I don't post here very often, but I read most posts since I am working on introducing open source projects into my courses.
This is something I said at last years HFOSS symposium in Milwaukee, and I want to say it again. If we want to get more faculty involved in open source, and particularly if we want faculty from outside of computer science departments, then it is going to be very important to reach out to the academic IT community. You know, those folks who control all of the equipment and software at most schools, and who make the key decisions as to the type of computing environments that will be supported. At many smaller schools, the non-computer science, and even the computer science, faculty rely on the academic IT department to do most of the hands on installation work and to set up the computing environments. As a result, at many schools, faculty don't have the knowledge or even the permissions and access to do open source work. For example, at my school, we have to put in software requests ONE FULL YEAR in advance, and open source licenses have to be reviewed by our lawyers, which ma! kes the kind of freewheeling, "set up what you need as you need it" style of open source development close to impossible. Most of the faculty in my department, which is a mixed math/computer science department, have never heard of Apache or Eclipse or MySQL or Subversion/CVS/Mercurial. They rely on our IT staff to make software decisions. I have been at other small schools and have seen the same thing at those schools. Therefore, I think there should be outreach to the academic IT field, which has its own conferences and meetings. I think academic IT people should come to POSSEs. I know my life would be much easier if I could get some of our IT people on board, and I suspect this is true at lots of schools. Bonnie MacKellar St John's University -----Original Message----- From: tos-boun...@teachingopensource.org [mailto:tos-boun...@teachingopensource.org] On Behalf Of Matthew Jadud Sent: Wednesday, January 12, 2011 2:09 PM To: Heidi Ellis Cc: tos@teachingopensource.org Subject: Re: [TOS] Infrastructure Team: Can haz? Hi all, On Wed, Jan 12, 2011 at 13:29, Heidi Ellis <heidijcel...@gmail.com> wrote: > constraint is time. Computing profs already have to keep up with the latest > technology changes. Involving students in OSS is a change in teaching I had a detailed response to some of the earlier posts, but let it sit. (I didn't like having college and university faculty compared to children who need to learn to make their bed---it was a bad analogy.) Like educators at all levels, faculty work long hours because they are passionate about their students, and the ones who will go the extra mile to introduce their students to FOSS need more barriers knocked down, not morality tales. I'm completely with Heidi on this, and I want to take it a step further. The majority of students graduating today are not in computing. I'm going to claim that a lot (most?) of management positions are held by people who graduated with degrees in History, Literature, Business, Philosophy, Psych, Econ... you get the picture. If you want POSSE to have an impact---that is, if you want faculty beyond computing departments bringing their students into the ecosystem---then you need to lower the barriers until an overworked member of the faculty at a small community college teaching technical writing can easily (1) learn the tools and (2) help their students to work with those tools in open communities. (Or, not. See my last comment.) More questions and discussion about the needs of the users (the faculty---who are they, who do we want to support?) and how best to meet those needs is a good idea. While I understand the spirit of Chris's point of view, I don't think it gets at the reality of the vast majority of POSSE participants to date, or the broader community of educators that we hope (need?) to engage. To that end, more user-centered discussion and questions to people like Mel (who has helped run just about every POSSE to date) would be a Very Good Thing. Cheers, Matt _______________________________________________ tos mailing list tos@teachingopensource.org http://teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos _______________________________________________ tos mailing list tos@teachingopensource.org http://teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos
