Re: KDE Program for a FLOSS-oriented CS curriculum

Sandro, 

Great idea, I love it. I do wonder what form you imagining this taking?
are you thinking of a wiki book or something? or a site with lessons on
it? 

Either way, as an educator myself, I have some pretty strong opinions on
this subject.

The idea of teaching open technology as a part of computer networking,
or computer programming, or whatever, is an important one and one often
dismissed as not relevant because people say things like "well I don't
use KDE at my job, so it must be true that no one does". Fact is, the
key isn't that we teach KDE, or even Linux: it's that we are teaching
people how to learn. With closed technologies, there is by definition a
limit to what students are able to learn. So we are implicitly teaching
them to take certain things on faith; "don't ask WHY that works; you
can't see the code or the configuration, so just Believe that it works."


With open technology, wewe explicitly teach students to dig deeper, to
learn everything, to understand anything.

I personally find that one effective way to do this is to just teach
what you are teaching, and use open technology to teach it. The
class/lesson doesn't need to be about KDE or Linux/BSD, but it should be
*on* KDE and Linux/BSD. The openness reveals itself when a student asks
a question that you *can* actually answer, because it's open source.

I have taught film, visual effects, Arduino, Python, animation, and
video game programming with these principles, and it has yet to fail me.

-seth


 




> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject: [kde-promo] KDE Program for a FLOSS-oriented CS curriculum
> From: Sandro Andrade <[email protected]>
> Date: Wed, April 29, 2015 2:10 pm
> To: KDE Promo <[email protected]>
> 
> 
> Hi there,
> 
> I've been thinking about the process by which newcomers start doing
> their contributions in KDE. In spite of some minor exceptions, I guess
> undergraduate students are still the majority of such potential
> contributors. However, different universities around the world vary
> from zero to very intense incentives not only to the adoption but also
> to focus their academic activities towards FLOSS applications.
> 
> Certainly many possible causes for such zero adoption of FLOSS in
> universities are out of our immediate control, but I think we have
> chances for addressing another ones. What I've seen, at least in
> Brazil, is that most CS professors are either not interested in FLOSS
> or perhaps interested but completely unaware about how things work and
> how they would correlate FLOSS with the subjects taught in their
> courses.
> 
> Cutting right to the chase, I was wondering if the availability of a
> high quality and comprehensive "KDE Program for a FLOSS-oriented CS
> curriculum" would help in any way the number of CS students doing
> their work using KDE software. In practical terms, we initially would
> have to agree on a common CS curricula (hopefully that is expected to
> be easily identified) and then document, for each curriculum
> component, the KDE technologies that would be either inspiring sources
> for analysis or potential cases to apply, as contributions, concepts
> related to that curriculum component.
> 
> Some examples:
> 
> - For a "Data Structure" and "Graph Theory" courses: we  would
> document possible contributions in Rocs or the main implementation
> aspects of Qt container classes.
> - For a "Design Patterns" and "Software Architecture" courses: we
> would describe how patterns have been used across KDE software and the
> tactics adopted in outstanding architectures of applications like
> KDevelop, Qt Creator, Plasma, KF5, and many others.
> - For a "Software Quality" and "Project Management" courses: we would
> explain the quality assurance process adopted in Qt and KDE
> communities, along with the tools, standards, and procedures that
> support the process.
> - For a "Computer Graphics and Image Processing" course: we would
> point out contributions possibilities in kdenlive, krita, and so on.
> - For a "Compilers and Programming Paradigms" course: we could explore
> the grantlee parser automata and/or the QML interpreter.
> 
> The ultimate goal would be having a detailed set of guidelines about
> how to adopt KDE as a central case study in CS courses. Obviously,
> that would require some time investment and the help of those of you
> who knows a lot about KDE solutions.
> 
> By now, I would like to hear from you about two initial questions:
> 
> 1) Do you experience this same scenario in your countries/universities
> and consider this problem 'pervasive' enough to demand a global
> endeavour from our community ?
> 
> 2) Do you think such a 'KDE Program' is worth and would help in
> fostering the adoption of KDE in universities and in alleviating some
> initial contribution barriers ?
> 
> Cheers,
> --
> Sandro
> 
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