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September 29, 2008

Seneca College in Toronto now offers a different approach to open source training: a hands-on introduction to the Linux community in partnership with the Mozilla and Fedora projects.

The program is now in its third year, and it is expanding rapidly. It has received attention from other academic institutions as well and that hope to imitate it in the same direction.

According to one of the professors involved in the teaching and development of the program, Chris Tyler says Seneca College has been using FOSS (Free or Open Source Software) in its courses for fifteen years.

But when Mike Shaver and other promoters from Mozilla's Toronto office began giving presentations on free software at the college, professor David Humphrey started working on Mozilla-related projects with students outside of class.

As this extracurricular work began being integrated into the course material, it led to a $50,000 grant from Mozilla two years ago, and an additional $100,000 grant last year.

In February 2008, the Fedora project began a similar relationship with Seneca, due largely to the efforts of Chris Blizzard, a former employee of Red Hat, Fedora's parent corporation, who now works at Mozilla. Red Hat also gave an undisclosed grant to Seneca.

To this date, about 150 students have taken Seneca's undergraduate courses in free software. "About forty eight percent of the students maintain some sort of involvement in open source," Tyler says.

One recent student contributed a plugin to Firefox 3 that Mozilla developers said couldn't be written, and several have gone on to become Mozilla interns and employees.

Currently, Seneca offers four upper undergraduate course that involve Mozilla, two each in the Bachelor of Software Development and the Computer Programming and Analysis Diploma. It also offers the week-long Real World Mozilla course.

This fall, thanks to Fedora, it will add the graduate-level Linux/Unix System Administration program.

Greg DeKonigsberg, Fedora's liaison with Seneca, says, "There's a lot of knowledge that's simply not taught that you just need to get in order to fully participate in an open source project."

He added "there's a difference in how open source is approached compared to traditional software, and it's not like you can learn it in a book... It's very much an apprenticeship model. It's a completely different mindset."

Different thinking or not, those that are directly involved say that the Seneca programs are necessary because familiarity with the open source world is not something that traditional computer science can teach.

Also, it simply isn't in their vocabulary either, and that of course makes a big change for many that are already used to open source terminology, and the "FOSS way" of doing things.

Among the specific knowledge that students learn via the Seneca projects are "how do you submit bugs? How do you get reviews for your code patches? How do you participate in the build process and don't mess it up?"

Frank Hecker, executive director of the Mozilla Foundation, makes pretty much the same point, referring to the learning process within the free software community as "osmosis." (!)

"What they're doing isn't something you can capture in a course book or video," Hecker says. "Part of the reason that the Seneca project works is that you don't just have students working on an isolated project, where they do the project on their own, they hand it in, and the teachers evaluate it."

He added "part of the process is that students actually get directly involved in the community."

He added "they don't just submit code-- they have to get involved in the Mozilla development processes. They're really learning as a sort of junior person to the more senior members of the project how to be a Mozilla developer. And there's no Big Book of Mozilla that will tell you everything you need to know. You have to learn by doing. Period. There's really no other way."

"Trying to teach these things artificially, either by creating a false open source community for the purposes of the class, or teaching them outside the community, isn't effective," Tyler says bluntly. "This is a very applied, pragmatic approach. We've really become convinced that it's the most effective way to teach open source development."

"From a Mozilla perspective, it wasn't just promoting Mozilla in general," Hecker says. "It's also a training facility to provide additional people to work on the Mozilla project." By contrast, he explains, people who volunteer in their spare time take much longer to reach the point where they are major contributors or potential employees."

Although the Fedora part of the program is still being developed, DeKonigsberg hopes for similar advantages for his project. In addition, he points out that "Students bring a lot of perspective that those already in the project can simply miss on the first few days. One of the problems of working every day in a project is that you become desensitized to the pain points of new contributors. But to students, those pain points are obvious if you're paying attention."

He added "in other words, by listening to students, DeKongisberg hopes to improve the prevailing practices within in Fedora."

In an effort to help satisfy curiosity about the college's programs, Tyler and Humphrey have added an educational track to Seneca's FOSS Symposium this year, and Tyler is scheduled to speak at the upcoming Ottawa Linux Symposium on the college's programs, on Oct. 8.

Seneca's FOSS instructors are also in the early stages of developing a FOSS curriculum -- a venture in which Fedora in particular hopes to be actively involved. "My ideal goal would be a completely open source curriculum about the open source development methodology," DeKonigsberg says.

He also suggested that, by working with the FOSS community, where sharing information is a prime virtue, Seneca is helping post-secondary education return to its original ideals.

Source: Web Services.

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