Posts that are fedora-ish
I was just looking for Fedora materials suitable for an “Extreme IT Day” for high school and college students, and thought I’d share what I found. Some of these are oldies but goodies, and all of them are suitable for teens who may not have had prior exposure to free software.
Fedora Flyer by Max Spevack – (odt) (png-front) (png-back) (other languages)
Fedora Cheat Cube by Nushio – (png) (other languages)
The remainder are flyers from SXSW by Mo Duffy and the Design Team – the download links on that post are broken, so I tracked down the individual pdfs.
(Assets-flyer.pdf)
(Whatcanitdo-flyer.pdf)
(Interviews-flyer.pdf)
(Guesswho-flyer.pdf)
(Getinvolved-flyer.pdf)
Monday, October 31st, 2011 | fedora, teaching open source | No Comments »
A big welcome to Monica Cardella’s “Informal Learning Environments” graduate class here at Purdue’s Engineering Education department. Here… is your mission for two weeks from now. We’re going to dive into my informal learning environment, the world of open source.
Reading 0: What’s open source?
In order to talk about open source, we’ve got to have a background understanding of what it is. We likely won’t discuss these readings much; they’re for giving you a quick overview of what “open source” encompasses (probably more than you think!) so feel free to skim whatever catches your interest and see which links you’re intrigued to follow down into.
- Wikipedia: open source – you may want to focus on the Applications section, and others of you might be interested in open design. This is for a quick overview and perspective-broadening on what open source is, so don’t spend more than 15 minutes here.
- Opensource.com – pick a channel and read 1-2 articles from it — again, this is for perspective-broadening on what the possibilities are, so set a 15 minute cap again. My guess is that life and education will be popular with this crowd; work on teaching open source can mostly be found under the posse tag.
Also note that you’ll see a couple terms used to refer to “open source” other than… well, open source. Multiple variants on “(Free) (Libre) and Open Source (Software)” frequently appear as acronyms, so whenever you see…
…consider them to all refer to the same thing for our purposes. (There are subtle differences between the terms that some people care about deeply, but we’ll save that discussion for another day if folks are interested.)
Reading 1: IRC chat
Read this chat log from a conversation taking place between a first-year liberal arts student new to an open source community and two experienced project participants who catch her question and try to step in. An informal analysis by the student’s professor follows
It’s important to note that all of this was remote and spontaneous; the student didn’t preschedule the meeting with community members, she simply showed up online and started asking questions, and one person answered, and eventually a second one began to chime in.
For those who want more, the chat transcript spawned a mailing list conversation between faculty members (Jadud and Morelli) and FOSS participants (Chua and Wade) but this reading is optional.
Questions to consider: who can you empathize with, and why? What would you have done differently in this situation if you were the student? Community members? Professor? For others considering this sort of immersion (students diving into a real-world project environment without explicit scaffolding or defined mentorship engagements), what sort of preparation would be useful to provide each of the three groups (students, community, and faculty)
Reading 2: Planet CDOT
A Planet is an aggregation of blogs — a sort of metablog that collects and publishes posts from many people who have individual blogs on their own sites. For instance, many contributors to the desktop software GNOME are featured on http://planet.gnome.org, many contributors to the Fedora Linux distribution are on http://planet.fedoraproject.org, contributors to the Sugar Learning Environment (which runs on the One Laptop Per Child XO computer) are at http://planet.sugarlabs.org… take a quick look at each of these (5 minutes each at most) and get a sense for what a Planet is. It’s a gigantic realtime look at the design notebooks of hundreds of (mostly) engineers, or at least that’s how I think about it.
You may notice posts on many topics and in many languages. That’s normal around here. The content posted is not moderated; the only moderation takes place in deciding whose blog is going to feed into the big Planet, but once you’re “in,” anything you write goes out there – also note that these folks aren’t necessarily in formal project roles. In fact, nearly all of them are volunteers with no predefined commitments; they self-identify with these projects, work on them, and simply Do Stuff.
And schools have started using it as well. Go to Planet CDOT, which comes from the Center for the Development of Open Technologies at Seneca College in Toronto, Ontario. Spend about 20 minutes looking around and reading; pick 3 posts from 3 different people to hone in on and see what you can find about the people who wrote them.
