Been there, kinda. When I blundered into this several years ago by starting with the idea of students making OLPC games it turns out that I insulated my students from many of these conflicting technology issues while still having them make things in an active community with real world users. So in a sense, the games weren't toys.
When we pursued open video chat, to make a long story very short, we ran into several technology and OS version conflicts. We created a proof of concept version that worked technically, but well as a packaged solution. We may yet take a swing at it this year now that some of those things have changed. I think the answer to the problem you pose is a difficult one, but that in general there's a lot of work incumbent on profs to really research the projects and communities they work with to ensure they aren't faced with the kinds of issues you are running into. Unfortunately that requires a lot of effort and background knowledge on the part of the prof. One thing TOS might do is identify a select group of projects that each of us has worked on and would be willing to mentor and/or run interference for within the community as needed. We could look for a variety that covered a range of areas ( 2 hci projects, 2 OS projects, etc ) These could be put in to the emerging textbook, have a place on the wiki, etc. Thoughts all? Sent from my iPhone On Sep 4, 2011, at 8:00 AM, "tos-requ...@teachingopensource.org" <tos-requ...@teachingopensource.org> wrote: > An experience report.... _______________________________________________ tos mailing list tos@teachingopensource.org http://lists.teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos
