Hi Folks, My comment is not to worry overly much about having a strict curriculum for POSSEs and for extending POSSEs. There are a couple of issues floating around here.
First, I think that you want a curriculum that you (the originators of the material such as Mel) can use. From that perspective, identifying effective pedagogy/androgogy and the necessary topics for POSSEs is good, but I wouldn't want you to become exactly like a prof. We need you to be "you", not us. To provide your perspective on software development in the OSS world. While I think it's good to understand your audience and to craft your teaching for that audience, one of the great things of value that the OSS community brings via the POSSE is the perspective of how things really are in the OSS world. I think this is a huge contribution and far outstrips getting the right readings for a topic. Second, you're trying to create reusable educational material that can be used by profs to teach others about involving folks in OSS. This is in no way a simple or easy thing to do. I note that many profs are in academia because they're individualists. They prefer to do things their own way. I'm not saying this as a negative, but as a fact, and it's one of the main problems in reusing educational resources. Due to the nature of academia, it means that you'll never craft a perfect curriculum for even a majority of the profs. So my suggestion here is to not aim for a "perfect" curriculum, but to provide a range of options for deliverables, readings etc. knowing that you'll likely never get agreement from profs as to what is the perfect mix. And count that a success! I think the POSSE curriculum is good and evolving in a very positive direction and I want to encourage you. I for one have definitely benefitted from the POSSE effort and I have only attended a couple of hours of one. The rest of my benefit has come from reading logs, adopting assignments and interacting with folks who have been to a POSSE. So good work! Heidi -----Original Message----- From: tos-boun...@teachingopensource.org [mailto:tos-boun...@teachingopensource.org] On Behalf Of Mel Chua Sent: Wednesday, September 15, 2010 8:00 PM To: TOS Cc: CommArch Subject: [TOS] POSSE curriculum alpha release (0.8) Phew. I've worked on this all day and I think... I've reached a good stopping point. This page should be readable by anyone who wonders "what happens at a POSSE, what do you learn anyhow?" or "how could I teach a POSSE myself?" At least that's the goal I was aiming for. http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/POSSE_curriculum For those of you who remember the whiteboard picture (http://mchua.fedorapeople.org/posse/notes/posse-curriculum.JPG whiteboard picture) from last week - I started from that and kept running forward, basically. This is still a work in progress! Remember, I don't actually know how to design a workshop or write a curriculum or any of that, I'm making this up as I go along with tons of help and guidance from you folks who actually know how to teach. :) Readings still need to be filled in and materials created, the prework and followup sections need to be written, and everything needs to be checked for sanity - but I think it's far along enough to release this as a somewhat useful draft that shows (as clearly as I can express) what we're thinking. Next deployment is the 1st week of October at POSSE South Africa. What I'm going to do next: * First, I'm going to blog this to Planet Fedora (since the upcoming POSSE in Cape Town is going to be a Fedora one) and Planet TOS. Gotta share what you're doing... * Tonight I'll be taking this for POSSE South Africa and making it into a schedule (adding times and whatnot). The "downstream" South Africa curriculum is my final deliverable for today. * Next Wednesday I'm going to sprint on filling in the readings (working with the Textbook as an upstream project when possible); my final deliverable for that day is the "prework" section which will be sent to POSSE South Africa attendees, because that should include links to all the readings. And then we'll see where we are at. What I need help with: 1. Finding readings. Check out the curriculum and see if you have favorite links, resources, etc. that you think would be useful for each day - just link them to the "readings" section for that day, or email them and I'll add them. 2. Feedback and criticism galore. As I mentioned, I (1) don't know how to design curricula and (2) have been living with too much of POSSE in my brain and have no clue how this looks to other people who might consider deploying it. Is this a curriculum you think you could teach, or a curriculum for a class you'd want to take? Where should we go with it next? 3. Forking. If you're interested in deploying this material in a different format (not a one-week faculty workshop) - for instance, ymasory and paulproteus are working on that weekend hackathon at U Penn and potentially repurposing some of this material - I'd like to hear that, because that'll help us figure out how this needs to be generalized to become a good curriculum/material upstream. Phew. Thanks, everyone, for your continuing patience and awesomeness and help and mentorship and feedback. I'm learning an amazing amount about teaching right now by working on POSSE, and have been learning far more than I've taught by working on POSSE for the past 14 months (yeah, it's only been that long). --Mel _______________________________________________ tos mailing list tos@teachingopensource.org http://teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos _______________________________________________ tos mailing list tos@teachingopensource.org http://teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos
