From Teaching Open Source
Sunday schedule for POSSE. This day starts the week with an evening welcome session.
[edit] Welcome and Introductions
Evening Session
This session will introduce the participants, the subject, and the program for the week.
- Welcome (GDK)
- Introductions and Icebreakers
- Open Source and Teaching (brief)
- The rise of Free Software/Open Source in Computing
- Opportunities provided by Open Source:
- Large, production-quality codebases
- Real users and real user feedback
- Global development teams
- Distributed development teams
- Predefined, working production processes
- Many ways to get involved (development, testing, optimization, porting, documentation, localization, art, ...)
- Low barriers (in one sense) to get involved - no need to ask for permission/approval, just start working
- Market penetration not yet widespread - plenty of strategy projects/opportunties here!
- Challenges of teaching in an Open Source community:
- Many projects not really set up to handle an influx of newbies (yet)
- It's real world -- unpredictable, frequently-changing, and the communities involve unpredictable people
- Learning to work within the community is time-consuming and means less "academic information" can be crammed in (not necessarily a bad thing, but perhaps a problem for Programming 101 or other information-heavy courses?)
- Codebases can be overwhelmingly large and contain some really bad code
- Community schedules are sometimes flexible/moving and often do not match academic schedules; release dates may extend past finals week, mentors may have to disappear mid-term
- Plans for the Week
- General schedule: Start at ~9:00 am, wrap up in mid-/late-afternoon, overnight deliverable
- We will be working inside two communities (describe briefly - more detail on Monday):
- Mozilla
- Fedora
- All content is on the wiki (will be explained in detail on first day)
- Handouts
- Contact info
- URLs for the course (wiki, planet)
- Account information on server
After-Session
- Installfest, for anyone interested or needing to update their laptop configuration -- any combination of:
- Fedora Linux + development tools
- (Windows) Firefox, Putty (optional: mozilla-build, VS)
- (OSX) Firefox (optional: Development tools, XCode)