Matt Jadud and I are giving a talk this Friday at his undergraduate alma mater, Kenyon College. I haven’t seen Matt since POSSE this summer and am looking forward to long conversations with him on the nature of academic life and other things, possibly punctuated by bottles of my favorite rootbeer.
Our topic is how liberal arts students can get involved in open source.
Take a Walk in the Commons: Open Source and the Liberal Arts
As educators in the liberal arts, we try to prepare our students for a lifetime of learning. When we introduce our students to open communities as part of their classroom experience, we provide them with an opportunity to engage with the world around them and help solve real problems for real people. Participation in open communities as part of the undergraduate experience provides ways of developing and practicing communication, teamwork, and leadership skills—and contrary to popular belief, sometimes the most valuable contributions are the nontechnical ones.
In this talk, we’ll explore the wide range of opportunities for students to get involved in open source and open communities, with examples, case studies, and concrete next steps you can take as an educator or student to bring these opportunties into your classrooms and projects. Regardless of whether your interests are intellectual property law, computing in the sciences, enabling government transparency, language learning, or something else entirely, there’s an open community waiting for students to contribute and make a difference.
As of today (November 30, 2011) our slides are almost-but-not-quite done – comments welcome on what we do have, which is up on github. Slides were created with Beamer. Which brings me to noting two things I learned today:
Installing Beamer on Fedora 16
Beamer is a lovely little tool that uses LaTeX for making presentation slides. And all the Fedora installation instructions I found for Beamer are incorrect, so I’ll save you the hour of head-scratching I endured this afternoon and tell you that you need two packages beyond whatever comes with the default F16 install. Just yum install texlive-texmf-latex texinfo-tex and you should be all set to jump into the directory with beamer slides and make away.
If you want to try out beamer, here’s a quick little walkthrough that’ll get you looking at our current slides in 5 lines, assuming you already have git installed (if not, yum install git first).
git clone git@github.com:mchua/A-Walk-in-the-Commons.git # grab the code
cd A-Walk-in-the-Commons/presentation # go to the slide files
sudo yum install texlive-texmf-latex texinfo-tex # install beamer
make # builds the beamer slides into a pdf
evince a-walk-in-the-commons.pdf # and you've got them!
Changing the origin of your git repository
My git repository of the slides is actually a fork of Matt’s. I cloned his original, made and committed my changes, and then realized that I didn’t have push access to his repository, so I forked my own. But my commits were still lined up to push to Matt’s repository – how do I tell git to push to my new repository instead? It took a couple minutes of scanning through manpages and searching the intarwebs, so here’s the answer for posterity (for the record, the solution came when I finally realized we did this for SoaS documentation git issues).
git remote rm origin # remove the original repository (in this case, Matt's)
git remote add origin git@github.com:username/your-new-repository # add my new repository
git push origin master # and now it pushes to the right place
Ah, the end of the semester. The time of year when I curse how much I’ve taken on with one hand, and sign up for even more next term with the other. I’m trying to reverse this trend; it’s better to commit to few things well than to many things poorly, and it’s always a possibility to pick up on the optional if there’s free time.
Written? Kitten! got me through a first draft of my first lit review. A wiki of engineering education resources provides a productive stream of distractions; even if I’m not doing my assignments, I’m at least learning something related to my field. I’m either working, sleeping, relaxing, or (more commonly) trying to relax; it’s the first time I’ve made a point of striving for balance instead of trying to work as much as possible, and (to my surprise, but still to my constant untrusting anxiety) work manages to get done anyway. It is a gas that expands to fill all available space.
You train into rhythms and build up storehouses when times are good so that when times go haywire, you have habits and reserves to draw upon. I’m glad I started hitting the gym this semester; the increased fitness makes my spates of terrible posture and late-night typing now all right, even if I’m now skipping sessions and slumping during the times I manage to hit the gym, barely managing to creak out 11-minute miles on the treadmill, wearily dragging myself through lunges holding 20lbs. It’s something I know how to do now, so I can still sort of do it, even badly. Light discipline in more things next semester, I hope, following that pattern. Light discipline that looks silly and easy when the times are good, but will be gritty to stick through when the times get hard.
