[Ambassadors] Event Report: University of South Carolina - School of Technology Support and Training Management

[David Nalley]

Quick event report from today:
A bit of background - At the Palmetto Open Source Software Conference
I met a professor at the University of South Carolina who had been
having some of her classes do documentation for OpenOffice.org among
other projects. I talked with her and suggested that Fedora was a
natural fit for her class since the project was large enough to be
significant, and also our release cycles were such that students could
see some fruit to their work before a semester ended and they left the
class. She seemed excited about the potential, and invited me to
speak.
I arrived and talked a bit with the professor before class started,
and she dropped a bombshell on me, that she had 'assigned' 4 students
to work on fp.o docs. Apparently these were students who were
technically competent, and excited and actually asked to work on
writing Linux documentation when they heard of the opportunity. Two of
the students have used Fedora for varying lengths of time.
I ran through a quick introduction to Fedora and Open Source in
general and showed off the OLPC XO (which incidentally I had to 'rent'
for this occasion, but have no fear, I understand the NA Ambassadors
are going to be allocated some in the not too distant future) I passed
the unit around and it received lots of oohs and aahs. I handed out
LiveCDs to each person at the event. I answered questions for about 30
minutes, and then the prof. introduced me to the 4 students and
suggested I talk about what projects were available for them to work
on.
Quaid has been working on a list of tasks for docs projects - so I
proposed all of those - and then they asked me if we were doing
videos/screencasts as well. I showed them some of the Fedora TV
listings and pointed them to [[Screencasting]] After reviewing the
tasks they seem to like the "Bugzilla for New Users" idea, and might
do a screencast to go along with the document. We also talked about
potential OLPC documentation projects - but honestly I need to get a
list of those tasks from Greg. In addition to those 4, there was one
more student who wasn't in the class, but heard that I was coming and
showed up to listen. I am going to work on getting him involved as
well, though not necessarily with docs. There were also 3 other
professors who came to listen about this 'newfangled F/LOSS thing'.
Overall I think it was a success - she's limited the group to 4
students this semester just to see how it works - but last semester it
appears that 1/2 of her class did OO.o docs - so we can certainly grow
this.
After the class was over I talked with the professor a bit more and we
talked about educational theory - and she is of the opinion that
education in general is drifting away from the theory over experience
model. She also said that a significant problem in education is that
teachers don't know technology even when it is vital to their ability
to successfully educate, and students are passing them by. I told her
that we had recently discussed finding a way of having some sort of
educator training to expose teachers to the latest and greatest in
technology and open source and how it benefits them, and why they
should embrace it. She then informed me that she sits on the board for
the South Carolina Business Educators Association which involves high
school and college instructors. She asked me if I was interested in
speaking at their annual conference in February and exposing some of
these things to their members. She indicated that she'd work to get me
a speaking slot, but of course can't act alone. So we'll see how that
turns out. As it turns out she did her doctoral thesis on community
interactions within education - and she said that what was visible
from the outside of Fedora was fascinating and that it might make an
interesting study at some point in the future.

At the end of the day we should have at least 4 new contributors (at
least for a semester) and we certainly have an opportunity to grow
that, both with the students now and those in the future.

Blog posting with pictures will be forthcoming, but it might be
tomorrow before it gets pushed out.