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POSSE - Professors' Open Source Summer Experience

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

There are more professors than ever hoping to teach the open source development process to their students -- but working in the open source world can be a daunting proposition. Professors themselves have only a limited amount of time to learn about open source, and are often unsure about how, exactly, to get started.
POSSE (Professors' Open Source Summer Experience) is designed for these professors. Sponsored by Red Hat, the POSSE program is a week-long boot camp that will immerse professors in open source projects. Participants spend a week of intensive participation in selected open source projects, led by professors with experience in teaching open source development, in partnership with community members who have deep experience and insight. By the end of the session, participants should have a much better understanding of the workings of open source projects, and a strong network of contacts to lean on as they begin to bring students into the open source world.

Learn more:
http://teachingopensource.com/index.php/POSSE
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Video Language:
English
Duration:
04:51

English subtitles

Revisions

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