This is difficult to do alone. I need to set up study groups, pairing times, social-work hours to get through. Accountability. People to sit and work beside me in parallel, even if we are working on different things. Supper-and-studying buddies. Alone, it’s too easy to get distracted.
Sanity… it’s a good thing. I’m trying to maintain it, and I hope I’m getting better every time.
Portland is a weird town, slapped together from recycled materials, hovered-over by a helicopter whine as funk and blues and rock and jazz and tinny radios from food trucks spill over tent cities and 24-hour neon donut signs. Gleaming trains. A city block that’s all-bookstore, sprawled mazes of shelves. A skinny red-haired guy dancing his heart out, sleeveless and barefoot, on a stage; a Chinese bistro with giant loops of handmade paper swooping from the ceiling, and a spicy sausage smearing through the foil in my hand, cold rain dripping into my collar. It’s a city that’s eclectic in its pride.
During GHC, I kept looping back to the Hasso Plattner Institut table, peppering the grad students there with questions. Really? You’re an Olin-sized institution right outside Berlin focused on real working computing systems (as opposed to theory) and Stanford d-school style design and a group working on the impact of the internet on educationand you’re looking for summer graduate researchers and postdocs? And you think my background is interesting? Well. Hallo there. I guess I’ll have to send some emails. Probably not this summer (although… I don’t know!) but possibly a semester or a school year sometime in the future, depending on how my research direction pans out.
GHC itself was… wow. I kept on going around thinking wait, it’s a tech conference! and wait, we’re all female! which – okay, yes, expected for a Women in Computing conference, but I’ve never before felt so safe and welcome and relaxed at a conference, and I hardly knew anyone there… even at conferences where I know a large proportion of attendees, even at conferences I’ve organized, I’ve never felt this way.
Holy crap. Conversations were easy to slide into. Connections were so easy to make. I’m shy! I don’t go to the conference party and let loose on the middle of the dance floor! I don’t strike up conversations with strangers in the hall, at the back of a session, waiting for the train… but I did. I didn’t have to prove or defend myself. Feeling that safe felt… strange. And I think it was the combination of that net of safety in a strange city with new people that finally led me to take some bigger steps I’ve been afraid of for a while.
It’s still travel, though. It’s still lonely. But sometimes you need the lonely. Sometimes you need to sit in the discomfort. I think that’s why long walks like the Coast-To-Coast and El Camino de Santiago appeal to me, why I like long roadtrips on dark nights. It’s forced reflection. Packing light allows one to afford improvisation (hat-tip to Sumana for the link). I’m definitely eyeing this 18″ luggage because my battered yellow carry-on (purchased for supercheap when I started working for Red Hat and therefore traveling a lot) is literally falling apart; I also somewhat covet Tom Bihn bags. I should figure out my use case, write specs from that, make a purchasing decision, then save for it and get it once my yellow luggage finishes ripping to pieces – which means that I should plan out the trips I want to take. Hm.
“It is essential to happiness that our way of living should spring from our own deep impulses and not from the accidental tastes and desires of those who happen to be our neighbors, or even our relations.” — Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness
I’m exhausted. I’m behind on a lot of things. I’m scattered, anxious, and a little lonely. But I’m okay. I’m here and present in the world, and I’m… alive. It’s good to be like that. It’s good to know you’re doing the best you can, even if that’s nowhere near perfect or even sometimes nowhere near good. Plateaus are okay, but they’re scary right before you leap, when you don’t know what’s going to take shape yet. So it’s all right, and it’ll work out.
Must remember hat.
Must go to sleep now. I’ve got a long flight and a long drive and a long night installing my art project tomorrow.
I apologize in advance to any actual German speakers who may stumble across this post; I have not gotten my writing checked by anyone who knows the language properly. In fact, I wrote it on an airplane without a grammar book using the dictionary on my cell phone to help me figure out how to translate weird but crucial words like “Free/Libre and Open Source Software Communities” – the everyday vocabulary is my own. This means that things like “proper spelling” and “appropriate word choice” are absent. (Yes, I know that “typen” is not a direct translation of “dialect,” but I don’t know the word for “dialect,” ok?)