You’ll see a stream of posts from students (at all levels), staff, and faculty (they may be initially hard to identify, but David Humphrey and Chris Tyler are both professors) talking about their work. It’s informal, like the sorts of conversations you might overhear if you plonk down in the cafe outside the CDOT space… except you don’t have to fly to Toronto in order to do it.
Questions for discussion: What information can you glean from 20 minutes of looking through this website? What projects do people talk about (coursework, research, etc?) Do they identify themselves as members of an academic community, members of an open source community, or both? How would this sort of resource be useful to the following audiences:
- A prospective student
- A new student in the department
- A graduating senior in the department
- A faculty member in the department
- A potential industry/academic partner that wants to work with or recruit students from the department
How does this compare to the “sense” of the department you think you’d get from visiting CDOT in person for an afternoon, and how does it compare to the “sense” you can get of another department remotely… for instance, pick an engineering school at Purdue you’re not involved with and check out their site; what can you find in comparison?
That’s it.
I know this is a lot of web stuff, so if you’re really pressed for time, do reading 0 and pick either 1 or 2 to dive deeper into. We’ll talk about all this on the 21st of October. This is the world I come from, and I’m curious what you make of it — what’s confusing, what’s difficult, what warts do you see that we’ve gotten used to? What’s surprising? What aspects fascinate you most?
FOSS folks, feel free to chime in… what do you wish faculty knew about us?
Looking forward to the discussion!
Sunday, October 9th, 2011 | fedora, olin, teaching open source | 2 Comments »
Sometimes when I’m confused, I sit down and write about it until my feet feel like they’re standing on something firm again. Here goes.
I’m a novice in the academic world. Context eludes me. Descriptions of methods are swarming like abstract, unapplied flies around my head. I came here because the open source world hasn’t yet been translated into the world of scholarly learning — these dynamic communities of practice for ridiculous amounts of learning remain unstudied, unrecognized, despite addressing so many of the things that engineering and computing educators have been crying out for for as long as I’ve been hearing them: authentic learning experiences! mentorship, peer teaching! global communication, teamwork, self-efficacy… onwards, onwards. Yes! I thought. New ground to blaze!
And then I got to grad school and spent most of my first month disoriented and fervently wishing for something that someone had done before, please don’t let me be the first one out here, please don’t let me be the only one out here. The irony is thick, I know; isn’t this what I asked for? It is, and it’s uncomfortable, and I will feel quite lost for quite a while (possibly forever), and that’s something that I need to remind myself to be okay with. The trouble with doing something new is that you can’t really hunt for validation for it until after you do it. It’s like a startup. You need to take a risk that you’ll put in all of this effort and then nobody will care. Yes, you can make your work transparent (and I should more) and work within a community (and I am — hello!) but part of the rite of passage is forging your own path, and good lord that’s scary.
I wonder if professors teach in order to stay sane, so they can have some part of their world that they know and lead and control… I wonder if it feels like we’re taking that solidness away from them when we ask them to take a leap into teaching open source, I wonder…
Okay. So where are gaps, and what am I finding?
Gaps are everywhere.
I’m struggling like hell to figure out which projects to prioritize. Some recent ones:
- Academic copyright is so very, very broken.
- If you survey cyberlearning grants the NSF has given out, you’ll see big holes in authentic learning and building actual online communities (as opposed to “we put up a website, here it is”) — both areas that teaching open source excels in. Opportunity to fill?
- Hackerspaces are almost invisible in the academic literature. There’s plenty of nonscholarly information on them — websites, blog posts, everything — but that hasn’t been “validated” by peer-reviewed journal articles. Ditto for the maker movement as a whole. The open source way. All of this.
- As Michael Tiemann and Greg DeKoenigsberg and others have pointed out, open source communities are brilliant and readily accessible examples of communities of practice and nobody is checking them out according to that framework. Gah.
- I find myself repeatedly explaining the Dreyfuss model to open source hackers and project leaders. Maybe I should write an article on how academics can explain this to the communities they’re trying to work with.
- POSSE! POSSE as a program, chronicling POSSE participants (must… find out what people are doing… this year…), the… and my brain falls apart into unfocused incoherence.
