Archive for July, 2009
POSSE week is over. Everyone has headed home, happy and exhausted. Honestly, I can’t say much more coherent stuff about POSSE right now – there’s too much in my brain to sort out after a mindboggling week of work that rewired a lot of my thinking about open source in academic contexts – but the summary is “open source in higher education is going to work – it’s going to be more wonderful than I could ever have imagined before this week – and it’s going to take a lot more time and work than I could ever have concieved.” I’ll come back to this with better notes after my brain is decompressed.
In the meantime, I will leave you with a picture of our final bit of swag. Which every classroom ought to have, in my biased opinion.
Friday, July 24th, 2009 | fedora, sugar, teaching open source | No Comments »
Sebastian Dziallas put together a Fedora Education Remix LiveCD for the POSSE professors to take home. It contains development tools and documentation bookmarks for the projects they worked on this week as well as several other open-source-and-education software projects that might be interesting communities to help with (like Moodle and Sugar).
The objective is to have a LiveCD that can be handed out to classes of students tasked with working on an open source project so that they can minimize their build/dev/contributing environment setup time, and so teachers know they can rely on all their students having a working version of a certain set of programs.
v.1.0 is now live and in the hands of professors for testing – based on this week, there are definitely improvements to be made for v.1.1. I think we’re missing some tools to complete all of the POSSE exercises, but can’t say exactly what those are until I go through the curriculum again next week – it’s hard to shoot at a moving target. (It’s also kind of fun.) Usage and experimentation and testing and feedback (and help) is very, very welcome.
Thanks, Sebastian!
Friday, July 24th, 2009 | fedora, teaching open source | No Comments »
Jeff Elkner: where do all the geek girls go? A high school teacher grapples with the realization that there’s actually an age at which the “tech is boy stuff!” inflection point hits – somewhere in middle school, girls drop out of STEM. (My response was basically “sometimes they just don’t think of themselves as geeks, for various reasons, even if they do or previously did what adults could see as “geeky stuff.”)
Caroline brought up the Zone of Proximal Development, the space between what I can do by myself and what I can do with someone else’s help. It’s where you want to learn; it’s where teaching and mentorship are most useful (because really, how can you teach someone something they can’t even do with help – although perhaps zen koans might not fit this framework…)
Every time I learn about things from “the world of education,” they make a lot of sense. They stretch my brain, they’re subtle, good, tough to really understand, but they make sense the same way some math or the “feel” of a brainstorm just Makes Sense to me. I mostly just don’t have the big names names and vocabulary words down, so I don’t know the right search terms to find the good research on these kinds of things.
I need to find a mailing list or IRC channel or Planet of education researchers to listen to – or whatever the equivalent would be in that domain (scholarly papers, yes, but researchers don’t have casual conversations in those formats…) – any ideas where to look, or what the list/channel/Planet equivalents would be? And yes, I’m applying for education grad school in the fall – nothing like immersion to teach you a language and a culture.
Friday, July 24th, 2009 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Matt asked me what kind of school I’d like to teach at once I get out of grad school. I hadn’t given this any thought before (I haven’t even gotten into grad school yet) but it’s a good one. Here’s a stab at it. Braindumping.
I know what I don’t want.
- A school that measures me solely by my research output and treats teaching as second-class – or worse, an annoyance that one has to put up with in order to DO RESEARCH!!! (Don’t get me wrong; research is awesome, and I enjoy it and look forward to doing more of it – but it’s not the end-all-be-all of my existence, and can never be.)
- A school that won’t let me be an engineering prof who does research on education. I want my engineering education research to count towards any “research” requirement I may have as a faculty member.
- A school that does not give its students the flexibility to design their own courses and paths of study. I need them to have room to move in order for me to help them move in it. And possibly past it.
- A school that does not value efforts (on my own part, if need be) to improve my teaching.
- A school that relentlessly hounds me to get more grant monies in.
Hm. This is starting to sound like the inverse of an “I do want this” list.
- Somewhere that values teaching ability – evaluates you based on it, at least in part (student evaluations, actual teaching effectiveness – not a popularity contest, but whether they learned stuff – I realize no metric and no instrument will ever be perfect for this)
- Somewhere I can do cool research, cross-disciplinary research, collaborative research with other faculty outside my own department, education research… somewhere other professors won’t be averse to me studying them and their classes for my research, too!
- Somewhere with flexible student paths, and students who can and will take advantage of the design-your-own-path option.
- Somewhere that will let me travel, present, take sabbaticals, consult, etc… and keep on working on awesome open source and education stuff. Perhaps as part of classes or research – this doesn’t have to be separate – but… it has to be there.
