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