- How do new participants in open source communities become experienced ones? This happens very, very rapidly in many cases. What determines how successful newbies will be? Can those behaviors be learned?
- The quick release cycle for open communities (“release early, release often”) contributing to the long release cycle for students… oftentimes it’s not until many semesters after the class, or possibly even years after graduation, that the effect is really seen. What do we do about that, how can we examine that?
- This First Monday article, which still bugs me with its limitations. Yes, you can analyze open source communities that way, but doing so misses lots of information that would be quite relevant to — and likely reverse — the conclusions of the study.
- Brain is lapsing into incoherent unfocus. Trying to sit with the tension and the discomfort and the not-knowing, but also to not be paralyzed by it. Difficult balance. What does it feel like for an academic to enter the open source world? What does it feel like for an open source person to enter the academic one?
A few more things I’m pondering:
- Is Fedora still a good project for me to base my research within? (I feel like a heretic writing this, but look — blunt questions.) I look at Biella and Martin doing theirs within Debian, and go well, wait, that… makes potentially more sense. No single corporate sponsor. (No single corporate sponsor that also happens to employ me, too.) On the other hand, it might be precisely that model that makes Fedora so interesting.
- Should I be grounding myself more in the doing for an open source (software or hardware) project? It’s been months since I made what I consider to be a direct contribution to an upstream. This makes me sad, and my hands are itching to do usefulness again, but they are also very full, and I do try to be a good citizen (bugfiling, etc) and know I can… I’m worried that I’ll fade too much out of this world and lose my base and float away into the world of academia, never to return. I worry about this a lot. Do I need to give myself an assignment every week — edit so many wiki pages, check out so many test plans, look into patching something, whatnot? This feels counter to the spirit of scratching one’s own itch; if I need to make myself do it, I should probably… not do it, right? But maybe it’s good for me…
- What should I do this summer? Dive back into direct FOSS contribution? Broader community work more focused on the industry side of things? Set aside the open source world for a few months and plunge into academic research and try to emerge with a firmer grasp on that terrain? Relax? Can I be fifty people at once? Why do I need to sleep? Why is the world so vast? How can I ever contribute anything to such a giant universe when I have such a short time on this planet and am so unskilled, unschooled, unable to do useful things?
Whoa. Hello, existential crisis. Okay, Mel. Snap out of it. You have a lot to learn, but you can do stuff. Big scary world, confusing, yes, I know. But moving forward.
I’m going to sit down and finish my overdue paper. If I finish that before my reading group meets, I’ll brainstorm on my fellowship application. — I have other brainstorms scattered here and there, I may or may not collect them, I don’t have to. And then we shall see. We shall… see.
Productively lost is profoundly uncomfortable. Knowing that this is where growth takes place doesn’t reduce the discomfort, but it helps you stay there, in that place of learning.
Wednesday, October 5th, 2011 | fedora, teaching open source | 5 Comments »
Some of you may recall my outburst of sadness regarding academic copyright assignment a few weeks back. Well, I’ve never been one to let the world just keep on bothering me without doing something about it, so with the help of ninja engineer-turned-librarian-turned-engineering-education-reseacher Amy Van Epps (who reminds me of my Olin classmate Bonnie Charles Tesch, just older and not into bioengineering) we’ve been looking into copyright addendums. These are tools that authors can use to vaccinate themselves against overbearing copyright assignment policies — the grown-up scholarly equivalent of “I’m rubber, you’re glue.”
Here’s how they work.
You: I have made something that I wish to share with the academic world via a peer-reviewed scholarly publication, because that’s what the people who I want to impact and influence value and read.
Publisher: Okay, we’ll publish it — but first, you have to sign this form that gives us all your rights forever.
You: I’ll do that and attach my counterform — this copyright addendum, which prevents your form from taking some of my rights forever, so I get to keep the ones I think are important. (For instance, I might want to release my work under an open license — after a certain period of time has passed, in order to be fair to you as a publisher.)
Publisher: <silence>
You: Aaaaaand I can take that as consent. Thank you!
“Awesome,” you say. “How do I get that addendum?” Short version is that right now you can go to the Science Commons copyright addendum creator and generate your own. Print, sign, copy, send. Done.
