[wsfii-discuss] open education

Wed Nov 2 10:53:46 UTC 2005

On Wed, Nov 02, 2005 at 02:03:56PM +0530, Arun Mehta wrote:
> Ultimately, all problems lead us back to the system of education. If 
> open systems of all kinds are to take hold, students must not just be 
> exposed to them in education, but imbibe the spirit.
> 
> I am particularly thinking about software writing, where the assembly 
> line approach of conventional education does not work, and qualified 
> teachers are hard to find, since industry pays much better. Does there 
> exist, or can we build, a method of training people in software writing, 
> in which the students are helped to become useful members of teams on 
> sites such as sourceforge? They could start small, doing beta testing 

Yes, let them simply go to some free software project they like and ask
for work to be assigned.

> and improving documentation for the user, the code, etc. Gradually, they 
> would start writing small bits with help, and get better at doing it. 
> Writing FLOSS would form the core of the teaching methodology.

I don't have experience with this on FLOSS but have experience on UCT.
My friend Lucas Vogelsang is 15 years old and is going to high school.
He showed interest in Ronja development so he started straight away,
with very low startup dead time.

We came to metal workshop and I asked him: "have you ever worked with
metal?". Reply: "No." In 5 minutes he was cutting sections 
http://images.twibright.com/tns/1a4b.html
on band saw
http://images.twibright.com/tns/1a43.html
for Ronja welded console
http://images.twibright.com/tns/1a52.html
and then welding Fogtown development transmitter.

His contribution list already involves mechanics, optics, electronics,
and programming:

* Measurement of cosmetic mirror
* Work on Fogtown transmitter development (30x30cm Fresnel lens)
* Work on Aisha development (Luxeon III driver)
* Work on prototype of new Parallel console
* Work on SMD version of RX PCB
* Setting up svn & trac
* Redesign of main.php and it's icons
* CSS style
* Fixes in HTML syntax for XHTML compliance

Lots of the things he learned on-the-fly.  This shows that UCT education
has very low demand on already existing education.

That was in the summer. The console
is already "in production":
http://ronja.twibright.com/console/par_welded/ and the transmitter is
already measured to have 3.0km range. The fact how many useful
contributions he has already been able to produce shows the efficiency
of UCT education.

The problem with schools is they ignore the fact that noone is able to
learn when he's boring. They are very inefficient in education. FOSS and
UCT have excellent efficiency because are not boring.

The best Computer Science schoolmates on my university were always those
who were working on Linux Kernel or GCC in their free time - for example
Martin Mares (Linux PCI subsystem), Pavel Machek (Linux Suspend to
disk), Vojtech Pavlik (Linux keyboard, jostick, sound and more), Jan
Hubicka (GCC). They always understood the school stuff and could explain it
excellently.

clock at kestrel:/usr/src/linux$ fgrep -R 'Martin Mares' . | wc -l
118
clock at kestrel:/usr/src/linux$ fgrep -R 'Vojtech Pavlik' . | wc -l
249
clock at kestrel:/usr/src/linux$ fgrep -R 'Pavel Machek' . | wc -l
55
clock at kestrel:~/gcc-4.0.2$ grep -R '\(Jan\|Honza\) Hubicka' . | wc -l
1296

Hypothesis: work on FOSS of these students was contributing factor
or main cause of their excellence

CL<