Education/StatusMeetings/2009-05-19

Mozilla Education Status Meeting - May 19, 2009

Teleconference System Info

• Tuesday May 19, 2009 11:00 am EDT, 8:00 Pacific, 1500 UTC (other time zones here)

• +1 650 903 0800 extension 92, conference # 7600 (US/International)
• +1 416 848 3114 extension 92, conference # 7600 (Canada)
• +1 800 707 2533 (password 369), conference # 7600 (US/Canada Toll Free)

Pressing *1 will mute or unmute your line. If you're having trouble hearing other people, pressing *6 will make the conference louder to you (*4 makes it quieter). If other people are having trouble hearing you, pressing *9 will make you louder to everyone else (*7 reverses this).

IRC Backchannel

During the call you can also join the #education channel. If you don't have an irc client installed, you can use Mibbit to connect directly in your browser (enter a nickname and click Go). Whatever you type will be sent to the rest of the group in real time.

Invited

• Gregorio Robles (URJC, Spain)
• Gen Kanai (Mozilla Japan)
• Satoko Takita Yamaguchi (Mozilla Japan)
• Ralph Morelli (Trinity College)
• Trishan de Lanerolle (Trinity College)
• Ignac Kolenko (Conestoga)
• Carlo Sgro (Conestoga)
• Ciera Jaspan (CMU)
• Rob Cameron (SFU)
• Didier Courtaud (Evry, France)
• Luca Greco (Italy)
• Guy Pyrzak (see http://guy-pyrzak.blogspot.com/2009/04/lots-of-design-feedback-and-bugzilla.html)
• C N Ravikumar (Sri Jayachamarajendra, India)
• Srirang G Doddihal (Sri Jayachamarajendra, India)
• Heidi Ellis (Trinity College)
• Greg Hislop (Drexel)
• David Bolter (University of Toronto)
• Andy Cobley (University of Dundee)

Agenda

• Connecting: professors and others who are working with Mozilla, or planning to do so
  • Hybrid approach, involving Mozilla, universities, colleges, and high schools
  • Direct involvement with real Mozilla projects, products
  • Opportunity to focus (e.g., HCI, automated testing, XML, JavaScript) within the context of a larger community
  • Bootstrapping professors, teachers, and their students into large scale open source work
  • We've been doing this for the past 4 years, and it can be done

• Question: Could we collaborate on an inter-institutional virtual course that takes students inside the process of building the open web?
  • We teach and work in different contexts, each with a different focus
  • Our students have different strengths and abilities
  • We all want to see our students have real world experiences and the chance to collaborate on a global scale

• Idea: Form a community within Mozilla of professors, teachers, and students working on Mozilla in an educational context
  • Begin in Fall 2009,
  • Provide virtual support and resources
  • Combine our students into a common on-line community of Mozilla contributors, supporting one another
  • Connect this education community to Mozilla in order to find mentors, real projects, and knowledge

• Discussion:
  • What is your context and interest?
  • What are your ideas?
  • What needs to be in place for you to get involved with something like this?

Notes

Virtual Course

• what is meant by virtual?
  • professors and students interact with developers and each other
  • professors can support other professors
  • a space which is not the school and not Mozilla but hybrid is available for a professor to go to and get knowledge
• what is meant by collaboration on virtual course?
  • does it make sense to do an integrated course?
  • virtual course is not just way it offered
  • hybrid approach - different school will have different areas of interest
  • virtual course will not be one thing but a pooling resources and attention so that all have visibility of others
  • not trying to jam everyone into the same virtual lectures
• are their courses that can be retrofitted?
• need to start to recognize in each other a chance to work together
• expected that at each school there is one or two professors who will be involved
  • project grows by connecting those people
  • critical mass builds on-line

Institutional and logistical problems

• how can we work together and not in silos?
• issues of accreditation and institutional boundaries need to be solved
• school years don't match up in terms of dates
• challenges to pooling efforts in different time zones
• some of these problems have been solved by how Mozilla operates as it is a global operation

Teacher professional development

• teachers need to have some willingness to get into Mozilla's codebase to be effective
• what can Mozilla do to get faculty in shape for this work?
• is there a way to do this that would be effective? what would make transition easier?

Student skill levels

• courses only for undergrads, postgrads or other levels?
  • possible to mix different levels of students; good to mix
• Mozilla has different levels
  • students have worked on different levels (eg. some students have only done only done unit testing)
• takes students 120 hours to achieve professional competence in terms of getting a big picture view of a project
  • courses can zero on a more limited set of knowledge (eg. only unit testing)

Finding student projects

• projects good for students are often one step removed from what will ship soon
  • not blocking but may get picked up for next release
  • need to balance what is valuable to Mozilla with finding projects not so central that there is room to develop
  • there are project that Mozilla won't do, but are interesting experiments that may fit with a school's area of expertise and would attract the attention of Mozilla (eg. re-writing XSLT parsing)
• for beginning students a project would work if developers needed a user community to test work
  • Mozilla is large enough to find a variety of projects

Connecting students with the Mozilla community

• when taking students into open source development it is most effective to direct them to the same project (eg. Mozilla)
  • critical mass among students
  • Mozilla takes notice because you are large enough to attract attention

Evaluation

• how are students evaluated?
• can professors use a mentor's feedback to mark student work?
• can Bugzilla and IRC be mined to come up with automated evalution component to feed into overall marking?
• courses should have a level of interaction student and faculty such that evaluation is not a problem
• for beginning students using sourceforge and similar tools to track contributions
• functionality on Mozilla Education site for a standard evaluation tool proposed
• programs such as Capstone have certain requirements for students doing their own work that are part of definition of the course
• work placement could be open source development projects

Issues for research oriented school

• faculty needs to see open source development in terms of academic contribution
• faculty has a traditional view of scholarly contribution that may not include open source development
• sometimes hard to get university excitement about non-research aspects of open source
• from research point of view challenge of making connection to open source communities
• are there model policies that institutions can use to get things going?

Support from Mozilla Foundation

• it would very helpful to get letters of support from Mozilla for grant proposals and for consideration by policy makers
• Frank Hecker can arrange letters of support