What did we do at FIE?

Continuing the theme of "where have you been for the past month?" - the updates are starting to trickle in.

Sebastian and I pushed some opensource.com articles from our trip to the FIE conference in DC at the end of last month. We actually both wrote both of them, but the website can only credit one author at a time, so we put his byline on one and mine on another. The first article is a play-by-play of the Teaching Open Source panel with Matt Burke, Heidi Ellis, Greg Hislop, Clif Kussmaul, and myself, with some impromptu jumping-in by Sebastian as well as Steve Jacobs.

The second one is from dinner - we (1) ate pasta and (2) asked the professors what their biggest obstacles to teaching open source were, and got some surprising answers. In a nutshell, they are: university licensing policies, student privacy policies, and IT policies. Basically, the written rules of the academic system are (for perfectly internally-rational reasons) set up in ways that end up discouraging open source participation.

Heidi also wrote a blog post on our visits with her students and should be putting out an article on that herself pretty soon. It's surprisingly difficult to articulate the conversations we had, because so much of it was stumbling around trying to find ways to translate between different cultures (open source and academia) and we only really got coherent (to ourselves) towards the end... and then articulating that to others is a whole different question.

Next up: same thing, from the Engineer of the Future conference. So... many... creative commons... images... to credit...