Musing now and then…

The 8:30 to 3 schedule, a carefully bulleted agenda, and eight attentive teachers quietly keyboarding at their computers would undoubtedly give the impression that things are in order. In essence, though, it turned out very entropic.  How many times we assure our students that good problem solving process is of an unsettling nature, as we aim at delivering a solution, but with many twists and turns in between? Today, at POSSE Worcester 2010 Day 1, we experimented it on ourselves.

The challenge for me was doing many things at the same time, with no full understanding of what I was doing  or what the tools and means I was using were… as if I didn’t have my head and I was not using my hands.

In the end – defined, arbitrarily, by the closing time of 3 pm, deliverables were orderly and neatly checked in a table on the white board.

Lessons learned:

• To enter the FOSS land, make sure you can be as connected as possible via joining IRC channels, writing your blogs and feeding them into FOSS planets, and editing wikis to have your say into the FOSS story.
• To develop FOSS projects, you’ll learn about project hosting at sites such as SourceForge, Gitorious, or Google Code and essential development activities such as version control, code review, and bug tracking.
• At teachingopensource.org, same get involved principles apply.

One thing is certain. Engaging in open source is like learning to ride a bike: can never be forgotten.