User:Bkoster
I'm a professor at Meredith College in Raleigh. We do a real CS major, but there's only two of us teaching, so I wear many hats.
Evaluation. I'm doing a little better with the Evaluation activity. Mostly, I got off SourceForge and went to OpenHub. OpenHub is much more tailored to the kind of things we are looking for, projects that are even open for contributors, for starters. I found a music composing system called Rosegarden. It's somewhat developed, but there is still activity, things to do. At times there have been many contributors, but it's just a handful at this point. And they invite people to join.
Planning 1. It took me a while to think about which course(s) I'd want to try FOSS in. I love the idea of working on real projects, but so far it seems to me that you can't count on a student learning anything in particular from working on a FOSS project except for learning about the process itself of working on a group project. (And yes, I have the nagging sense that that is too narrow minded, that if I found the right project I could teach networking with it, but I just don't see it yet.) Anyway, my Software Engineering course has as its only goal to teach the process of making software, so I really need look no further.
So now what about an assignment? If I have a class, do we all work on the same project? In the pre-net world, the class itself was the group. But now, with groups out there, every student could join a different one and all be fine. But if we spread out, my evaluation of them becomes difficult, and we lose the aspect of group-pounding that may be needed to get our foot in the door. (Or perhaps this is just my ignorance, that I haven't put MY foot in any doors yet, not really.) Anyway, if we all stay as a group, how does a project with a handful of developers deal with suddenly having 20? That doesn't seem right either. How about we go in pairs or triplets?
So the first assignment is, get into the group of developers, get your voice in the mix, download and run the code, look at the documentation, see what it looks like. Then you can look for a place to help. If I'm supposed to have a specific project where I can say "go find X and do Y to it", I don't. And I've discovered that the Rosegarden project is for Linux, which is fine, I just don't have Linux box I can put my hands on right now. Do I really need one? Do all of my students?
