I'm going to offer a few suggestions, even though this is unlikely to affect me in any direct way.
On Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 23:24, Chris Tyler <ch...@tylers.info> wrote: > *# Guest lecturing I would encourage you to use something like this as an opportunity to do *anything* other than lecture. Live coding sessions, where students can come and join in using collaborative editors (riding co-pilot in a giant "group programming" session), or focusing entirely on code review and discussion about artifacts that are part of a project, and so on... this strikes me as far higher value than having a developer come and give lectures. Unless that is a particular strength of theirs, it seems like the wrong way to use their expertise. > *# Enabling the local faculty and students to closely observe a real > open source developer in action (may involve additional blogging or > other communication) I guess I think anything is better than lecture in this context, and designing it that way from the start seems like a Good Idea. > I think that this model has the potential to help deepen the connection > between an educational institution and an open source community for a > very low cost -- it's manageable for most schools to provision an office I do think there are challenges here: * A dev needs to move, unless the idea is to only use local talent. This is at least $1000+ per direction (minimum---a one-way UHaul costs at least that much). * They need to redirect all their mail and bills for a year. * Their tax situation changes. * They loose their existing social life/structures for a year. * ... Moving for a year is hard. I agree that the model has a lot of promise, but I think it mostly has promise/value to either 1. young developers who want to travel to new places and meet new people, or 2. young developers who are thinking they might like to go back for more degree work. This would be a massive undertaking for someone who has a family, home, and other financial commitments. I like the idea overall, but it seems like the logistics are non-trivial. > a school will need a solid open source context in place for this to work > well, otherwise it will fall flat; POSSE could play a valuable role in Yes, having a POSSE at the site in advance might be a Very Good Thing. (I don't know if that is what you were saying, but that's where my thinking took me.) A local POSSE first would be one way to lay the local cultural groundwork for having someone from the FLOSS community live in-house for a year. Not doing that is a recipe (especially at larger institutions) for having them be as anonymous as any other grad student or post-doc: someone who works with two or three faculty (at most), and is invisible to the rest of the department/institution. That's my 2p, anyway. Cheers, Matt _______________________________________________ tos mailing list tos@teachingopensource.org http://teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos
