Mel - Some thoughts:
1. Most people in most communities (academy, business, opensource, civic, etc.) believe in what they do and look for ways to improve what they do. 2. When people in or out of a specific community advocate for "the best way to do things" they are bound to make little progress converting others. 3. The agile development process models for software evolved from understanding #2 both implicitly and explicitly : choose the tools appropriate for the job, remembering the adage that "a poor worker blames their tools." 4. The academy is primarily concerned with teaching undergraduates, not with research or Ph.D.s. 5. There is no generic academic culture, just as there is no generic culture for any other diverse group of professionals. 6. In Computer Science, we have no-fee conference and journal publication via ACM and IEEE Computer. 7. In my experience, Computer Science academics are willing to share code after publication. Learning how to do so effectively can be/is a goal of TOS. 8. Intellectual property rights make the world go round, whether we like it or not. 9. Lest we think ourselves too important, 29,000 children under the age of five – 21 each minute – die every day. 10. Let's commit to improving the world together. Dissertation research idea brainstorm #1: develop a taxonomy of open source activities and conduct studies that compare and contrast these activities with their closed source counterparts in order to discover the effectiveness of each in doing X,Y, and Z. Cheers, Jim On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 11:16 PM, Mel Chua <m...@purdue.edu> wrote: >> On Mar 7, 2012 2:36 AM, "Jim Bowring" <bowr...@gmail.com >> Why the closed-minded vitriol about the academy? Positive actions >> are required! > > > Jim -- I can see how this might not have come through in my original message > on this thread, but I've found that I'm a harsh critic of the things I love > the most. If I didn't have such high regard for the academy and its power to > affect the world, and had no hope or intention of changing it for the > better, I would not be sitting in the ivory tower right now. :) > > As Seb pointed out, identifying the problems in anything is the first step > to improving them; positive actions tend to stem from visions of how > something could be better than it currently is. Since this mailing list > tends to have a lot of academics on it, my writing here tends to be skewed > more towards the "here's what FOSS does right and academia does wrong; let's > transfer goodness in that direction!" theme (perhaps sometimes unfairly so). > > Conversely, when I'm in a group of mostly-hackers, I tend to talk more about > the things that FOSS is doing wrong and academia is doing right, and argue > that FOSS should adopt those practices. For instance, FOSS projects tend to > have ridiculously high failure-and-dropout rates due to poorly designed > scaffolding (or a lack thereof), and schools are more proactive about > identifying and aiding newcomers who are struggling. I guess I should say > these sorts of things here more as well -- thanks for inadvertently pointing > that out. > > Either way, the first step to change is understanding -- and I think what > Seb and I are trying to do, as relative newcomers to the academic world (and > experienced denizens of the FOSS world) is to understand and make sense of > our new environment -- and part of that is fumbling around and saying > (seemingly) stupid things and learning from how folks respond to them. The > comments on my blog post > (http://blog.melchua.com/2012/03/07/foss-thinking-vs-academic-thinking/#comments) > have likewise been illuminating food for thought -- I totally didn't expect > this big a reaction, but hey... that's how we learn. > > Ideas for specific positive actions to take are welcome. I mean, I do need a > dissertation someday. :) > > > --Mel > _______________________________________________ > tos mailing list > tos@teachingopensource.org > http://lists.teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos _______________________________________________ tos mailing list tos@teachingopensource.org http://lists.teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos
