almost as a 0:01:25.159,0:01:29.626 pre-open source course, so that students, rather than work 0:01:29.626,0:01:33.466 on their own little projects are instead collaborating 0:01:33.466,0:01:37.463 in small groups using open source methods and communication tools. 0:01:37.463,0:01:42.896 And it's really transformed that course. He's offered that 0:01:42.896,0:01:46.423 course for one full semester and he's into the second semester 0:01:46.423,0:01:50.890 and so far, the results are really quite astounding. 0:01:50.890,0:01:55.513 The student engagement is dramatically increased, 0:01:55.513,0:01:58.674 and the students are... pop into the IRC channel and you'll 0:01:58.674,0:02:01.600 see them late at night or on the weekends and hacking 0:02:01.600,0:02:05.466 away and by introducing open source concepts earlier 0:02:05.466,0:02:09.567 I think that we be able to prepare students to become 0:02:09.567,0:02:13.172 more deeply involved when they reach the later semesters. 0:02:13.172,0:02:16.647 One of the things that was interesting that came out 0:02:16.647,0:02:19.651 during the first POSSE was that, for me, I watched a lot of 0:02:19.651,0:02:21.847 the professors come in and go "We were thinking about 0:02:21.847,0:02:25.215 computer science senior capstone projects." But another 0:02:25.215,0:02:30.021 one was "Well, wouldn't this stuff be great for students to 0:02:30.021,0:02:32.581 learn how to write technical documentation?" Or if you're 0:02:32.581,0:02:34.958 studying human/computer interaction, have your designs 0:02:34.958,0:02:38.955 actually in a product by the time you graduate. Or if you're... 0:02:38.955,0:02:43.683 If you want to do QA when you get out, learn how to do 0:02:43.683,0:02:46.609 that on a real product that's shipping and you find the bugs 0:02:46.609,0:02:50.736 in. And so, broadening to a couple of other disciplines 0:02:50.736,0:02:52.907 and a couple of other teams that we know how to handle 0:02:52.907,0:02:56.327 very well, and in Fedora and in other open source projects, 0:02:56.327,0:03:00.271 that's going to expand the... instead of just reaching the 0:03:00.271,0:03:02.602 computer science majors and the computer science 0:03:02.602,0:03:06.175 department, we'll be able to get students that study other 0:03:06.175,0:03:07.315 things as well. 0:03:07.315,0:03:10.772 One of the Seneca students wrote the animated PNG 0:03:10.772,0:03:13.985 implementation for Mozilla. There was no animated version 0:03:13.985,0:03:18.452 of that except for the MNG format which was very rarely 0:03:18.452,0:03:22.841 implemented. So, one of our students, with the urging of 0:03:22.841,0:03:27.569 the Mozilla community, implemented a lightweight animated 0:03:27.569,0:03:32.062 format for that and since then that format's been adopted by 0:03:32.062,0:03:35.589 I think all of the major browsers. 0:03:35.589,0:03:36.189 Oh, wow! 0:03:36.189,0:03:39.977 So, there's more than 300,000,000 people directly using 0:03:39.977,0:03:42.851 that student's code and then many other people using the 0:03:42.851,0:03:44.914 Internet that have been impacted by it. 0:03:44.914,0:03:48.023 To go into an interview and be able to point to that and say 0:03:48.023,0:03:50.557 "Yeah, actually I wrote that software," or "I added a feature 0:03:50.557,0:03:52.620 to that software, fixed a bug, or wrote some documentation 0:03:52.620,0:03:56.800 for it," and then for the interviewers to be able to verify that, 0:03:56.800,0:04:00.771 and be able to see everything that they have done is 0:04:00.771,0:04:02.808 very powerful. 0:04:02.808,0:04:04.563 If there are professors that are interested in teaching 0:04:04.563,0:04:08.449 open source, are there other people that they can talk to about this? 0:04:08.449,0:04:10.725 The web presence that we created is called 0:04:10.725,0:04:14.696 teachingopensource.org and in fact the POSSE program 0:04:14.696,0:04:18.691 is accessible at http://teachingopensource.org/posse 0:04:18.691,0:04:23.158 So there's a fairly easy way for people to get in touch, 0:04:23.158,0:04:26.449 find out what's going on with the POSSE program, get 0:04:26.449,0:04:28.565 involved, and perhaps even host. 0:04:28.565,0:04:31.491 If professors are interested in doing something like that 0:04:31.491,0:04:35.853 at their school later on, then come, join the fun, say they're 0:04:35.853,0:04:39.798 interested, and can go from there.