With only 1 day to go before SIGCSE, the "Special Interest Group in Computer Science Education" conference and the largest CS education conference in the world, my inbox has been filling with invitations to do this, see that, visit this booth, enter this raffle. For an introvert and first-time SIGCSE attendee like me, it's all a little overwhelming. My own preference is for deep communication, even if the tradeoff means I can't talk with as many people - I'd rather have 5 excellent conversations than 500 handshakes and rocket pitches.
Over the years, I've found writing to be a good way to let me get those deep experiences while also sharing them with a much wider audience - and so myself and a number of Teaching Open Source professors and opensource.com authors have been planning a tag-team effort to cover SIGCSE on opensource.com/education. Familiar faces include Allegheny College and Olin College, as well as Grant Hearn from the University of the Western Cape whom we met in Cape Town and Mihaela Sabin from the University of New Hampshire. Oregon State University's Leslie Hawthorn and Trinity College's Ralph Morelli will be pitching in on coverage of the HFOSS Symposium on humanitarian open source projects, and we're still looking for suggestions and more authors... so if you're looking for a way to get involved with SIGCSE or opensource.com, join the authors list and introduce yourself - this is a great opportunity to get started.
We're gearing up to hit the ground running, notebooks and cameras in hand - and we need your help.
Which sessions should we cover? The schedule is huge, and we want to hit the ones that people are interested in, so take a look and let us know where we should go to find great opensource.com articles.
Who should we interview? I have a video camera and a sound recorder. Matt Jadud has a video camera and a sweet, sweet SLR. There's a giant list of presenters, and even more attendees. Do any of these folks strike you as people with potentially great open source stories to tell? Help us find them!
What do you want to hear about? There are 1,200 CS professors here who specifically care about education - not just research and publishing (although they're often excellent in that area as well). These are the professors who wrote kind replies to your 2am email about problem sets when you were back in college, the ones who tried to do something awesome in every algorithms lecture, the ones who stopped you in the hallway as a senior and helped you find your first job. And some of their students are there as well - undergraduates curious about the design of the learning experiences they're going through, graduate students hoping to become great professors themselves someday.
What are you curious about? What would you like them to know? Let us know in the comments, and we'll do our best to find the answers for you.
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