POSSE

A group of colleagues—Stoney Jackson (Western New England University), Sean Goggins (Drexel University), Darci Burdge (Nassau Community College), Lori Postner (Nassau Community College), and Greg Hislop (Drexel University)—and I have recently been awarded an NSF TUES Type 2 grant we’re calling OpenFE for Open Faculty Expertise. The expertise that we’re trying to build here is in the area of supporting student learning via participation in humanitarian FOSS (HFOSS) projects.

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POSSE (Professors Open Source Summer Experience) is a week long introduction to the FOSS community and its tools, development and instruction that has been offered and sponsored by Red Hat since 2009. Over 70 participants (mostly faculty, but with a few staff and grad students at some iterations) have attended sessions in the U.S., Qatar, South Africa and Singapore. » Read more

In information technology (IT) and software development fields, there are a few fairly common misconceptions about the use of open source software. These misconceptions were debunked in a discussion at POSSE RIT 2012, and we’d like to share (and spread) that conversation. » Read more

When I spent some time going around North Carolina recently visiting POSSE professors, I had a realization: We encourage professors to be productively lost, to go out and feel immersed in a community, admit that they can't solve all of the problems themselves, and act more as a facilitator in the classroom. That helps them identify the right questions to ask--and the right places to ask them--online.
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The Association of Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group in IT Education (ACM-SIGITE) met at West Point's Thayer Hotel on the first day of the three-day conference--and free and open source software (FOSS) was one of the top items on the menu.

The conference offered a three-paper session and a panel on using FOSS in the classroom that were well attended and generated good questions (and answers) about approaches, tools, and techniques for bringing students into FOSS. » Read more

Karl Fogel reminded me to check the copyright assignment for the scholarly papers I'm starting to submit on Teaching Open Source (TOS), particularly POSSE. I sat down and did some digging, and here's what I found--keep in mind these are the notes of an unschooled grad student new to the topic, uneducated on copyright and new to academic publishing--let me know if your experiences have involved other interpretations of these policies. In fact, I'm posting these assertions in the hope that people will correct me if I've made mistakes (and I will edit this post and provide attribution for the edits). » Read more

(This is the fourth and final post in the "Voices of POSSE" series, a collection of interviews conducted at this year's Professors' Open Source Summer Experience, held in Raleigh, NC, July 23-24.)

At Bacone College in Muskogee, OK, students use open source tools every day. They manage coursework with Moodle. They browse a school website built with Joomla. And they write papers with OpenOffice. » Read more

(This post is the third in the "Voices of POSSE" series, a collection of interviews conducted at this year's Professors' Open Source Summer Experience, held in Raleigh, NC on July 23-24.)
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Microphone static crackles.

Hi, everyone–Mel Chua here, reporting in. I'm recovering from POSSE, the Professors' Open Source Summer Experience, where we just kicked off our our 2011 cohort of professors over in Raleigh, North Carolina. Each of the faculty members here has committed to getting the students in at least one of their courses involved in open source community contribution during this coming school year, and they're off and running now after a weekend of intense cultural immersion. Let's recap the high points of POSSE Basics 2011, shall we?

Going-back-in-time sound effect, hazy visual shimmers. » Read more