On Tue, 25 Aug 2009, C. Titus Brown wrote: > -> My name is Adam Miller and I'm a Fedora contributor as well as a -> > graduate student. I got a really random idea last week about a course -> > I would like to see taught at my University (Sam Houston State -> > University) and I went through my usual channels for peer review and -> > was then referred to Mel Chua and Mel was kind enough to comment as -> > well as send me the direction of teachingopensource.org and the -> > mailing list so here I am. The current draft of my idea is located -> > here: http://maxamillion.fedorapeople.org/course_idea_draft1 -> -> I > have spoken with the Computer Science Department Chair -> informally and > was told once I get the idea refined I can "sales -> pitch" it to him, > so I am here hoping for some review (positive or -> negative, everything > is welcome). I'm just wanting to hash things out -> and make a solid > proposal so that I might actually be able to pull -> this off as a > course to have taught here to undergraduates. > > Hi adam, > > one comment -- I would suggest choosing an existing active project to > work on, rather than creating a new one from scratch. Overcoming that > initial inertia and building a "real" open source community around a new > project will be quite tough.
I agree. The two opinions that seem to predominate here: * Select one project and encourage all students to work in it. Good because, if you choose the proper project, it's much easier to get the support of the project, get to know project leaders, figure out useful work for students to do, etc., etc. Only works for large-ish, mature-ish projects. * Have students select their own projects. Good because students may feel more attachment to their own choice, but risky because the project may be less able to onboard them. I've heard of successful classes following both models -- but very few that succeed in creating their own project. That's hard and takes fulltime resources -- which a professor, realistically, cannot be. (Unless you're talking about a subproject of a larger project, which might work in collaboration with members of the larger project.) Also, if we're lucky, we might have a textbook more suitable for newbie students than Fogel. Even though Fogel's book is excellent. --g -- Computer Science professors should be teaching open source. Help make it happen. Visit http://teachingopensource.org. _______________________________________________ tos mailing list tos@teachingopensource.org http://teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos
