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Category Archives: Classroom

POSSE Cali schedule updated – now 06 to 10 July

Although a bit late in the game, we decided to move our POSSE forward by a day.  This is to keep us from running against the July 4th weekend. We cooked up a poster and information packet you can read, use, and pass around.  It’s mainly about getting people to the main POSSE Cali page, [...]

Three reasons POSSE attracts professors and other educators

College educators, read and pass on the word. POSSE may be the really great experience you’ve been looking for.  The groundbreaker that suddenly makes sense and focus out of attending open source conferences, hurried LUG meetings, and dissatisfaction with the limits of what you can do in the classroom compared to the open world. We’re [...]

My POSSE in Cali – Professors’ Open Source Summer Experience

Finally!  This coming 05 to 09 July we are hosting Professors’ Open Source Summer Experience (POSSE) in Mountain View.  And I get to participate as a full instructor in this coolest of programs to come out of the Red Hat community leadership team in the last year. If you are in California this July and [...]

Nice round-up from Creative Commons of open source way content

Just caught a nice post by Jane Park on the Creative Commons blog about teaching open source software.  In the post she highlights three new free and open content works that are for education audiences.  All these works are released under Creative Commons licenses (CC BY and CC BY-SA): Practical Open Source Software Exploration: How [...]

Textbook released – Practical Open Source Software Exploration

After months of work and a last-weekend rush of conversion from MediaWiki to DocBook+Publican, the Teaching Open Source writing team has released version 0.8 of “Practical Open Source Software Exploration: How to Be Productively Lost the Open Source Way“.  (HTML single-page and PDF.) This week, Dr. Tim Budd at Oregon State University (and member of [...]

A better way to use Wikipedia in the classroom

This is an idea I’ve said in presentations and in person over and over again, about time I give it a home. Where Wikipedia is a useful information source and starting place for deeper exploration beyond it’s reference-focused world, there is so much more that can be done with it to help teach the open [...]

Observe the operating room – wiki2xml sprint for FOSS textbook

There is a work sprint you might be interested in observing or participating in if you … Use MediaWiki for writing long works and want to see how it is to convert to DocBook XML. Want to know more about using DocBook XML and the Publican publishing toolchain. Enjoy watching people edit XML like mad. [...]

Irony of ability – how less helps you do more

Just wanted to highlight this interesting article, talking about an English professor at Oklahoma City University who has Lou Gehrig’s disease.  She teaches her class via video conference, and of necessity has learned a new approach of listening and letting students lead the discussion: Taught by a Terrible Disease This interested me for several reasons. [...]

How to become a docs contributor – video

This Wednesday I was helping Mel with the POSSE class in Singapore.  Basically, I covered what open source content in Fedora does (technical docs, process docs, community self-knowledge docs), the common tools and styles we try to propagate, and then walked the class through how to contribute to the release notes.  The exercise was focused [...]

Let me say it again: Get off our freedoms!

Chris Dawson, I understand you are concerned about your school system being sued by the RIAA in your post, “Let me say it again: Stop sharing music!” But spreading nonsensical fear and misinformation isn’t the way to do it. It seems an odd choice to restrict academic openness and freedom for the sake of bad [...]