User:AChernik

Short Introduction

I am an open educator at Duke University, where I am directing an initiative to integrate open source principles and methodologies into modes of thinking, communicating, and creating within education.

My teaching and research focus on open knowledge, education innovation, connected communication, participatory democracy, the phenomenology of collaboration and meritocratic organization, and design methodology. I have deep experience creating and scaling collaborative faculty development and curriculum innovation initiatives, have presented and written extensively about hacking knowledge in relation to student and citizen agency, and have directed grant-funded initiatives centered on open knowledge and networked communication and digital form.

FOSS in Courses Activity

I am extremely interested in designing stand alone HFOSS activities as well as developing new courses focused around humanistic inquiries pertaining to FOSS. With both of these goals, I am focused on identifying ways in which we can innovate education models in light of free and open knowledge.

STAND ALONE HFOSS EVENT

I am considering partnering with Hack Duke [1] or the Duke STEAM Challenge [2]. Participation in both events is high, yet the largest difference is that Hack Duke follows a traditional hackathon format and takes place over 48 hours, while the Duke STEAM Challenge takes place over an entire academic year. I am particularly interested in the STEAM Challenge model because it follows a project-based, collaborative, and mentored approach. This approach would allow me to embed learning units about the ethical implications of HFOSS. Last year, the STEAM challenge winners created Pocket Counselor, "a mobile application that helps lay counselors deliver a culturally grounded mental health intervention to families with poor functioning and dynamics of distress."

NEW COURSES

- Open source culture gateway course. Learning units will focus on a different aspect of open source culture, such as open medicine (case study: open prosthetics project), open organizations (case study: Red Hat), and remix culture (case study: Creative Commons). I will be looking at how Steve Jacobs at RIT has designed his open source course.

- Open knowledge and education innovation. Students will research the ethical and practical implications of open access to knowledge and share their digital knowledge products as open education resources.

- Open government. Students will employ design thinking methodology to identify and define specific community needs and ideate modes of addressing these needs, from civic technology prototypes to project collaboration with organizations such as Code for America and local open data portals such as Open Raleigh and Open Durham.