From Teaching Open Source

This page is a draft. It's a series of thoughts in the process of (eventually) becoming an application - it's nowhere near ready for submission, and shouldn't be treated as such. Right now, it is mostly me rambling, and is not intended to be comprehensible to anybody else. Comments and patches welcome, of course - but understand that this is a total braindump right now, and I'm still wandering around a lot.

[edit] Introduction

For the past several years, I've been thinking about graduate school - specifically, studying the intersection of open source communities and engineering education. How are engineers taught in school? How do they learn in open source? What practices from each world might be helpful for people in the other, if the two were bridged? (Why is it hard to bridge them?) I'm starting to move towards this in earnest - this is a space where I am working out my application to Purdue's PhD program in Engineering Education. Here are the application requirements.

Logistics: I'd like to start during the fall semester of 2012, so I can do a full year of (1) running RH's edu strategy and a full year of (2) working with a university in Asia (while still running RH's edu strategy). I want to make POSSE sustainable and begin getting my brain into "school mode" again (perhaps taking an evening class during fall term if time and scheduling permit).

I do plan on continuing to work (in open source and education in my role on the Community Architecture team at Red Hat) as much as possible while studying, though I may at some point need to take a sabbatical in order to go hardcore on my dissertation or whatnot. I do not know how this will work out yet. This is all super-tentative and strawman-like and totally exploring lots of ideas with no intent of making a decision anytime soon. Consider this all brainstorm mode.

Procedure: I don't have one yet. Right now, these thoughts are highly unstable and very much not worked out. I'm in the process of trying to clarify and articulate for myself why I am doing this, and exactly what I'm headed towards - so I'm sure huge revisions and overhauls will be taking place, and this is rambly and rough. But you can't edit what you don't write, so... here goes.

[edit] Statement of purpose

A statement of approximately 300-500 words concerning...

[edit] your purpose for undertaking graduate study

warning: overly geeky terminology ahead. this needs a lot of refinement.

In FOSS terminology: I'd like commit access to this repository.

I'm coming back to academia from within the world of open source. It's an upstream - we get a lot of our contributors from this system, or from people who've been through this system - and it's one we always talk about patching, but we can't push our patches there. We don't understand how their release cycle works, or how they make decisions, or even what the process for becoming a commiter really entails.

I want to go there and become one so that I can find out, document it, and help folks from the open source world format their patches for inclusion, and help them push those patches upstream.

[edit] your reasons for wanting to study at Purdue

I know I need a better explanation for this, but: because it feels right. I have a difficult time describing this; perhaps to some people it will make sense when I say "it felt like Olin." It felt like Candidates' Weekend.

The people I want to learn from are here; the space is buzzing with the kinds of questions that I want to hear and learn to think about and ask and also eventually answer, or learn how to work towards the answers. The research is exciting! The university itself is a great testbed - there's so much engineering education going on that there's a lot to see, a lot of data, a lot of things I could try learning and teaching. It's connected to a lot of other institutions doing fascinating engineering education work.

It would be good for me, I know. I just have trouble articulating why right this moment.

[edit] your professional plans and career goals

That's a very good question. I would like to have the largest impact on engineering education in the context of open source possible. I am not sure what this means yet.

• continuing to work on this from within industry?
• going to academia (likely as a professor) and attempting to bridge it from "the inside" (or the inside of that particular type of institution?)
• something else?
• platypus?

[edit] your research interests

Many.

I will come up with a better explanation of this later. I need help thinking about this more.

[edit] interesting background circumstances

I was the first person in my extended family to grow up and be schooled outside the developing world (the Philippines), and the first to develop hardware, software, and participate in internet communities. I grew up as a “disabled” kid with a hearing loss severe enough to warrant a host of technological aids, special classes, and a full-time sign language interpreter. It was an interesting childhood.

[edit] special abilities/achievements

• hat of contagious enthusiasm!
• cloak of nonthreateningness and ability to listen and be a buffer.
• +1 lipreading ninjahood! (and general ability to empathize with those typically "othered" from a space due to inadvertent demographic reasons)
• scary fast with text - reading, writing, and multitasking online conversations
• improvisation-fu
• well, I am an electrical engineer who writes code and understands the ecosystem that surrounds its continued production and support. I've also done basic machining stuff and am pretty comfy learning more... I like getting my hands dirty, in general.
• when I learn something, it gets documented. Magically. Automatically. It's how I learn stuff.

[edit] professional history

Rough, rambly, leaves out stuff, shamelessly stolen from my blog's about page right now.

My name is Mel. I’ve been called a hacker by other hackers. Pressed for a short job description, I would say that I engineer educations. I’ve also been called an open-source community ninja, catnip gardener (from the old adage that managing programmers is like herding cats), and a Swiss Army Person or a Hack Of All Trades. My quest is to make a world where makers make themselves, and I’m particularly intrigued with the space between how hackers learn and how engineers are taught (in undergrad and beyond).

Over time, I've progressed from hacking hardware (electrical engineer) to code (software developer) to organizational cultures (community QA team lead). I now hack communities of practice as a member of Red Hat's Community Architecture team. You may also know me from Fedora, Sugar Labs, One Laptop Per Child, the MIT Media Lab, Design Continuum, Appropedia, or The Open Planning Project.

These days, I spends most of her time with on open source in education, teaching professors how to teach open source, leading the Fedora Marketing team, and generally getting things out of the way of people who want to Get Stuff Done. In my hypothetically existent amounts of free time, she volunteers for Sugar Labs and works on undergraduate engineering education reform, occasionally at the same time.

[edit] how will obtaining an advanced degree in engineering education best prepare you for your long-term career goals?

That is a very good question indeed.

The obvious answer for me is "well, unless I get commit access to this repo in the first place, I can't do anything else I want to do," but all the parts of that sentence need further explanation (what is it that I actually want to do, and why is getting a PhD in ENE a prerequisite?)

[edit] Curriculum vitae

Um... I don't have one yet. I'll make one soon.

[edit] Research statement

Applicants should submit a statement of approximately 300-500 words. Applicants should address the following from personal experience or a personal point of view.

[edit] Describe one important issue in engineering education

Oh gosh. Do I have to just pick one? I'm going to link to OSDC article ideas right now because it is the closest thing I've got and then come back here later with a better list...

[edit] With regards to the issue identified, state the question(s) you would be interested in investigating through research

Dependent on section above. Hang on a bit.

[edit] Describe how answers to your questions could impact or reform aspects of teaching, curriculum, or informal/formal educational programs

One thing I do know is that I'm interested in how open source communities can benefit from this as much as formal education can. How can we become more conscious of how we are learning, how we are teaching - who we are teaching, who is not learning - and thereby become better able to aim at what it is we decide we want to do with respect to all of these? I think that the ability to critically reflect in a data-based way on these types of topics will be something valuable that I can bring from academia back to open source.