Open Source Educator (Part Five: Teaching) March 3, 2011

<polyachka> So would you say that OLPC/Sugar got you interested in Open source or the other way around?

<mchua> I got into that because one of the big bottlenecks I saw for Sugar – and this is true of many open source communities – we’re just not that good at teaching people how to join us.

<polyachka> agree

<mchua> If you think about something like… say, playing guitar. There are books on playing guitar, schools for playing guitar, teachers. You can walk down the street – everyone knows what it means to play guitar, they know someone who plays it, they’ve listened to CDs with guitar players, they’ve seen them on TV. And if they want to get started, they know they can grab a book or a teacher, they have some idea – there’s a pathway for that.

<mchua> But open source? How the heck do you start with open source? A lot of open source hackers would say “well, you just *do* it!”

<mchua> but that’s like taking a 5-year-old into a kitchen and handing them a knife and saying “cooking! you just do it!”

<mchua> “there’s nothing preventing you from making a perfect roast chicken right now! all the tools are in front of you! all the ingredients!”

<mchua> “But I don’t know how to turn on the oven or use the knife to chop things!”

<polyachka>

<mchua> However, professors are masters at turning complicated subjects into scaffold pathways that students can learn along.

<polyachka> I’m laughing here like crazy

<mchua> The good professors, anyhow

<mchua> So it’s my hope that by working with these professors – if they figure out what sort of resources, guidance, support, teaching, etc. their students need to get started in these projects

<mchua> those same resources and scaffolding and learning-pathway will be useful to other folks as well, other newcomers.

<mchua> And to answer your earlier question, I would say that I was interested in open source first, and then OLPC/Sugar followed from that – but also that OLPC was the first time I was actually an open source contributor, rather than just a user.

<mchua> I started using open source software when I was 14 (a bunch of my high school friends invaded my room one evening with Debian install floppies) and wanted to contribute back to it but couldn’t figure out how.

<mchua> I was intimidated, none of the projects I contacted were responsive, I basically tried to contribute for 6 years but couldn’t figure it out – it was very discouraging, I thought it was because I wasn’t “good enough” to contribute to open source.

<mchua> And that’s why I’m now working so much on the newbie experience, working to help people get started… because I know how it feels to be stuck like that.

<mchua> It’s not that you’re not good enough, it’s that you haven’t found the right mentors, the right entry points, nobody’s told you about the culture, the way of thinking and doing things.

Open Source Educator (Part One: Red Hat) February 26, 2011

I heard about Mel Chua in open source circles and asked if I could interview her on IRC. Here is part one of our interview:

<polyachka> Good morning! Where are you now?

<mchua> I’m sitting in Raleigh, NC at the moment. I tend to move around a lot, though.

<polyachka> and where is your home?

<mchua> The internet. I don’t really have a place I consider a (geographic) home base at the moment… been moving and traveling quite a bit. I’ll be settling a bit more in West Lafayette, Indiana this summer to start my engineering education PhD studies at Purdue University, though.

<polyachka> but where did you go to high school?

<mchua> Aurora, IL. I lived away from home for high school; it was a residential public magnet – my family didn’t live in Aurora.

<polyachka> by traveling you mean going from one project to another for Sugar?

<mchua> Oh, my travel isn’t for Sugar events these days. Mostly for work, and to see family and friends on occasion.

<polyachka> what do you do for work?

<mchua> My dayjob is working for Red Hat’s open source community team; I’m responsible for the company’s education strategy.

<polyachka> interesting

<mchua> So I work with professors who are getting the students in their classes involved in open source communities, and help them figure out how to do that. One of things I do is teach summer workshops for those professors – many of them have never been open source contributors themselves, so during the workshop we have them go into an open source project and make a contribution of their own.

<polyachka> how many people work for Red Hat?

<mchua> I think somewhere around 3,200 worldwide at the moment…

<mchua>Last summer, one of the workshops we ran (in Worcester State, Massachusetts) featured Sugar Labs as the community to get involved with. And Peter Robinson and Walter Bender were my co-instructors, with a lot of remote support from Sebastian Dziallas. Professors were patching Walter’s “Abacus” Activity, editing Sugar on a Stick documentation and using it for testing – good stuff.

<polyachka> so is it a big trend for professors- to learn about open source? Surprising, as all they publish is not open source…

<mchua>  I wouldn’t say it’s a “big trend” yet, but we’re hoping it will be. It’s certainly a growing movement. There are professors who contribute to open source as a hobby, and there are professors who research open source as a career.  So it’s not just CS professors – economics, sociology, etc. researchers look at our communities as well. Apparently we’re rather fascinating.

<mchua> And open source communities have characteristics of a lot of things they’d like their students to experience – real world projects, distributed collaboration, things for building their portfolio, etc.

<mchua> The Teaching Open Source (TOS) community, http://teachingopensource.org, is a gathering of these professors and open source community members working to support them – great group, the Worcester State crew from the Sugar workshop hangs out there as well. (It’s an open community that centers around academic rather than code projects, basically – everyone’s welcome to join.)

<polyachka> what was your favorite workshop?

<mchua> My favorite workshop would have to be POSSE – that stands for Professors’ Open Source Summer Experience.

<polyachka> where was it?

<mchua>It’s been taught a number of times. The first time was in Raleigh in July 2009. It’s been to Singapore, Cape Town… I taught the last one with Sebastian Dziallas in Doha, Qatar.

<mchua> Yeah, he and I have been revising the curriculum for the past year or so to make it more scalable and understandable (and teachable by people who aren’t us).

<polyachka> where is Sebastian from?

<mchua> He’s from Germany, but is currently studying in Boston. You should interview him, actually – he’s the guy behind Sugar on a Stick. (and started Sugar on a Stick while in high school.)

<polyachka> so any favorite topics for workshops or projects?

<mchua>In terms of workshop topics… the most difficult thing for professors is not learning the tools – they already know how to develop software and all that stuff, some people already know what bugtrackers are (some don’t) – the hard part is the culture.

<polyachka> how many people are in one workshop on average?

<mchua>On average I’d say we have between 8-15 professors in a workshop. Local open source community members swing by, though, so when we all go out to dinner we’ll have 15-20. I think of the workshops as cultural immersions – open source communities have weird quirks that sometimes we forget the rest of the world doesn’t know yet.

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