My colleague Jordan has graciously allowed me to sit in the open source development class(OSD600, DPS909) offered by the School of Computer Studies, Seneca College. After attending the Teaching Open Source seminar at FSOSS 2008, I have become interested in observing how students could interact with open-source communities such as Mozilla and Eclipse Web Tools Platform(WTP). I am also curious about how a professor could teach such as a non-traditional project-based course effectively. I have a hunch that there are many issues of teaching and learning that I could explore here.
On the first day of the class(Jan. 13), I was impressed by the remarks of my three colleagues. Dave Humphrey told the students in an inspiring way: “You are not ready to work on these big open-source projects such as Open Office and Eclipse Web Tools. You must persevere. In the end, you would show that you’re good developers.”
Fardad told the students in a straight-forward manner: “I do not know much about Open Office. We learn as we go.”
Jordan told the students in a humurous way: “Our goal here is to fix bugs in WTP.” A week later(January 20), Jordan was showing the HUGE code base of WTP to the students. He said, “I do not know much about this code base. When we want to fix a bug, we ASK HELP FROM THE COMMUNITY.”
I was amazed by my colleagues’ transparency. They were honest with the students: “The professors do not know everything!” This reminds me of what Parker Palmer has said in his book The Courage To Teach: “We teach who we are.” Maybe I have to be willing to reveal my limitations as a teacher if I want to teach such a course effectively. Rome is not built in a day. As for the students, have they learned to nurture a spirit of taking challenges and perseverance? The challenges become even greater since(I think) most of them are full-time students who have to work hard on other courses at the same time.