Recently I’ve begun volunteering at Idea Fab Labs here in Santa Cruz, with two specific goals — expanding the space to include free/open source software ethos and hacking, and helping all these awesome makers with questions and reality around the open source way. Tip — I got quite fired-up to do this from Ruth Suehle’s […]
Category Archives: TOS
Open source curriculum at Idea Fab Labs
11-Aug-15First fall textbook sprint
05-Nov-10This Monday 8 November from 1600 to 2200 UTC we’ll be having the first writing sprint for the next version of the Practical Open Source Software Exploration textbook. Anyone interested in helping or watching should meet in #teachingopensource on irc.freenode.net (webchat interface.) You can attend all, some, or none of the sprint. 🙂 I’ve been […]
Anyone interested in helping us setup, run, and use the Four Seasons of Code (FSoC) tool for the upcoming Fedora Students Contributing session? FSoC is a web-based tool for administering a student contributing program — handling proposals, commenting, automatic reminders, and so forth. There is a running instance to look at, and we could get […]
One of the response’s I got to from the call for writers for the Practical Open Source Software Exploration textbook was an offer of an excellent content source, Terry Hancock’s book Achieving Impossible Things With Free Culture and Commons-Based Enterprise. This is a great example of a longer work that the Practical OSS Exploration textbook […]
Do you like knocking on doors?
15-Sep-10As it happens, I don’t. I’m a bit terrified by it. But many people relish the opportunity to help someone solve a problem they didn’t even know they had, or did know but didn’t know who to turn to. Or they have it solved, but in an unsatisfactory way. That’s where the people who will […]
OSCON and CLS 2010 highlights
31-Jul-10As usual, when I get back from a big conference and trip, my mind is full processing everything that happened, and my life is full recovering from the effects of the travel. Instead of a full report right here and now, I’m going to give a quick highlight of the latter part of July 2010. […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]