This is basically the best German I can produce (mostly) unaided right now. It is probably terrible, but… release early, release often! I’ll provide an English translation at the end for what I think I’m saying so that non-German speakers can nod in sympathy and German speakers can shake their heads in despair at the atrocity I have committed to their language. FAIL FASTER, LEARN FASTER!
Hallo – ich heisse Mel. Ich bin Studentin und Ingenieur, und ich wohne in Indiana (in dem USA), aber ich komme aus der Internet. Meine Grosseltern kommen aus China, und sie sprechen zwei typen Chinesische (Mandarin und Fookien, unser Familie Chinesische typen) und Philippinisch und ein bisschen Englisch. Meine Eltern kommen aus Philippines und sie zwei typen Chinesische und Filippinisch und Englisch sprechen. Ich in dem USA geboren, heirfuer ich sprache… Englisch. Ich bin Amerikaner! (Dieses Stereotyp ist nicht so guet.)
Ich studiere Open Source Gemeinden: wer arbeiten, was machen sie, weshalb hilfen sie, wasfuer ein Wissen sie gelernt. (Open Source Gemeinden heisst auch FLOSS/FOSS/OSS Gemeinden – das bedeutet “Free/Libre (befreite?) und Open Source (erkennbar Code? Ich weiss nicht, was Wort ist richtig hier) Software, daher ich will sagen “FOSS.”) Gibt es viele FOSS-Volk in Deutschland, aber ich verstande nicht, was sie sagen. Sie verstanden Englisch, aber wir (Amerikannern?) sprechen kein Deutsch, daher sie wissen, was wir machen und wir wissen nicht, was machen sie. Ich moechte nach Berlin fliege (gibt es eine wichtig Hackerspace in Berlin) und sehe, was sie machen. Das ist eine Anlass, warum ich Deutsch lerne.
Aber ich habe ein kleines Problem. Ich bin auch schwerhoerig, darum viele Deutsch Klasse ist schwer… “Hoeren Sie und wiederholen Sie” ist nicht ohne Frustration, wenn sie hoeren nicht! Ich kann nicht wiederhole, was ich kann nicht hoere… ich muss lese. Ich hierfuer die Buecher kaufe, und jetzt ich habe ein Blog fuer schreibe. Ich weiss nicht, was ich schreibe… ich habe viele Fehler! Dennoch, das ist der Weg fuer Wissen.
Ich habe eine Fragen fuer Sie, mein Dozentenstellung. (Ist das Wort richtig, “Dozentenstellung”? Mein Handy hat ein kleines Worterbuch und er sagt “Dozentenstellung.”) Ich suche etwas fur lese. (Mein Grammatik ist heute vermutlich falsch.) In dem USA wir haben etwas heisst “Simple English” fuer Erwachsene, das ein bisschen Englisch verstanden. Haben Deutschland etwas fuer Erwachsene, das ein bisschen Deutsch verstanden… “Einfach Deutsch”? Oder Buecher fuer Kinder… ich lese heute “Der Kleine Prinz,” was sollte nach ich lese?
And now in a language I actually know!
Hello, I’m Mel. I’m a student and an engineer, and I live in Indiana (in the USA), but I come from the Internet. My grandparents come from China, and they speak two dialects of Chinese (Mandarin and Fookien, our family’s Chinese dialect) and Tagalog and a little English. My parents come from the Philippines and they speak two dialects of Chinese and Tagalog and English. I was born in the USA, therefore I speak… English. I’m an American! (This stereotype is not so great.)
I study open source communities: who works, what they do, why they help, what sort of knowledge they learn. (Open Source Communities are also called FLOSS/FOSS/OSS Communities – that means “Free/Libre (free?) and Open Source (transparent Code? I don’t know what word is correct here) Software, so I will say “FOSS.”) There are many FOSS people in Germany, but I can’t understand what they say. They understand English, but we (Americans?) don’t speak German, so they know about what we’re doing and we don’t know what they’re dong. I want to fly to Berlin (there’s an important hackerspace in Berlin) and see what they’re doing. That’s one reason why I’m learning German.