Longer version: so here’s the thing. This problem has been solved. There are already forms and documents out there that let you do this. They’re legally solid and institutionally endorsed, even encouraged by heavyweight research-publishing institutions like Purdue and Northwestern and UIUC (we have our own versions of such addendum documents).
But nobody knows about them. Not even the faculty at those institutions. Furthermore, copyright addendum forms are usually written for academics and assume you’re already knowledgeable about academic publishing and the copyright issues therein. But really, how many of us are?
I want to see an addendum and supporting materials geared towards free culture people who may or may not be academics, but who want the scholarly world to hear what they have to say (for any reason), and to work on getting people — particularly students and faculty interested in participating in open source communities — aware that they can and should keep their freedoms to share their work, because I have spoken to so many academics who have gone “oh, I wish I could open-license my work, but academic copyright won’t let me…”
Folks, they may not want you to, but if you take the right steps, they can’t stop you.
(Or at least I’m putting my own academic career on the line from the start on that hypothesis, and feel like I have solid backup.)
So. Action steps.
If you’re submitting something to a conference/journal/etc and get a copyright assignment form to sign, please consider looking at that copyright addendum and seeing if it’ll be useful to you to include that stapled to the back — it takes 5 extra minutes to keep your rights to making your own work open and free and accessible to others.
If you’re from the open source and open content world and want to learn more about what academia’s been doing to reform academic copyright from the inside, check out the folks at SPARC, who have been working on this thing for years. (Hat tip to Amy for the pointer — she’s a wealth of information on this stuff!) If you’re from the academic world and are curious what open content and open source folks have been doing, see Question Copyright and Creative Commons and Freedom Defined.
And if you’re interested in working on this sort of thing, or already working on this sort of thing, please holler.
Friday, September 30th, 2011 | fedora, olin, teaching open source | 1 Comment »
Note: I originally wrote this post in January 2008, and my setup (and all three distros) have changed considerably since. The original motivation was, as per my notes, “so that people with little/no Linux experience can still understand what I’m doing – if you fit that description, I’d much appreciate a comment on how well it works, and what things are still confusing so I can clear them up.” Other than this intro, the rest of the post has been left untouched, and is… at least for me, an interesting time machine. In less than four years, we’ve come a long way.
I wanted to triple-boot my laptop with 3 Linux distros so that I could separate my work from my development from my play – Ubuntu, Fedora 7, and Gentoo, respectively. Now, I’ve been using Linux for about 7 years, and dual-booting with Windows for half that time. But triple-booting distros ended up taking me a long time to figure out, even if it was actually simple in the end. Here’s why.
Partitioning
First I had to partition my hard drive. This means I had to split up my hard drive into sections so each distro could have its own place to play – plus a shared partition (mounted to /home) so I could keep my files and folders accessible and common across each OS. Four partitions – Ubuntu, Fedora, Gentoo, and home. Not bad. My hard drive is 120GB, so 10GB seemed like a fair amount to give to each distribution, leaving 90GB for files (way more than I need at the moment).
But wait – I needed a swap partition. Swap partitions are used by your computer as “extra RAM” – when it’s got extra stuff kicking around actively that it wants to stash somewhere and the RAM is out of room, it goes in your /swap partition and makes things seem a lot faster. (In some distributions, including Ubuntu, you can use a swap file, an ordinary file in your hard drive instead of a whole separate partition, for the same purpose.)
Okay, so I’d make one swap partition and share it across all three distros, right? Nope. Ubuntu needs its own swap partition (not a swap file) if you want it to be able to hibernate. Since I often get interrupted in the middle of work and like being able to have all my open windows, running apps, etc. automagically restored, I like hibernate. So I need two swap partitions, one for Ubuntu and one for Fedora and Gentoo to share. They recommend that your swap partition be anywhere from 1-2x the size of your RAM; my laptop has 2GB of RAM, so I decided to make 2 swap partitions, 4GB each.
Problem: 3 distros + 1 home + 2 swap = 6 partitions. A device like a hard drive can have a maximum of 4 partitions. (I’m not sure why.) I found this out when I tried to write the partition table and my laptop began shouting that the 82 GB I hadn’t yet allocated was “unusable space.”
