Wednesday, March 18, 2009

White Paper in open source and education -> rescoping

After the insightful moments at HFOSS and many discussions followed in the mailing list of teachingopensource.org, I have to narrow down the scope of my white paper in open source and education.

This decision was made after talking with my professor today and it is not the first time I did this since I came back from the symposium. The first time I narrowed it down to the polytechnic schools in Ontario since I don't understand properly the post-secondary system in United States and my experience is with an applied college rather than a theory and research oriented university.

Trying to narrow it down to the polytechnic schools inside of Ontario does not work either since it would require me to get in touch with several schools and maybe for nothing since teaching open source is not yet normal. Even the term polytechnic cannot be extrapolated to an equivalent type of school in the United States and it is not an accepted term in here either!

What I am going to do
I have three more weeks before the due date and I am going to narrow it down to the advantages a Seneca student gains when taking the open-source courses compared to other Seneca students and show how the skills gained were immediately put into practice when I was doing my internship with the Release Engineering team of Mozilla. I hope Lukas Blakk, Anthony Hughes, Cesar Oliveira and Ben Hearsum could help me by telling me what their own experience is from working at Mozilla and having taken the open-source course or the crash course at Seneca.

Funny enough, this advantage that I gained is going to be lessened since the majority of my class mates are either currently taking the open-source course with Jordan Anastasiade or they took it with Dave Humphrey last Fall.

This is going to require to write again a new outline, identify my ideal reader and all the work I had already done but it will be totally worthy and more personal.

Stayed tuned!

1 comment:

  1. Hi, Armen.

    Just a thought for brainstorming purpose. Even though it may not be a focus of your research report, you could still have a section on doing a "compare and contrast" between Seneca College in Ontario and some of the universities that you've come across at HFSOSS and
    the tos email exchanges. You'll still use Seneca College as your reference point and the experiences there can shed some light on the issues faced by the univeristy educators.

    Peter.

    ReplyDelete