On 04/15/2010 12:20 PM, Greg DeKoenigsberg wrote: > On Thu, 15 Apr 2010, Shlomi Fish wrote: > >> I don't want to discourage Teaching Open Source or other efforts, but we >> should consider whether forcing young people to get involve in FOSS >> development against their will would be beneficial in the long run. > > I agree: this shouldn't be about forcing people to get involved. It > should be about providing the *opportunity* to get involved in a > structured way.
Yep. Opportunities, and the ability to take advantage of them. It wasn't my teachers or my classes in high school that exposed me to open source; a few older students did (which is why I'm excited about the work Ryan is doing with the Campus Ambassadors program). But it was the fact that I *lived away from home* for high school that gave me the ability to take advantage of the inadvertent opportunity to learn about open source from my high school friends. Since it wasn't "for class," it wasn't something I would have been allowed to spend my free time learning, had I lived at home. Had I been given the choice to gain academic credit for participating in open source, *then* perhaps I could have both (1) lived at home and (2) gotten into open source without (3) setting off parental panic flags. Sometimes, kids aren't allowed to catch the bug for anything that isn't for credit, or directly applicable (from their family/culture's point of view) towards Their Future; an opportunity isn't really an opportunity unless you're able to take advantage of it. --Mel _______________________________________________ tos mailing list tos@teachingopensource.org http://teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos
