Hi Folks, I too agree that we want both profs and students involved with real communities and making real contributions. This is the attraction of the approach! However, if the goal is to get more profs involved, anything that lowers the barrier to entry is a good thing.
>From a prof's point of view, if the learning curve is too steep, profs won't try things in class. I've been doing this for a while and my biggest constraint is time. Computing profs already have to keep up with the latest technology changes. Involving students in OSS is a change in teaching approach combined with a learning curve for the prof. So if there is a solution that gets me started that doesn't involve lots of time or frustration, I'm all for it. I don't think that this will mean that Profs will always take the easy way out. Professors are very self-directed and they will definitely want to customize for their own environment. In addition, profs typically assume that they're on their own. We're used to having to learn new technologies and approaches independently so POSSEs are definitely an improvement on our usual approach to learning new things. Profs will definitely use TOS community to help solve problems in the manner of an OSS community. But they will have just learned about how OSS communities work and will assume (or should know) that they should make all efforts to solve problems on their own before asking a question. I think that the best approach would be to provide a reasonable solution that works within the POSSE setting (time and resource constrained) as well the alternatives so that once profs understand the approach, they can find the technology solution that best fits their environment. Just my 2 cents. Heidi -----Original Message----- From: tos-boun...@teachingopensource.org [mailto:tos-boun...@teachingopensource.org] On Behalf Of Chris Tyler Sent: Wednesday, January 12, 2011 9:10 AM To: Karlie Robinson Cc: tos@teachingopensource.org Subject: Re: [TOS] Infrastructure Team: Can haz? On Wed, 2011-01-12 at 08:27 -0500, Karlie Robinson wrote: > By creating a shopping list of instant solutions, you're telling POSSE > participants that TOSS and the people who lead their POSSE will be > available, indefinitely, to solve their problems. Instead you should be > looking at how to successfully tell someone "Do it yourself" by creating > a situation where they are able to tap the community on their own, > outside of TOS, to have their needs met. Karlie, I'm completely with you on this: I agree wholeheartely that we should not create sandboxes to play in, and that students should be working with real open source communities in real open source projects rather than creating their own toy projects in git instances that aren't really used by anyone else. However, we have had profs tell us that they can't get the infrastructure access they need at their schools -- some can have root on an internal server, or a server connected to the public Internet, but not both (root and an accessible IP), and some can't even get a fraction of that. So being able to provide some things such as a Planet very quickly could have value. (Of course, the other side of this is just hosting TOS.o on a higher-bandwidth link with higher availability for the wiki etc, which is also important). -Chris _______________________________________________ tos mailing list tos@teachingopensource.org http://teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos _______________________________________________ tos mailing list tos@teachingopensource.org http://teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos