From Teaching Open Source
My name is Mel Chua, and this page describes the TOS-related projects I'm working on. Feel free to contact me with any comments, questions, or ideas you might have, or check and see if I'll be traveling near you sometime soon.
I work on the Red Hat Community Architecture team. I come most recently from the OLPC (http://wiki.laptop.org) and Sugar Labs (http://wiki.sugar.labs.org) projects, where (among other things) I worked with groups of college students to start university chapters working on both projects. Not long ago, I was an engineering student at Olin College (olin.edu) where I promptly got addicted to education and decided that someday I would become a professor*, so y'all are my heroes.
One of my big goals (and interests, in general) is how professors can make students into catalysts - making sure you go back in the fall with everything you need to turn each kid in your class into an open-source community leader. I'm also hoping to work on followup and learn how to help your ideas and projects gain traction and credibility in the academic world as next school year goes along - do we need to publish journal articles on the impact of teaching the open-source way, should we hit up conferences, how can we help you get permission/resources/recognition from admins, what are the challenges re: working in open-source communities that are particular to universities (student turnover every semester, grades, etc.), what else should be on this list?
I'm new to seeing this side of academia which you all know very well, so I'm looking forward to having my assumptions challenged and my worldview of the ivory tower rewired.
[edit] Projects
- POSSE - one of the POSSE 2009 organizers, working on followup and summer 2010 sessions.
- Textbook project author.
- /Braindumps of projects that haven't really been fleshed out yet.
- Universities - a first attempt to keep stats
- POSSE alumni - another stats attempt