But I have a little problem. I’m also deaf, so most German classes are hard… “Listen and repeat back!” is not without frustration when you can’t hear! I can’t repeat what I can’t hear… I need to read. Therefore, I’m buying books, and now I have a blog for writing in. I don’t know what I’m writing… I have lots of mistakes! However, that is the way to knowledge.
I have a question for you, my readers. (Is that word correct, “Readers”? My cellphone has a little dictionary, and it says “Readers.”) I’m looking for something to read. (My grammar is probably incorrect today.) In the USA we have something called “Simple English” for adults that understand a little bit of English. Does Germany have something for adults who understand a little bit of German… “Simple German”? Or books for kids… today I’m reading “The Little Prince,” what should I read next?
I had an insight just now that makes me somewhat uncomfortable. Next semester’s schedule has me signed up for 5 graduate classes… so far. The original plan was 7 until classes got cancelled on me, but any grad student will tell you that even 5 is an insane load (3 is considered a very full schedule here).
So, question: do I need CART for any of these? My first instinct was no, I’ll be fine, these aren’t going to be giant lecture classes. 30 students at most. I can cope.
But! I cope by zoning out and choosing to miss things, choosing to make do with less information. I can understand most classroom discussions when I decide to, but it’s a decision to focus my full powers of attention on it, and the cognitive load is… while not backbreaking, it wears on me. It’s the effort equivalent of running at 6mph. Most folks can run at the rate of a 10-minute mile; it’s not hard. But 6mph running is nontrivial enough that if you needed to start jogging vigorously every time you wanted to find out what people were saying, you’d more often let some conversations go by so you could think about other things, so you could rest, because even 6mph is ridiculous if you do it for 10+ hours at a stretch with no break. So I withdraw. Constantly. Habitually. Almost unconsciously – it’s a learned rhythm that I’ve adopted for survival for so many years.
Actually, I’m watching myself do it right now as I write this post from the corner of the classroom. And that’s what triggered the insight.
I think I’ll actually be fine with my advisor’s 1-credit offering on social construction of knowledge; I’ll check the registration numbers, but think it’ll effectively be a tiny reading group with someone who knows me well, and I’ve done well auditing a class in that format this term — full engagement, no zoning out. I’m also pretty confident about my German reading course, which historically tops out around 3-5 students and is basically the “hey, grad students who don’t speak any German but want to read German texts for your scholarly work; we’ll teach you how to get through them with a dictionary” class. No lectures. Lots of books, books about books, books about reading books… it’s a course grounded in text. I’m very good at that, and have talked with half a dozen people in the department (including the chair and the instructor) to make sure I’ll be okay.
My other three classes are likely to be more like the one I’ve got this semester; enrollment in the 20-somethings, a mix of lecture and reading and discussion. I can survive in them, I know that. I can probaby thrive in them, if I seriously haul ass. But maybe I should make it easier to thrive in them… not necessarily so that I can work less hard (because I usually throw myself completely into things no matter what), but so that I can go farther, since the earnestness of my efforts will go into better work rather than being able to understand.
Strange concept. It only makes sense when there is no maximum of “better” – no “okay, I am good enough and I am done now” point… where there is something more I could do with my extra energy that would make a difference. If you’re going to get a ham sandwich no matter what, paying 30% more for that sandwich than your classmates do is fine if you can’t otherwise spend that money anyway. But if you could use that extra 30% to upgrade to a brie, apple, and caramelized onion panini instead, then… glory, why would you pay the extra tax? Use your surplus to go for even more deliciousness! In grad school, it’s not about how much I can do… it’s about how far I can go in something, and any powers I can bring to bear on mastery of something will be… good.
I feel guilty writing this. Entitled. After all, it’s not like I can’t survive without assistance. I have done it all my life; I’m smart and scrappy and extremely good at making-do. But the resources are here, and maybe… making it easier for me to thrive so I can do more for the world, maybe… that’s not a bad thing. Maybe. It’s dumb to say “I accomplished average awesomeness, but I did it by struggling to lipread all the time!” because… masochism in and of itself does not improve the world. And it’s not like I’ll be getting addicted to a crutch I can’t get by without. Clearly I can manage without support. Hell, I can kick ass without it.
So how much more ass could I kick with it? Let’s find out.