Extended partitions
The solution? Use extended partitions. In the Ubuntu installer, this meant manually partitioning (which I was doing anyway, instead of the automatic allocation the LiveCD makes for you) and making the last 3 partitions “logical” instead of “primary.”
I’m told there is no difference in speed and functionality, from the point of view of the end-user, on primary vs logical partitions. The only difference is that on the actual hard drives, logical partitions are “nested” inside a primary partition.
Learned something new today.
And if I thought my triple-boot adventure took a long time, I can only imagine how long it took this person, who chainloaded grub to boot… 100.
Sunday, September 18th, 2011 | Didn't fit anywhere else, fedora | No Comments »
Very lightly edited email to a friend who asked about building momentum in a new academically-based hackerspace, posted here in the hopes it might be useful to others.
First, timing. You wrote your email midsummer — I’m not sure how much that has to do with it, because summers are usually planned in advance (in a university context) and it’s difficult for a substantial chunk of people to add in new commitments mid-cycle. Now it’s the start of the school year, where everyone’s having their callouts — probably easier to pick up new people (but also likely to have a high washout rate the first few weeks).
Also make sure that — if you don’t already have this — your space has a drumbeat that’s extremely visible. The spaces we’re in have a rhythm; when we build spaces within a space (groups/clubs/labs within a university, in this case) we also need to set a rhythm — it’s calming, reassuring, lets people know things won’t disappear if they look away, lets them know they can come back later. (You may not see upsurges in participation until year 2, 3, 4, when people go “ah, yes, they’ve been around long enough that they’re not going to go away; my time invested there won’t be lost.”)
Transparency. Allow people to eavesdrop on your activities and thinking as much as possible without revealing themselves unless they want to. For instance, blogging (one common way folks do this) or having an in-space computer dedicated to a twitter account anyone can walk out and shout out things on — new projects and notes and quotes stuck up on bulletin boards around the space keeping the news and “who’s working on what” info a fresh stream, making accidental connections more likely. Become a journalist; interview people, post their notes and quotes and work up, connect them with others.
And be visibly messy and incomplete. For instance, if you’re blogging, blog about confusion, dead ends, open questions… let folks watch the others in the space struggle, instead of only putting out perfect projects. Put out mistakes — not just because it helps others help you fix them, but because it also reassures them that they don’t have to be perfect to jump in, that y’all ask questions that are as “stupid” as the ones they have.
Bar to entry — you may have come across the term “legitimate peripheral participation” — look up the wikipedia article on “Communities of Practice” if you haven’t checked out Wenger’s work already and you’ll likely get a kick out of it. Folks can’t necessarily easily add new commitments mid-cycle, so how can you make the commitment barrier lower, how can you get it so they can make a visibly meaningful contribution in 5 minutes with no further obligations? Think of how — I think it was in my interface design class that we had a discussion about how good unsubscription, warranty, reset, etc. policies up-front encouraged more people to buy, install, etc. More people will make longer-term contributions down the line if they’re initially reassured they don’t need to make commitments — instead, the little contributions (with no further obligation) add up until you look up one day and go “wait, I’ve been there every Thursday for the past 7 months!” So maybe experiment with not allowing people to make commitments, somehow. Design things so that they can’t be continued, and see if that subtle psychological effect pays off.
Leaving things undone — sort of a corollary to the mess. Don’t finish things! This will be painful. Publicly, deliberately, abandon something that’s 90% complete when the 10% to finish it is so obvious, so easy, and will make such a dramatic difference to the finished product — and cheer loudly when someone discovers that, finishes it, and give them lots and lots of credit. A few times, do the slog and let somebody else do the glory — give them that adrenaline rush and get them hooked, then show them how they can do the slog and become more independent and able to get that glory moment without relying on you. Start things and don’t finish them, and be a squeaky wheel about the opportunities — and make sure that those opportunities are really the fun parts, the cool stuff, not “can someone else do the slogwork for me”?
Have lots and lots and lots of individual interactions with people. Private ones, before public meetings. Prime the pump. There’s a tactic you might know for bringing up a controversial proposal at a meeting — you have individual talks with each other representative about that topic, before the meeting — and then at the meeting, you let them talk about your topic. Oftentimes the stuff you’ve talked with them about will pop out, and they’ll own those thoughts as their ideas. Same thing here — if you talk separately to a bunch of people about how their interests might hook up with each other, about the sort of atmosphere you’re trying to create at the gathering, and then actually bring them all together in the room, that dynamic often does end up actually happening.
