From Teaching Open Source
[edit] 1. Introductory information
- Matthew C. Jadud
- Allegheny College
- Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science
- mjadud at allegheny dot edu
[edit] About my classes
- Creativity and Leadership
- FS 101 (Freshman Seminar)
- Fall 2011
- Eventual course home
- Programming Languages
- CMPSC 220
- Fall 2011
- Eventual course home
- Title TBA: Collaboration with Darren Miller, faculty in Art
- FS 102
- Spring 2012
- Eventual course home
In addition, it is likely that two senior capstone students will pursue open projects. One intends to implement and test a multicore wait-free, work-stealing scheduler for the Transterpreter project, which I have been involved with as a core member for roughly 7 years. The second student intends to use OSD600/700 at Seneca as a starting point for designing a senior capstone experience in contributing to a FOSS project over the course of the 2011-2012 academic year.
[edit] The present
My second Freshman Seminar, FS102: Technology and Activism, represented my first and deepest dive into introducing students to open source software. Paired with Art and Activism, a seminar taught in parallel by Prof. Darren Miller in the Department of Art, these two classes introduced forty first-year students to the process of collaborating in open communities. Students conducted interviews, developed logos, and wrote text contributing to the Fedora 13 release during the spring semester of 2010.
What was it like taking forty students at a small, residential, liberal arts college into FOSS? It was overwhelming and hectic. Even with the help of a colleague on loan from Red Hat (Mel Chua), we discovered that we had taken the most ambitious path forward first. However, what we loved about the experience was that the course was extremely authentic: students were interacting on IRC and mailing lists, using bug trackers, reading documentation, installing FOSS software... they were fully engaging in as process FOSS participants.
Based on this experience, my second dive with students was in the context of CMPSC 303: Human Centered Design (HCD). Students first engaged in lightweight usability testing of the Fedora website as part of the Fedora 14 release, and then dove deep in doing usability work on a selection of FOSS projects. For example, one of the three teams did extensive work on Getting Things Gnome, an tool for managing to do items in the context of the Getting Things Done method.
The HCD experience was both more manageable and more complex -- with 10 students, it seemed "easy." However, the students were diving deeper into their communities over a longer period of time. Managing the communications, keeping projects on track and on time -- this was harder to do than I expected. While it is important to be flexible when working with open communities, I clearly needed more scaffolding and structure for keeping things on track locally, despite any scheduling setbacks that might occur in the students' interactions. (Or, perhaps not... I'm still learning how to interface the 14-week semester with the fluid, ongoing interactions that take place in many open communities.)
Despite the challenges, these experiences have been invaluable, and they have served as excellent starting points for discussions with colleagues across the campus about ways we can interact and collaborate. My colleagues would naturally be inclined to think that the computer (and/or programming) are essential aspects of what I do, and therefore any collaboration we might engage in would necessarily involve something very "technical." Working with a FOSS community means that I can find natural ways to collaborate with faculty in art, environmental science, biology, political science, economics... really, any department at the college. It simply becomes a matter of finding a community in which we can engage our students, and the process, communication skills, and reflective process of learning take center stage, while technical skills become something to be picked up and discarded as needed and as we go. From my point-of-view, this makes FOSS participation a natural fit for me as a member of a computer science department at a small, liberal arts college.
[edit] The Future
Written from the perspective of 2012.
I had two big victories in FOSS participation with my students this past year. One, in my majors course (Programming Languages), and one in my collaboration with my colleague in Art.
My offering of Programming Languages was different from any course I've run previously. During the Spring of 2011, I took part in a workshop at SIGCSE regarding lab-based instruction. Led by Mike Clancy and his team of collaborators, this workshop inspired the design and offering of a "by interpretation" offering of the study of languages in Scheme. The course design was conducted in the open (and it needs a lot of work!), but we spent 8 weeks digging deep into interpreters, and the students surprised me with how well they adapted to the hands-on learning paradigm.
The last four weeks were the success. In transitioning to patterns for parallel software construction in occam, I brought out the CC-licensed text and FOSS tools that I contribute to. The students were charged first with diving into a new language, and then set a simple challenge: given a sensor, motor, or other interesting component from our lab, develop a new parallel-safe interface to this hardware that we can add to our project's library of code. In addition, they then had to contribute documentation to the recently webified version of the book. The students joined our developer's list, were granted access to the Subversion repository, saw how to check out and build the project... it was great. And the contributions they made! Their work not only was valuable from a learning perspective, but it will add value directly to our ongoing research regarding the use of parallel languages for robotic control.
The second success has a much greater impact on the larger FOSS/EDU community. During the spring of 2012, my colleague Darren ran a second FS102 (I was not scheduled to do so). However, with the support of our departments, we took our experiences with an initial "deep dive" into FOSS, and created a concise set of assignments that introduce first-year students from a broad background to the communication and collaboration involved in FOSS participation. These assignments were influenced greatly by our conversations with Karl Wurst, who we had the opportunity to work closely with at POSSE 2011.
The assignment designs have multiple kinds of impact. First, we can share them out as modules that can be reused at other institutions (or, we hope, by colleagues of ours at Allegheny). Second, they provide first-year students with meaningful ways to engage FOSS communities -- and, unlike our previous experiment, we have a plan for how they might continue to participate. During the 2011-2012 academic year, I began establishing a Community Collaboratory at Allegheny College; this is a "maker space," if you will -- a place where students, faculty, and members of the community come together to explore art, science, and technology through the act of making. The FS102 students were able to leverage this space in their studies, and (more importantly), we will follow up during the 2012-2013 academic year with a learning-living community dedicated to exploring the intersection of serving globally by collaborating and making from a fundamentally FOSS perspective. This LLC will draw on the experiences of our FS102 students, and explicitly bring them back as "alumni," so they can serve as "peer guides" as a new generation of students explore into the realm of FOSS participation.
[edit] Making the Future
A critical resource we think we're going to need is support for either (1) bringing outsiders in to our seminar, or (better) (2) taking the students out into the world. There is some internal support for these kinds of things, but a critical part (we think) of the Freshman Seminar success will be making the FOSS participation "real" for our students.
The most important thing, however, is the community of educators doing this kind of work. Continuing to work with and develop infrastructure for collaborating with educators around the US and (for that matter) around the globe on how we can successfully integrate FOSS into our classrooms is essential.