Hi Folks,
Let me start by saying that I'm torn. In the spirit of being open, I was going to blog these thoughts. But upon reflection, I decided to post them to this group. I want to use my experience to highlight problems that I think are major roadblocks for instructors teaching open source, but I really don't want to discourage instructors who may read my blog. I also want to state that I'm posting problems for which I don't really have any answers. I am teaching a software engineering course this fall. I was approached by the GNOME Assistive Technology community with a cool project involving magnification of video using Cheese. I decided to explore the project and initially my concern was lack of knowledge about how video is processed. The platform for Cheese is GNOME 3. Note that I wrote my dissertation on Unix and have had some form of Linux on VirtualBox for two years now. I wouldn't call myself a Linux expert, but I am relatively knowledgeable. So here are the roadblocks. The first is time. I spent at least 80 hours in August trying to get VirtualBox on XP to host Ubuntu 11.04 with GNOME 3. After countless installs and uninstalls of VirtualBox and Ubuntu and lots of banging my head against the wall, someone from the GNOME A11y community kindly pointed out that Ubuntu and GNOME 3 don't play well together. OK, time to retrench. I have now spent some 20 hours installing a Fedora 15 guest on VirtualBox. This only required four different install attempts, but I have at least been successful. I've also spent four hours installing Cheese and I still haven't been successful. Panic is setting in. The second roadblock is lack of concrete directions. Let me explain. I have found FOSS communities to be very supportive within that community. However, what I'm trying to do is get a variety of applications from different communities to play together. I got my original idea for the project from the A11y community. In order to get as far as I did with VB/Ubuntu/GNOME 3, I had to join the VB community, interact with both the Ubuntu and the GNOME communities. I am also interacting with the Cheese community to get that installed. I have also spent many hours Googling my specific problems. While all of these communities have been helpful, many of my questions remain unanswered. The third is changing application during development. I want my students to be able to make a contribution to a FOSS project. In order to do so, they must be working on the most recent version of the product. However, this means that I can't stabilize the application before class starts, creating a risk that I'll be trying to teach students with an application that I can't get working. In addition, Updates tend to break things, requiring more time to figure out what to fix. OK, so I am now starting my second week in the semester and I have a working platform, but have been unable to install the application that I want students to use and get it running. In addition, I haven't had any time to work with the actual application. I consider myself more tolerant of risk in teaching than many of my peers and much more likely to let students learn in an environment where I don't know the answers than most of my peers. This is definitely panic time!!! These are some of the reasons why instructors get a text and follow the exercises at the end of the chapter and have students work on toy projects. And I find myself pondering where to go from here. Without any way to know how much more time and effort it will take to get Cheese to work, I can't tell whether to risk continuing. If I don't continue, what do I do for a project? I don't have time to handle the learning curve for a new FOSS project.. It is not my intent to deter folks from involving students in FOSS. Quite the opposite. But I also think that if we don't identify and find ways of handling these sorts of issues, We won't be able to get more instructors on board. Heidi
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