Do you think it’s possible to teach Open Source? It seems so …
Recently I’ve discovered the Teaching Open Source initiative which aims to teach next generations of software developers, analysts, system admin, etc. the ability to work eficently within Open Source communities.

The concept of “Open Source in Education is extremely unclear”, as stated in the site, and because of that, there they present clear declaration of intents that marks the boundaries of the scope of the initiative:

Teaching students how to contribute to and work within an Open Source project, collaborating with other community members on development, support, testing, documentation, bugfixing, and other collective tasks. This is teaching the “Open” in Open Source, and is the intended meaning of the phrase “Teaching Open Source”.

I really like that vision!

The whole initiative is structured in different projects and makes available, through the site, a set of informative and collaborative tools like blog, wiki, mailing list, an IRC channel, conference calls that allow anyone to contribute to the growth and development of projects themselves.
One of these projects is an in progress book, the Textbook Project, which I started reading pushed by a lot of curiosity. Starting from the early chapters, what struck me was the very practical approach, that can sound like: Students! Look for an open source project that attract you and get into it. This way you can touch with your hands how an open source project works, you can give your time and passion and have back a gain in terms of experience that you will be able to spend wherever you want.

I’ll keep an eye on it and report my comments on that initiative … meanwhile I hope it could be possible to start a discussion on education and maybe how it can produce (high) quality results … let me know what you think.

Tags: education, open source

Categories: OSS Discussions, Open Quality

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