- It would be nice if this were somewhere in or near a city. Maybe this will change as I grow older, but I need the city right now, need the exposure, the stimulation I craved for so many years and finally got to experience in my late teens. Cities are a push experience. You can’t help but see things there. I haven’t been exposed to enough yet to be able to have a good pull experience out of the city – I don’t know what to look for, what I should be pulling in.
- A place with colleagues I want to grow up to become. I’m not sure how easy mentors will be to find as I run helter-skelter further down this quirky path I seem to be drawing out (barely ahead of where I’m running), but I want teachers too!
- And quite honestly, a school I would want to be the President of someday. Not that it will happen, or that I want it to (I tend to run away from titles and positions of power, in general) but it’s a good litmus test for an institution as a whole; is it an institution I would want responsibility for? I can’t just go to a school based on one department and think that I’ll be able to insulate myself in there. The whole dang institution has to be a place where I can move, or I’ll get stuck fast.
Stuff that I actually don’t care about:
- What country it’s in. (I love the US, but I don’t have to teach here all the time – maybe another continent might be more receptive.)
- I struggle to say this, and I’m not convinced I don’t care about it yet, but I don’t think I should: prestige. Yes, it would make a lot of things easier. But part of the point I want to chase down is that you don’t have to be part of $famous-university to make a big difference. That other types of schools are better, even, for doing certain types of Awesome. That there are different types of schools, not one giant number line with “good” schools on one side and “lesser” schools on the other.
- How “smart” my students are.
That last bit needs some explanation. I mean… well, here. I want them to be smart! But I love teaching students who are much, much smarter than they think they are. I can’t do much with kids who know they’re smart and strut around proving it (they’re all set, aside from learning to tone down the cockiness and work with people – and I can do that, but it’s not the best use of my time). And I can’t teach students who are so stuck in their ways of thinking, or so apathetic, or so… self-promotion-seeking (there must be a better term) that all they want is to check off a bunch of boxes and get a piece of paper, thank you very much, goodbye.
But I can teach frightened newbies (this is very far from what I want to say, but it’s the closest English phrase I can produce right now). They’re the ones I’ve historically been the best with – uniquely the best with, in the sense that kids I worked with well, nobody else had found a way to really help them before and other folks saw them as not worth the bother. The quiet ones who wouldn’t do stuff anyway – the ones who have to be asked. Asked, coached, persuaded of their own awesomeness, applauded when they start taking initiative, pushed hard, and loved.
Kids like me. I feel like I just barely made it through on a wing and a prayer, that there were so many chasms I could have fallen into along the… geez, has it been 17 years already? of my education, that… by all means, I should have slipped through the cracks and really not be anywhere near where I am now. I won’t list the many reasons here, but you can probably guess a bunch if you know me. I often see people frustrated, stuck, behind, confused, failing… and look at them and think that there but for the grace of God go I. And then I think “well hell, if I barely made it, how many people didn’t? How much potential are we wasting? If I managed to make it through and N others like me didn’t, don’t I owe it to those folks to make sure that the value of N diminishes like crazy – diminishes until it’s 0?”
I don’t know how much this helps in figuring out what kind of school I want to teach at, Matt – but this is what I’m thinking now.
I also don’t have to teach. I don’t have to be a professor. I’m running towards it because it’s the best way I can see to get the stuff I want to happen to happen. Nothing else I’ve seen comes close. But there’s a lot I haven’t seen.
What I want to happen is for the kind of learning that goes on in open source communities to be as valid as the kind that happens in universities – particulary with the engineering stuff – and I want it to happen by the two things becoming the same, and if these changes can happen better with me in a different role than I’m planning now, or even without me, then that is what I will do. I want that legacy before I die, but it doesn’t need to be my legacy. Doesn’t matter who does the job so long as it gets done.
I hate credentialism, and know that it may be the case that I would learn to be more effective in these areas by investing my time in things other than going to school. My goal in going to grad school is to be the last person who has to get into the ivory tower to make these kinds of changes within it. Some doors are most effectively unlocked from the inside. However, if I can be convinced that I’m more effective unlocking those doors from not-the-inside, I will do that instead. It’s just… the door of academia seems like it’s locked so tightly, built so thick, placed so high-up – what effect will any things I work on have within the ivory tower if they can’t get into it in the first place? If I become part of the gatekeeper, perhaps I can open the gate.
It’s not the only way to do it, sure. But it’s the best I know of so far. And I’d love to be corrected.
Thursday, July 23rd, 2009 | Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
Hanging out with Harvard Law students last spring opened my eyes up to a whole new world. It makes me notice stuff like this:
http://www.entrepreneur.com/tradejournals/article/203245713.html
In fact, he makes the case that the most open-source line of work around–the business in which competitors are not only free to help themselves to each other’s work but are actually encouraged to do so–is the legal profession. To prove his point, Young asks that you imagine a lawyer who spends months and maybe even years pursuing a case through the system and finally ends up making an oral argument before the U.S. Supreme Court, where his novel and clever interpretation of the law is embraced by the court and entered into precedent. “As soon as the words are out of his mouth, any other lawyer can use those words without his permission,” Young says.