Amplify what folks are already doing, already interested in — instead of “start this new project with us,” look for “hey, you’re working on foo, would $thing-we’re-doing help with that?” Point out how participation would add to their existing work with very little effort, rather than how cool this new thing is (yep, it’s cool, but most folks don’t have time for another item in their lives no matter how cool it is). Get folks to perceive it as something they already are/do/have. For instance, “You’re teaching freshman electronics next semester, right? Well, Tanya is doing an Intro to the Lilypad thing next week and she’s got a fun way of explaining what the different components do, that you might enjoy — want to come?”
Hope that helps.
Wednesday, September 14th, 2011 | fedora, olin, teaching open source | No Comments »
As promised, here are my slides from the 2011 Ohio LinuxFest. Many thanks to the organizers for inviting me to speak, and for putting together (as always) a most excellent event!
The talk was a nonlinear narrative; start with the Main Talk, then whenever you hit a slide that says “Let’s Play A Game,” branch out to one of the other talks I’ve uploaded with the olf-2011 tag. I’ve put all the slide decks below in the order of first appearance during my presentation. Everything is Creative Commons BY-SA, so feel free to remix and share.
Talk abstract
Ever look around and think there must be something better than just going along with life, untracked and unaccounted for? I mean, where’s your scoreboard? Where’s your triumphant level-up sound after you complete a quest? Where the heck are those dang quests, anyway – and aren’t there supposed to be golden coins hanging in midair for you to jump into? Why isn’t your life as cool as a video game? When do you get your sword?
You recognize this. You want MOAR.
“Mel, if my life were like Angry Birds,” I hear you say, “my fitness level would skyrocket.” “Yes,” I nod. “Analyzing the differences between repeated attempts at various task setups with unpredictable results governed by defined rulesets would certainly get you in better shape – oh, and there’s a (FOSS) app for that.”
It’s not all about arcade games and pumping iron, either. How about RPGs like World of Warcraft – can quests, leveling-up, and building character attributes help you learn a foreign language? Or even Farmville – how can gifts, guests, and cute baby animals speed along your personal software development?
The answer is YES, good reader – and this quantifiedself-inspired talk will show you how you can do it all with FOSS, using everything from the arduino to identi.ca to the R programming language. Complete with live code demos and audience involvement in real-time quest completion, and possibly even a level-up in the middle of the talk.
Join us and take your first step into a MOAR EPIC, FOSS-driven life.
Speaker bio
Mel Chua is a hacker – of hardware, software, and FOSS communities, at various points in time – who studiously avoided video game addition for over a decade. Instead, she spent her time as a member of Red Hat?s Community Leadership team teaching professors how to teach open source. These were happy, productive days… a simpler time, a simpler life.
Unfortunately, Mel started working on her PhD in Engineering Education at Purdue this year, trying to figure out what effect FOSS participation has on students. This started her on data-tracking and led her down the dark, dark path to doom once she realized that scoreboards were way more entertaining when sound effects (POW!) and elaborate titles (LEVEL 198 STORMBRINGER, GUARDIAN of VALID W3C XML and KEEPER of the SACRED PYTHON MODULE) were involved.
Sunday, September 11th, 2011 | fedora | 1 Comment »
I’m speaking at Ohio LinuxFest tomorrow with a talk titled Level-up with Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics: Turn Your Life Into a Data-driven Video Game with FOSS. Why should you come?
- This talk has five slidedecks. The audience will get to choose when and how I use each one, resulting in some odd self-looping variant on Powerpoint Karaoke.
- I will sing solo in public for the first time in 13 years (when I had a bit part as radio host Bert Healy in my middle school’s production of Annie).
- The following picture is one of my slides.
Unlike previous talks I’ve done, I have no freakin’ idea how I’m going to capture this one for a future audience, because it’s so deliberately improvisational and nonlinear. If you have a video camera, please bring it and film! I’ll see what I can do afterwards.
