teaching open source

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

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

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

(This post is the first 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.) » Read more

We asked you earlier what you'd ask 1,200 computer science professors about open source given the chance. So when I headed down to Dallas, Texas for SIGCSE 2011, the largest CS education conference in the world, I took your notes to the Teaching Open Source (TOS) birds of a feather session and listened in on the conversations there. » Read more

What can you do with a boardroom, a projector, and a wifi access point? A movie night, you say? Nope. Just a few tools is all it took to get Mel Chua and Jan Wildeboer (from Red Hat) and Pierros Papadeas (from Fedora) together with local organizer Michael Adeyeye from the Cape Peninsula University of Technology. The event? A week-long workshop on the principles of open source communities and how to employ these in university-level teaching--in Cape Town, South Africa. » Read more

In 2007, Sean O'Sullivan, one of the founders of MapInfo, graciously made a donation to his alma mater, the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY with the specific goal of creating a center for the promotion of open source among undergraduates: » Read more

One of the challenges of working in the space between academia and open source communities is translating the cultural and timescale differences. One approach to bridging the gap is to empower people already in the academic space–like professors--to navigate the free and open source software (FOSS) world and bring that knowledge back to the institutions they come from. The week-long POSSE Professors' Open Source Summer Experience (POSSE) workshop, sponsored by Red Hat, aims to do just that. » Read more

It's taken me months to approach this article. It was going to be about the day-to-day life of tenure-track faculty. But, in the end, I can't write it. I've started this article a half-dozen times in the past few months, and writing about the day-to-day life of the faculty is not something I can do right now. » Read more