(Guest post by Heidi Ellis Professor and Chair of the Computer Science and Information Technology department at Western New England University. She has a long-time interest in computing education and has been supporting student participation in open source software since 2006 and has been PI or Co-PI on three NSF-funded grants in this area. Heidi also writes about students and open source at http://heidiellis.wordpress.com/)
The end of May saw another successful group of faculty members come together in Philadelphia to explore how to involve students in humanitarian free and open source software (HFOSS) to support student learning. The POSSE workshop (stands for Professors Open Source Summer Experience) was originally created by Red Hat to be an immersive experience in open source tools and culture for faculty members. The idea is to provide instructors with the necessary understanding of FOSS for them to support student participation in FOSS projects in the classroom.
A group of faculty members (Darci Burdge and Lori Postner from Nassau Community College, Greg Hislop from Drexel University, myself and Stoney Jackson from Western New England University, Sean Goggins from University of Missouri, and John Sener from Sener Learning) obtained some NSF funding in 2012 to expand on POSSE. This expansion adds an online component for about a month before the face-to-face meeting as well as the organization of small groups to support the effort afterwards. The idea is to let instructors learn about the nuts and bolts of the tools before a face-to-face meeting during which they'll learn about the culture and how the tools are used in an actual project.
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