Thanks to your feedback, we've now got 3 out of 15 professors selected - welcome to Nannette Napier from Georgia Gwinnett College (http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/POSSE_2011_applicants#Nannette_Napier), who joins Steven Huss-Lederman and Kristina Striegnitz in the POSSE 2011 cohort.
We also have two new completed applications. Here they are, with my comments: http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/POSSE_2011_applicants#Karl_R._Wurst - Karl has taught his Software Development course in FOSS before, so he'd come to POSSE knowing exactly what resources he needs to fill the gaps he saw last year. In particular, he mentions course materials/assignments and infrastructure, which may help us anticipate and find/setup those sorts of resources for the entire cohort well in advance (for instance, discussing how to utilize the SoftHum course materials repository Greg Hislop and Heidi Ellis and others have been building, and making sure professors have access to a turnkey custom Planet aggregator for their students blogs or a set of very easy instructions to install them on their school's servers, to bring up two things Karl mentions in his application). I'm actually even more excited about the Freshman Seminar; it might be neat to have a group of first-year students watching the work of the other POSSE professors' classes, looking for larger cultural/sociological themes and having the time to do the readings and discussions on historical/legal/etc. aspects of the open source movement, since they won't be so focused on producing software. In fact, they could bring that sort of knowledge *to* the other POSSE professors' classes... one potential cool assignment might be to read the blogs of all those classes for a week or two, then point out several blog posts that fall into a theme from a reading (the difficulty of picking a license as a non-lawyer reading legal text for the first time, language/timezone challenges of an international community, etc.) Someone in Nannette's class might not realize they're a perfect example of the advantages of "release early, release often" until it's pointed out to them, for instance. http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/POSSE_2011_applicants#Andrea_Hickerson - I'm personally excited about the potential here for giving Andrea's students PR and journalism experience while *simultaneously* generating tons of coverage for every participating school. If Andrea's Newswriting students can be grouped into small teams, and each team assigned a POSSE professor, that professor's class will effectively have their own personal news crew for interviewing students, chronicling the class, digging into the backgrounds of the project communities the students are working in and the community mentors they're working with, interviewing those folks... and getting that press out through RIT, through the PR dept of the professor they're assigned to cover, *and* through Red Hat's PR department (so the work of the Newswriting students chronicling the work of the other classes would be seen even more widely). This might be overly ambitious, but if timelines match up... perhaps for a final assignment, Andrea's students could take the role of newswriting teachers and guide Karl's first-year students through a round of interviews and editing - both sides would learn firsthand about the remote apprenticeship process that's so common in FOSS communities, the freshmen would benefit from that sort of 1:1 mentorship with upperclassmen, and the Newswriting students would get to see how much they'd learned about writing during the course of the term. (And Worcester and Rochester aren't so far apart that a mid-point meeting class field trip is totally unthinkable.) Comments, questions, etc. would be most appreciated. I'm starting to see the pieces and threads of an amazing summer cohort come together, and I'd love to be able to admit them both. There are 12 seats remaining in this summer's cohort; see http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/POSSE#Apply to apply. If we get both Andrea and Karl, we'll have 10 seats left, so send those apps in now! Please holler if you've got any questions. Cheers, --Mel PS: Thanks to NeoPhyte Rep for linking in the userpages of the professors on the wiki page of applicants - it was a wonderful surprise to get back from POSSCON and find that done! _______________________________________________ tos mailing list tos@teachingopensource.org http://teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos
