=== Title slide === Hi, I'm Karsten Wade. I'm Mel Chua, and we're from Red Hat's Community Leadership Team. As you can see Karsten and I come from very different backgrounds; he's been in industry for a long time, and I've recently gotten out of school, so we have different perspectives on this "education" thing. That's exactly what we're going to try to show you today; different perspectives. We've got 5 acronyms that we're using as examples of things that span the space of "education" in a different way, and we'll take them from a number of perspectives - so let's start by finding out who we've got here today. === Who is the audience? === We'd like to know who you are and why you are in a talk on FOSS and education. Is anybody not comfortable with the definition of free and open source software, aka FOSS? How many people are involved in the education field? Teachers or faculty? Admin or staff? Student or applying? Starting your own school or classes? Do you work for a business or organization that uses open source or are considering using free software? Who works for a non-profit corporation? Who is from Portland? Oregon? North, East, or South? Where else? Do you have a problem that you want to solve - that may not be a technical problem, but which you are considering open source as part of the solution? Have you looked at the value, affects, and costs of open collaboration for problem solving in your discipline or domain? How many people want to see open source spread - specific technologies, licensing, as a way of thinking about code and also beyond code? === Your job === Your instructions for the next 30 minutes are to think about these problems in whatever way will help you share as many insights as you can about them. What's important is not what we say, but what happens in your brain, and what you can share with others in this room - so if that means ignoring us for a while and thinking, please ignore us! Do whatever you think is going to make you get the most out of this tlak. == Outline of this talk == here's what we're going to do: for each of the 5 topics, we're going to... * State the problem ("bug") in education-land. This is a problem we're * How does $item solve it (as one solution)? * Why is FOSS vital to $item being a solution? * How can you get involved with $item? Here's the handy-dandy participation URL. That's the left side of the screen. On the right side we have a live stream of everything being tweeted and dented with the #5edu hashtag; this is a laptops-open talk, so please comment, ask questions, propose alternative solutions to the problem, whatever you can think of. == Humanitarian FOSS (HFOSS) == Problem: When you are running a humanitarian-focused project, from emergency relief aid to a long-term agriculture effort, technology is your friend and enemy. It can help you make leaps and bounds, but when it breaks it is the worst demon. Sometimes it's easier to just use pencil and paper. How can FOSS in education solve this problem? CS/schools worry: CS enrollment is going down, and all our students look the same (gearheads.) Others should care because: Business :: When CS programs only turn out super-geek programmers, they are creating an increasingly small group of people who are not well rounded for doing business. A business can absorb and work with a few end-of-spectrum individuals, but even they benefit from having enough over-the-line thinking technologists with strong ties to the humanities. Cf. Rands in Repose "Russian Lit Major." http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2006/09/06/russian_history.html Teachers :: You've seen the students with technical smarts who get turned off by computer science and engineering. HFOSS provides a way for you to get those students to combine their passions and active natures along with technical talents to work on affecting change in the world... and a way to unite with other schools to get grant/funding credibility within academia for it (we'll come back to this later, see: TOS). Communities :: Just as any building that is designed and built with a purpose and a passion is an asset to your community, so is a software program that comes from a similar place. HFOSS provides important exposure for those interested in affecting positive change in your community. Using FOSS allows these passionate people to achieve their mission by making technology a partner instead of an enemy. And we lose out on a lot of potential talent that doesn't fit our existing images of people who make and use technology. Humanitarian disciplines are required to make sometimes major capital expenditure (capex) and ongoing operational (opex) while relying on technologists for decisions. tech is used primarily by people who are tech-first (plz rephrase) Solution: Focus on solving humanitarian problems in the world... by working on open source projects. This flips things upside down because now the people who need the technology but who are not normally the tech-literate bringing in Shiny New Stuff Why FOSS: Lowering cognitive access barriers to tools and information, since these folks prioritize solving the problem over playing with tech and data for its own sake. Save budget - financial, time, logistics, and sheer human energy - by not having to context-switch so strongly out of the problem context (i.e. "to get access to this tool, I need to take class X, pay for Y, spend lots of time on setup Z, get someone to fix this..." vs "I'll ask someone to fix it and they may or may not." How to join: http://hfoss.org/ - become a chapter (school) or a project (foss). === Sugar on a Stick (SoaS) === === Slide === "Beginning with the finishing touches" Remixing is familiar already to teachers - "remix books" == "we'll skip the next chapter" Sugar is a computing environment designed for children. SoaS makes it deployable on a thumbdrive. This is the kind of project that is a perfect circle. Wherever an educator or a student enters the circle, they grow and gain access to all sides of the circle. The tool itself is no-cost to distribute and no-cost to use, and it provides a complete experience as-is. But it is also extremely transparent. If you have ever viewed the source on a webpage, or have seen students use that view to begin learning how to make webpages, imagine that access provided to the entire operating system. For the curious student, the innovative teacher, and the supportive and clever families, SoaS is the pedagogical opposite of a consume-only technology such as the iPad. Once you have the idea that you can remix your technology, projects such as the Fedora Project have tools to let you completely mix your own operating system. This may sound daunting, but for someone with the needed skills, it is only a few hours learning and work === Teaching Open Source (TOS) === Problem: People working on teaching open source don't have a neutral place where they can collaborate without feeling the need to build sandboxes for each other. OSS work doesn't "count" in academia for profs (teaching/research/service) or students (credit/grades), so projects/companies have no way to immersively participate in those communities and vice versa, aside from "shiny" sandboxed seasonal interactions. We sandbox each other - how much do parents see of their kids' lives when they visit for parents' day + graduation? Business :: TOS is the advisory board of professors who are reacting, informing, and mentoring in near real time (at the speed of business) in a way that's continuously visible to us. This is different from the old industry way of interacting seasonally with schools by erecting special 'sandboxes' for each other to only show the Best and Shiny. Real time interaction is the difference between an online library resource open for access 24x7 and a special collection you can only look at from 9 to 12, M/W/Th. Where does the community of practice for teaching FOSS contribution gather? Here – TeachingOpenSource.org (TOS). TOS is a neutral collaboration point for professors, institutions, communities, & companies around the practice of teaching open source. Within TOS, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) provide contrasting case studies on how schools large and small can integrate FOSS into the fabric of their teaching and learning, both from the top-down and the bottom-up. === Professors’ Open Source Summer Experience (POSSE) === Problem: Teachers don't have experience in navigating the sort of world of learning they'd like their students to go into. We want students to participate in FOSS so they learn real-world skills and communities have extra hands to help. Teachers have the time, mandate, and scaffolding know-how to do this. A teacher's job includes building scaffolding so their students are successful and don't fall to their deaths. It's difficult and impossible to build that without knowing about the world you are building it for. Solution: How do professors learn to teach their students open source, where students work on topics their teachers don’t know and the primary skill is learning to be productively lost? POSSE is a weeklong bootcamp that immerses professors in open source projects so they can learn how to get their students involved. Why FOSS: because we can immediately participate fully in these communities in a way that's replicable and scaleable to students later on. === Undergraduate Capstone Open Source Projects (UCOSP) === Problem: Academic-industry projects build closed portfolios. If academia is about this glorious (well... theoretically) scientific method research open thing, why do we have capstones (culminating experiences) that are black-boxy? Because (up 'till now) we thought that was the best we could do. === Questions? === Thank you!