A number of projects in my department are web-based: iKneer, globalhub, cleerhub. If you go there and can’t find out what they are, what they do, how to use them, or who you’d share them with and why, you’re probably not alone — having talked with some of the researchers behind them, they are awesome groups that really want to transform engineering education, and the resources they’re creating have tons of potential, but it’s hard to see it from the outside.
But that just means there are a lot of opportunities for opening things up — which is fantastic. I’d much rather help something awesome that should get out to a bigger audience go reach that audience than a bunch of people who want to reach a lot of people “just because,” but have nothing to give them. Since the term “opening up” is still a bit vague, here are a couple common recommendations I’ve made:
Whenever possible, don’t require people to register. They shouldn’t need to just to see the data that you have. Allow users without logins to access as much of the functionality of your site as possible. If I can’t find out whether the site is worth my time, I will decide it isn’t worth my time, and I will walk away. Simply requiring registration makes traffic plummet.
Only require registration if it is clear that you functionally need my information to
provide me with a service I want. For instance, it is arguably difficult to send me email
updates on new features on the site without my email address. Mozilla add-ons is a good example of a site that does it right. Let me quote their registration policy:
Registration on [this site] is not required if you simply want to download and install public add-ons.
You only need to register if:
You want to submit reviews for add-ons
You want to keep track of your favorite add-on collections or create one yourself
You are an add-on developer and want to upload your add-on for hosting on AMO
This makes sense. By the time I’m thinking about (for instance) submitting a review, I’ve probably already used an add-on for which I want to write a review; I’m already invested in your project and you’re going to help me deepen an investment that I want to make. Good.
Try to let people reuse what they already have. Login with (insert your favorite popular web service). Instead of making people make yet another profile page, just let them link to one they have (their faculty page, their personal blog, their Twitter/identi.ca account, whatever).
Make it really, really easy for people to take your work and data and displays out to the places they already have. This almost requires allowing public data viewing, because otherwise people can’t even link to your work. If you want to go one step further, allow embedding — think about how you can include a YouTube video on your website… what’s your website’s equivalent for other people? In effect, you’re letting your users do your marketing for you on their sites, which likely reach an audience you can’t (or maybe didn’t even think of).
Provide tutorials. Now that you have an unexpected audience you may not be able to see, you won’t always be there to hold their hand and answer questions when they arrive… so make sure that have some way to get those anwers.
Now for some common responses.
“But we need to track impact statistics! How can we get funding unless we know who we’re affecting?”
Open it up. Does Google require registration to perform a simple web search? No. Is anyone going to say Google’s search page is not having an impact on the internet? I doubt it. Be creative – there are many other ways to measure impact (hits, pageranks, clicks, links) that don’t rely on registration. Web startups do it all the time.
If you don’t do something unless you can measure it, you’re limiting your impact to what you can measure, which is always going to be a tiny, tiny subset of the impact you could have. Instead, try to have the biggest impact possible, then measure what you can, and argue that there’s plenty more that’s not measurable (“so if we can measure this much, think of how much more is out there!”)
“That works for the internet, Mel. Academia is different.”
Right, and your academic project is a website. The laws of human behavior don’t suddenly go wild just because something comes out of a university. (Facebook and Google and Yahoo came out of universities.) If you want to see evidence that this applies to metrics that researchers care about, there are plenty of studies showing that open access increases impact. The more accessible you make your scholarly work and the easier you make it for people to use your research… the more they’ll use it. (This shouldn’t be surprising!) And yes, this has been verified as likely to be a causal effect.
Anyhow. I am available to help with these sorts of things, if projects are interested — applying open source principles to academia and education is a big interest of mine (it’s why I’m in grad school in the first place). If you are interested in working something out, poke me - I’m always up for interesting conversations!
For our “History & Philosophy of Engineering Education” class at Purdue, we’re supposed to make videos that represent our vision of the future of engineering education. My team’s still pulling together our magnum opus, but I drafted up rough sketches for my portion and wanted to share a bit. Meet “Alex,” a student admissions vlogger for the (fictional) Donovan College set several decades in the future, far enough that SATs are an amusing historical artifact, South Africa is the hotbed of software innovation, and Harry Potter is “classic children’s literature.”