The work behind that new Supreme Court precedent–the R&D, so to speak–would have been paid for by the lawyer’s client, who was on the hook for the billable hours that led to the decision. But neither the client nor the lawyer would be able to make any claim to the new interpretation of law. As Young points out, it would be immediately available at no cost to anyone who would like to use it for their own cases.
Law! It’s turned from “mysterious black box PLZ RUN AWAY!!!” into “mysterious black box that will remain pretty mysterious to me, but which I kind of know how to ask questions about, and have people to ask said questions to, because those people understand law in a way I never will – and I now also have some notion about the way lawyers think and what they do so that I know the vague shape of the tool it is, and how it sees and shapes things.” I have confirmed that I should probably never become a lawyer (in the same way I should never be a doctor in the conventional “go to med school” sense), but I’m incredibly fascinated by it now, and curious, and all those sorts of happy things.
Lawyers are cool.
Thursday, July 23rd, 2009 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Yep, we’re going back in time a little. Best conversation snip from last night’s POSSE dinner:
We have to go to Best Buy.
Why?
To get a wireless router.
Why do you need a wireless router?
<something about how they need to be online to do work>
<something about how don’t they have internet in their rooms?>
Yes, but it’s wired, everybody working in their own room. We have to work together.
The best thing that I’m learning from watching these professors is how to be a good learner of the kind of stuff we’re trying to teach. If you’re curious what’s been going on, here’s the curricula from Monday (intro to open source), Tuesday (building and packaging), and Wednesday (bugzilla and reviews).
I’ve been light on transcribing for Tues and Weds since it’s mostly the profs working through already-documented processes like how to make an RPM, but I would love to see their notes on the experience – not redocumenting how to, say, package – but notes on what was surprising, hard, confusing… before the “oh, of course that is the way it is” I’m-used-to-this comfort zone hits, while they still have the eyes of newcomers.
Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009 | fedora, teaching open source | No Comments »
My rule: If I ogle something for over a year and can afford it, I get to buy it. With that in mind, my two “luxury” purchases of the summer have been Vibram Five Fingers shoes (~$80) and Bose Companion II speakers (~$60, refurbished – thanks to my brother Jason for the tip).
I feel kind of guilty for getting such nice things, but I am going to use them, and I usually don’t spend a lot of money. I still look at the cost of eating out each night when I travel for work and fight the urge to skip a meal, even if it’s going to be reimbursed. When I was about to go on my first trip, I mentioned to a friend that I could probably just eat one meal a day if I stuffed myself with trail mix and bananas from the Red Hat office I was visiting, so I wouldn’t have to expense so much, and was told to “buy the $expletive food, you idiot, they budget for that kind of thing.” (Similarly, my dad had to yell at me to start booking hotel rooms rather than a bunk in 20-bed hostel rooms.)
Obviously I need to revise my notion of money. It’s great to be able to live cheaply, but being afraid of money and not wanting to deal with it – having it or spending it or getting it – because you don’t know how – is never a good thing.
On an unrelated note, I keep on feeling like a little fish who keeps on getting thrown into progressively larger and larger ponds – although by now I think I’ve graduated on to rivers. Maybe even oceans. Anyway. It’s exhilarating, seeing how fast you can adjust and how far you can go and how much you can learn and pass on. I’ve learned to trust the little voice that goes “but but not ready yet!” as a reliable indicator that I am ready – unless I can articulate exactly why I’m not ready and what would get me to that point, I’m ready, just afraid. Dammit, why am I always afraid?
So looking forward to Paul Frields coming to POSSE tomorrow. Also saving plenty of room for that lovely BBQ. Oh, North Carolina BBQ. I knew there was a reason why the office was here.
Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Photos courtesy of Ian Weller and Christian Jacobsen. Thanks, guys!
For those who aren’t at POSSE but are thinking of running or attending one next year, here is our SETUP OF AWESOMENESS.
Projectors: one on each side of the room. You can see Chris Tyler on the right and his projector in the back (with Fardad Soleimanloo watching) here: on the other side of the Big Round Table (cobbled together from multiple rectangular tables) is Dave Humphrey and a projection of his laptop on the opposite wall. This was especially fantastic for when they demoed IRC, because you could see what it looked like for people on both sides of the conversation.
The professors immediately (as in, “within 20 minutes of sitting down to dinner Sunday night”) started talking with each other instead of to us (Red Hat people). This is a MASSIVE WIN. However, it’s always nice to have folks like Max Spevack (standing) and Greg DeKoenigsberg in the back corner…
…you probably thought I was going to say something like “just in case,” but actually, “so we can learn from what the POSSE profs are doing” is more accurate. For instance, here’s Matt Jadud demoing his project to The Greg. (Yeah, okay, this photo wasn’t taken today; Greg has a different shirt on.)
