1 00:00:00,627 --> 00:00:04,153 POSSE is Professors Open Source Summer Experience 2 00:00:04,153 --> 00:00:12,904 and it's a one-week intensive bootcamp for professors designed to solve a problem 3 00:00:12,904 --> 00:00:19,775 We realized a while back that many students who were getting involved in open source 4 00:00:19,775 --> 00:00:24,189 weren't doing so as part of a formal schooling program. 5 00:00:24,189 --> 00:00:28,264 And, at the same time there was a lot of value to 6 00:00:28,264 --> 00:00:30,302 learning in open source. 7 00:00:30,302 --> 00:00:32,940 There's a huge code base to experiment with, 8 00:00:32,940 --> 00:00:35,944 a community of collaborators that can support 9 00:00:35,944 --> 00:00:38,348 and encourage and aid learning. The problem was that 10 00:00:38,348 --> 00:00:41,953 there were very few professors who were involved with 11 00:00:41,953 --> 00:00:45,949 open source, and POSSE is designed to address that by 12 00:00:45,949 --> 00:00:50,024 encouraging professors to, themselves, get deeply involved 13 00:00:50,024 --> 00:00:52,297 in an open source community. It's not really 14 00:00:52,297 --> 00:00:55,432 very different from developing software in another context, 15 00:00:55,432 --> 00:00:58,619 except that in open source you've got the communications 16 00:00:58,619 --> 00:01:01,701 and the community aspects. So, it's almost more cultural 17 00:01:01,701 --> 00:01:03,739 than technical learning. 18 00:01:03,739 --> 00:01:07,344 One of the participants from the first POSSE is a 19 00:01:07,344 --> 00:01:09,172 professor with you at Seneca, Fardad. 20 00:01:09,172 --> 00:01:11,445 Can you tell me a little about what he's doing now? 21 00:01:11,445 --> 00:01:15,050 Fardad has taken a third semester programming course, 22 00:01:15,050 --> 00:01:20,196 one of the core courses in our programming program 23 00:01:20,196 --> 00:01:25,159 and added an open source component, almost as a 24 00:01:25,159 --> 00:01:29,626 pre-open source course, so that students, rather than work 25 00:01:29,626 --> 00:01:33,466 on their own little projects are instead collaborating 26 00:01:33,466 --> 00:01:37,463 in small groups using open source methods and communication tools. 27 00:01:37,463 --> 00:01:42,896 And it's really transformed that course. He's offered that 28 00:01:42,896 --> 00:01:46,423 course for one full semester and he's into the second semester 29 00:01:46,423 --> 00:01:50,890 and so far, the results are really quite astounding. 30 00:01:50,890 --> 00:01:55,513 The student engagement is dramatically increased, 31 00:01:55,513 --> 00:01:58,674 and the students are... pop into the IRC channel and you'll 32 00:01:58,674 --> 00:02:01,600 see them late at night or on the weekends and hacking 33 00:02:01,600 --> 00:02:05,466 away and by introducing open source concepts earlier 34 00:02:05,466 --> 00:02:09,567 I think that we be able to prepare students to become 35 00:02:09,567 --> 00:02:13,172 more deeply involved when they reach the later semesters. 36 00:02:13,172 --> 00:02:16,647 One of the things that was interesting that came out 37 00:02:16,647 --> 00:02:19,651 during the first POSSE was that, for me, I watched a lot of 38 00:02:19,651 --> 00:02:21,847 the professors come in and go "We were thinking about 39 00:02:21,847 --> 00:02:25,215 computer science senior capstone projects." But another 40 00:02:25,215 --> 00:02:30,021 one was "Well, wouldn't this stuff be great for students to 41 00:02:30,021 --> 00:02:32,581 learn how to write technical documentation?" Or if you're 42 00:02:32,581 --> 00:02:34,958 studying human/computer interaction, have your designs 43 00:02:34,958 --> 00:02:38,955 actually in a product by the time you graduate. Or if you're... 44 00:02:38,955 --> 00:02:43,683 If you want to do QA when you get out, learn how to do 45 00:02:43,683 --> 00:02:46,609 that on a real product that's shipping and you find the bugs 46 00:02:46,609 --> 00:02:50,736 in. And so, broadening to a couple of other disciplines 47 00:02:50,736 --> 00:02:52,907 and a couple of other teams that we know how to handle 48 00:02:52,907 --> 00:02:56,327 very well, and in Fedora and in other open source projects, 49 00:02:56,327 --> 00:03:00,271 that's going to expand the... instead of just reaching the 50 00:03:00,271 --> 00:03:02,602 computer science majors and the computer science 51 00:03:02,602 --> 00:03:06,175 department, we'll be able to get students that study other 52 00:03:06,175 --> 00:03:07,315 things as well. 53 00:03:07,315 --> 00:03:10,772 One of the Seneca students wrote the animated PNG 54 00:03:10,772 --> 00:03:13,985 implementation for Mozilla. There was no animated version 55 00:03:13,985 --> 00:03:18,452 of that except for the MNG format which was very rarely 56 00:03:18,452 --> 00:03:22,841 implemented. So, one of our students, with the urging of 57 00:03:22,841 --> 00:03:27,569 the Mozilla community, implemented a lightweight animated 58 00:03:27,569 --> 00:03:32,062 format for that and since then that format's been adopted by 59 00:03:32,062 --> 00:03:35,589 I think all of the major browsers. 60 00:03:35,589 --> 00:03:36,189 Oh, wow! 61 00:03:36,189 --> 00:03:39,977 So, there's more than 300,000,000 people directly using 62 00:03:39,977 --> 00:03:42,851 that student's code and then many other people using the 63 00:03:42,851 --> 00:03:44,914 Internet that have been impacted by it. 64 00:03:44,914 --> 00:03:48,023 To go into an interview and be able to point to that and say 65 00:03:48,023 --> 00:03:50,557 "Yeah, actually I wrote that software," or "I added a feature 66 00:03:50,557 --> 00:03:52,620 to that software, fixed a bug, or wrote some documentation 67 00:03:52,620 --> 00:03:56,800 for it," and then for the interviewers to be able to verify that, 68 00:03:56,800 --> 00:04:00,771 and be able to see everything that they have done is 69 00:04:00,771 --> 00:04:02,808 very powerful. 70 00:04:02,808 --> 00:04:04,563 If there are professors that are interested in teaching 71 00:04:04,563 --> 00:04:08,449 open source, are there other people that they can talk to about this? 72 00:04:08,449 --> 00:04:10,725 The web presence that we created is called 73 00:04:10,725 --> 00:04:14,696 teachingopensource.org and in fact the POSSE program 74 00:04:14,696 --> 00:04:18,691 is accessible at http://teachingopensource.org/posse 75 00:04:18,691 --> 00:04:23,158 So there's a fairly easy way for people to get in touch, 76 00:04:23,158 --> 00:04:26,449 find out what's going on with the POSSE program, get 77 00:04:26,449 --> 00:04:28,565 involved, and perhaps even host. 78 00:04:28,565 --> 00:04:31,491 If professors are interested in doing something like that 79 00:04:31,491 --> 00:04:35,853 at their school later on, then come, join the fun, say they're 80 00:04:35,853 --> 00:04:39,798 interested, and can go from there.