Basically, if my grand-niece were to take up engineering… what might her blog look like? (“Wait… Lola Mel, you used cell phones to talk with people? And did you really fly in airplanes?”)
So here’s the first post of school year by “Alex,” a Legal Engineering major at Donovan, explaining her internship classes and why she wants to do a term abroad in South Africa even if it might mean she takes 3 whole years to graduate.
Another post from a few months later, wherein Alex explains what to do if your library doesn’t have a fab center to print the parts for the design challenge and recounts a story Dr. Nathan told her class about the way people used to apply to college before portfolios were widespread… there was this test called the Standardized… Academic? Achievement? Standardized Something-That-Starts-With-The-Letter-A Test, and people got assigned numbers when they took it. Weird.
The audio quality is probably terrible; my microphone is about to give up the ghost. They’re drafts! They’re drafts! They’re not meant to be good! I did transcribe them, so you can turn on English subtitles and view the interactive transcript (mmm, technology and accessibility). But in a nutshell, this is my lo-fi glimpse into the future.
Oh. And in the event I do end up having a grand-niece named Alex, and she ever watches this, then… er… hi! Greetings from the crazy young version of your crazy old aunt.
As a foodie who’s had to repeatedly explain my job in free/open source software creation to non-technical people (hello, family!), I greatly appreciated the brilliant analogy in “I am a software chef” by Stanislav Ochotnicky.
I am a software chef. I create recipes and prepare them. I work in a restaurant, that we call Linux distribution. There are many restaurants, each having their own recipes, rules and so on… Each restaurant usually has hundreds of chefs, some of them specialize in few recipes (build scripts), some are more flexible. In my case I specialize in a type of recipes dealing with coffee (i.e. Java)… Quite often the food is made of more recipes (dependencies) and I have to create those first. Sometimes these recipes are already being prepared by other chefs, so I just use their work for my final meal…
Creating recipes is only part of my job though. I also work with our suppliers of ingredients (upstream developers)… Third part of my job is improving cooking process… So sometimes I move some furniture around so that other chefs don’t have so much between the fridge and other places. Or I create a new mixer (tools) that speeds up mixing of ingredients.
The full analogy is in Stanislav’s blog post, and I can’t help but think this would make an excellent lesson plan somewhere.
Some people absorb the spoken accents of whatever place I’m in. I absorb the written accent of whatever text I read. My poor 6th grade English teacher got to read my essays as I swept through Dickens, Bronte, and Shakespeare (that was a particularly amusing phase). It’s been a blessing; I can pick up disciplinary writing styles swiftly and (after a number of iterations for feedback) write things “in the language” of a certain group of people, given sufficient opportunity to “overread” (as opposed to overhear) them enough beforehand.
My problem now: a large portion of the text I’m reading these days looks like this (direct quote from a document):
The project represents an important step… to catalyze even broader conversations across the American engineering education enterprise on creating a vibrant engineering academic culture for scholarly and systematic innovation in engineering education to ensure that the U.S. engineering profession has the right people with the right talent for a global society.
Consequently, my own writing has started filling up with grandiose, generic platitudes that feel good but actually have no content. (Alternative: technical documentation that is full of data and precision, and devoid of soul, coherence, or flow.) Gah. Sharp edges! Snap! Wittiness! Where did they go? But these are the foundational works of my (nascent) field; I have to read them if I want to learn my way in.
So I flood myself with more reading to counter it, strategically… reading good bloggers as a palate cleanser before I write, reading science writing for the general public right before I go to bed, reading technical textbooks I admire when I see my words slipping into vagueness (see, that’s why I have a textbook collection — they are voices to absorb). I rewrite them into Mel-style notes, distributing single-pagers flecked with puns and colloquialisms to my classmates to stand in for 100-page essays written as many years ago (the Mel-style single-pagers are a hit). I try to stay aware.
But still, my voice dulls. I am dissatisfied. I wish I had a better way to watch this skill, to shape it. An editor? A coach? I actually have no idea how one does this… what is the name for the kind of feedback I’m looking for, and who can give it to me? How do I find them?