Saturday, September 10th, 2011 | fedora, olin, teaching open source | 1 Comment »
Those of you who are regular blog readers will know that I’ve promised to wear a lightsaber to my doctoral graduation, and possibly that I’m making the hilt for my first art class assignment.
Here’s the basic idea: just as assembling one’s lightsaber was an important culminating milestone in a Padawan’s apprenticeship, drawing on his or her past learning, my doctoral lightsaber hilt will represent the various phases of my prior education, and I will be building the blade bit by bit with the work I do over grad school — hanging over my desk, serving as a visual reminder of how far I’ve come and how far I’ve yet to go.
By looking at schematics and a few famous sabers — Obi Wan Kenobi, Qui-Gon Jinn, and so forth — I’ve found that lightsaber hilts break into three main sections of roughly equal length: power cell, crystal, and adjustment mechanisms. These will correspond to high school, college, and my early career, respectively. (Elementary and middle school will comprise the pommel cap below the power cell, and my family will be worked into the ring clipping the hilt to my belt.) Quotes below are from Wookieepedia.
High levels of energy generated by a high-output Diatium power cell was unleashed through a series of focusing lenses and energizers that converted the energy into plasma.
I spent my three years of high school at IMSA (Illinois Mathematics & Science Academy), a residential public magnet school for gifted kids from all over the state. I devoured calculus, number theory, physics, literature, writing, learned to swing dance, started blogging, got my first computer and was introduced to open source and programming, surrounded by brilliant teachers and (for the first time) lots and lots and lots of kids smarter than I was who regularly challenged me to step up my game. High school was where my geekiness was unleashed and allowed to run full-out for the first time, and where I earned the reputation of being tireless — high levels of energy generated, indeed. A power cell seems quite appropriate.
The plasma was projected through a set of focusing crystals that lent
the blade its properties and allowed for the adjustment of blade length
and power output. The ideal number of crystals was three, though only
one was required.
Boundless energy has plenty of potential, but you’ve got to turn that into something. Focusing crystals turn plasma into a blade; my four years at Olin College turned me from an overenthusiastic child into an engineer. (Okay, an overenthusiastic engineer.) I learned metacognition, introspection, and powerful ways of thinking — problem solving, design thinking, ridiculous amounts of collaboration, and audacity. I learned how to regulate myself a little better — learned about burnout, learned about the importance of balance (though not yet how to balance life). Most importantly, I did find my focus, in a way — it was Olin that got me on the track of engineering education, which is the field I’m pursuing my PhD in today.
Once focused by the crystals, the plasma was sent through a
series of field energizers and modulation circuitry within the emitter
matrix that further focused it, making it into a coherent beam of energy
that was projected from the emitter.
I’ve since spent time in the open source world with too many awesome projects and teams to list. If IMSA gave me power and Olin turned me into an engineer, the open source world gave me an arena and a paradigm to play in with my hyperactive problem-solving sense. It shaped the questions I’m asking as a budding researcher and the tools with which I search.
What I’m trying to figure out is what data to use to form each of these. One thought was grades, which would give me a high base across high school, tapering off towards the end of college (when it wasn’t, er, quite clear that I would graduate), then… I have no idea what I’d do for post-college. Also, grades are not everything. Another thought was writing — I have blog posts dating back a decade, and I could make the diameter of the saber proportional to the number of posts I wrote in any given month. High school would be anemic, college less so, post-college dramatically fluctuating. Or by travel, which would make the hilt widen dramatically as time goes by (okay, maybe that’s not such a great idea). Or open source programs used/worked-on, which would put the start date back with Red Hat Linux… 5? 6? when I was 14, along with a slew of programs (became a vim user, alpine, etc) closely followed by Debian (and even more applications!) a year later.
“Data” is used loosely in this assignment, though — I’m thinking first of quantitative, countable — but it could also be word clouds, looking at pictures I’ve taken, places I’ve been, people I’ve worked with, any of that. C’mon, Mel. Brainstorm. Think like an artist! Whatever I end up basing the hilt on, I’d like to do the blade in some similar manner — if it’s writing, then I’ll add little slices of blade according to word-count, and so forth.