To keep track of where people are in terms of what they’re learning, there’s a giant sticky note coordinate plane. The vertical axis is experience; the horizontal one is knowledge. The goal is to move everything to the upper right corner. Each sticky note has a professor’s name and a skill (like blogging, building, packaging, or IRC). Matt Jadud again, pointing at his blogging-fu:
And whiteboards. Lots of whiteboards. Whiteboards photographed by Ian. Seriously, I’m not sure I could have documented this week by myself – between the two of us, we’re blogging, microblogging, taking pictures, running the video camera… (Note: if you run a POSSE, document it! DOCUMENT IT!!!) (Also, the Open/Hosed sign is mine.)
Finally, I… guess I’m still a student at heart, because I’ve been far too overjoyed at seeing professors do homework than I perhaps should be. Here’s Ian Weller and Kent Palmer tooling late into the night at our hotel.
Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009 | fedora, olin, teaching open source | 1 Comment »
I seem to have a 24h lag in posting these notes. I’ll try to catch up tonight.
Along the “there are so many ways (not just code) to get involved” vein, Dave started describing a few very specific contributor types to get everyone thinking.
- QA people who can turn “it broke!” into “it broke at this minute on this day.” (regression windows)
- QA people who can turn “gmail makes my browser crash” into “these 3 lines of code make my browser crash.” (Note that the same person may not be good at this and regression windows at the same time – even within what we consider a subset of OSS contributions are yet more subsets!)
Here are some more.
- Writing and pushing press releases to newspapers when a new release of the project comes out. (In general, if you understand marketing and PR, OSS projects need you.)
- Keeping up with and summarizing the floods of information about a project – for instance, Gary generates a map like this every so often of keywords floating across the Sugar universe, and reading the Fedora Weekly News is easier than keeping up with all the mailing lists and IRC channels.
- An anthropology student came to the last FUDcon. She was from outside the Fedora community, and talking with her about her observations on how people worked together was one of the most mindblowing conversations I had all week. Holding a mirror up to communities is very, very helpful.
- License questions? Legal debates? IANAL, but maybe you are!
- Can you run events and meetings? Jump into a project and help the folks there keep themselves on track. The success of the first hackathon I ran can be attributed directly to Omar Pradhan, a former US Air Force Captain with amazing project management skills, showing up and kicking ass in getting everyone on track all weekend (actually, making a track to get on; I’d put out this feebly muddled schedule. Why do I drive events and meetings so hard? Because I watched Omar at my first one.
- Do you copeyedit? Can spel, spot sentence fragments – incorrect grammar? Make things make sense? We need you.
What other surprising contributions have you seen to OSS that you’d like more of? (I challenge anyone to find me a person with the slightest interest in contributing to OSS who can’t contribute. Small children, employees of proprietary software corporations with a strict “you can’t work on this code” clause, luddites… anyone.)
One of my favorite quotes from the past week:
Every newbie is someone’s guru.
They’re already interested in and good at something. Find that. As Chris said, “It’s not that you need to change who you are to contribute – it’s that you need to find out who you are and then how you can contribute who you are.” Professors create safe spaces for their students to discover these sorts of things. The rest of us who care about new contributors joining our projects ought to do the same.
Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009 | fedora, olin, sugar, teaching open source | 2 Comments »
Talking with some friends about “what is the future of the desktop paradigm?” (wherein my response has basically been “well, that’s an awfully vague question”) and figured I’d move the convo out because there are people with much, much more experience in this stuff out there (and who are way smarter regarding it than I am).
But how long is the mouse-keyboard-screen interaction going to stick around? We’re used to it, sure, but it’s not very good for our hands/arms/shoulders/backs. -Nikki
I see this as a much more concrete, actionable, and AWESOMETASTIC subset of the “what does the future of the desktop look like?” question.
It’s clear what our current primary interfaces with computers are.
- we look at screens (output)
- we type on keyboards (input, character)
- we use pointing devices, usually mice, but sometimes tablets. (input, single pair of x-y coords)
It’s clear how this may become different in the very, very near future – some of these
- multitouch/multiuser (input, multiple pairs of x-y coords)
- 3D (input, x-y-z coords)
- alternate text entry methods like voice rec, OCR, handwriting rec, foot pedals, treadmills, punching bags (input, character)
- ambient sensors and other forms of input with no separate “put this into computer” human action required (input, coordinates/text)
- combos of the above. for instance, 3D multitouch/multiuser gives us input with multiple pairs of coordinates made of tuples of arbitrary dimension.
And you can quickly see my blind spot: what other forms of input would we want to give computers that don’t come in the form of characters/text or spatial coordinates over time?
Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