Secondarily, I’m still trying to figure out how to get CNC lathe access at Purdue. I’ve found the laser cutter, vacuum formers, hot wire cutters, table saw, bandsaw, grinders… there’s a little CNC mill in the industrial design shop and I now know the guy to ask about it. There are some 3D printers (powder) I haven’t seen yet but I now know who to ask. But CNC lathe? Not yet. Still hunting.
Sunday, September 4th, 2011 | fedora, olin, teaching open source | 1 Comment »
I’ve been reading Understanding by Design on and off whenever I work on curricular material, and my last trip through it brought up a few ideas I wanted to explore-by-writing, so here goes.
I’m thinking about the problem of getting students to look beyond the facts to the meaning of the facts and the reasons we’ve come to believe they’re facts. This makes knowledge transferable to questions with different formats, and avoids the situation of students being able to parrot back what they “know,” but not being able to see and use the deeper principle in context. One of my favorite passages from Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman illustrates this sort of parrot-learning well:
I often liked to play tricks on people when I was at MIT. One time, in mechanical drawing class, some joker picked up a French curve (a piece of plastic for drawing smooth curves — a curly, funny-looking thing) and said, “I wonder if the curves on this thing have some special formula?” I thought for a moment and said, “Sure they do. The curves are very special curves. Lemme show ya,” and I picked up my French curve and began to turn it slowly. “The French curve is made so that at the lowest point on each curve, no matter how you turn it, the tangent is horizontal.”
All the guys in the class were holding their French curve up at different angles, holding their pencil up to it at the lowest point and laying it along, and discovering that, sure enough, the tangent is horizontal. They were all excited by this “discovery” — even though they had already gone through a certain amount of calculus and had already “learned” that the derivative (tangent) of the minimum (lowest point) of any curve is zero (horizontal). They didn’t put two and two together. They didn’t even know what they “knew.”
I’m not yet sure how to make sure the students do go beyond parrot-learning, but I can think about specific ways to test for beyond-parrot-ability in particular situations, and I suppose that’s good enough for now.
Next up: we say that students learn from mistakes; teachers learn a tremendous amount as well. By looking at the sort of errors a student is making, a good instructor can start to gauge the sort of mental picture they’ve got of how to tackle the problem, and how that differs from the kind of mental picture(s) they ought to have to tackle it, and possibly even where that (incorrect) assumption came from.
Language-learning is particularly good for illustrating this; for instance, someone learning English might stick “-ed” at the end of verbs to make them past-tense, not knowing that many verbs are irregular. It’s pretty easy to see where that might come from (“in my limited experience, all past-tense verbs look like their present-tense equivalents with an “-ed” added”) and therefore how to fix it (demonstrate counterexamples, but note that the “-ed” rule-of-thumb does work for many verbs and will generally be understandable to native speakers, i.e. “eated” vs “ate.”)
UbD talks about focusing and not having “LEARN EVERYTHING” as a learning objective. I’m terrible at this. One of the biggest challenge of trying to make something as big and chaotic as “how to participate in open source communities” teachable is the question of what’s actually vital, and what’s nice-to-know but survivable-without. Yes, I flinch every time a student team does their regular status reports by uploading a Word document to a wiki — but then again, I chose to spend my teaching time with them getting them on IRC rather than setting up a blog because I thought the first was more important, so is that report better than no report at all, and should I really block them from forward progress until they have everything perfect? No. Okay. So awkwardness will happen in the beginning, and I should be more ready for that.
Final thought that struck me on this run through the book (although this thought does not come from the book itself): one thing that bothers me about teaching open source is that I sometimes feel like we’re overmarketing it. TOS teaches your students basic subjects! Communication skills! Real-world experience! Large codebases! Global contexts! Service learning! It cures cancer, makes dishes dry streak-free, and walks your dog!
Clearly open source can’t do everything. I’d like to see more thinking about what the open source way isn’t good at; I do believe it’s good for things (for instance, non-major classes or large intro courses) that most people might initially think it wouldn’t work for, but I also suspect that it may be terrible for some things that we (open source enthusiasts) believe it’s wonderful for. For instance, do open source communities really give students useful feedback? All right, under what circumstances and at what effort — and when is the tradeoff not worth it?
Things to ponder as I head back home for dinner.
Saturday, August 27th, 2011 | fedora, olin, teaching open source | 1 Comment »
