Academic Involvement in Ubuntu

[Jan Morén]

mån 2004-11-29 klockan 13:12 +0100 skrev Daniel Holbach:
> Hey everyone,
> 
> Am Montag, den 29.11.2004, 13:53 +0200 schrieb Peter Damoc:
> > I too was disappointed to see this. I wanted to answer but I'm no Ubuntu developer.
> > 
> > there are a lot of things to be done... you can take your pick, you don't need Ubuntu developers to tell you what to do.
> > Suggestions... investigate why people need k3b... port k3b to GTK+
> > the best python IDE for linux seams to be eric3 BUT that also is a QT app.... port it to pyGTK or better yet to wxpython
> 
> I just added http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/IdeaPool to the wiki,
> please add your ideas :-)

There are some issues with academic projects that make it difficult to
give suggestions. Mainly:

1. The students are mainly meant to _learn_ something. No matter how
important or fun a project is, if it consists of "gruntwork" from an
academic standpoint it is not a good candidate. I suspect that porting
an existing app from one toolkit to another probably would fall within
this area. 

2. Time is very limited. As mentioned, the theoretical time frame
discussed is 3-6 months. But take startup time (approval of the project
as creditworthy, for instance) and closing time (write up a report), as
well as the inherent problems of students underestimating needed time
and effort, and you may actually have only 2-4 months "real" time. And
that is typically not full time either - other classes need to be taken,
beer needs to be drunk and so on. Anything that requires a substantial
investment in time and effort to learn just to be able to start on the
project is thus probably out.

3. Participation is limited. Most (not all, of course) students will
drop their project like a hot potato the moment the course credits roll
in, even if it means leaving their code in the middle of writing an
if-statement. Documentation and other externalia will typically be
strictly limited to that needed to finish the course, and no more. It is
not at all a given that other people will be able to pick up the pieces
and continue in a meaningful way afterwards. If anyone else is to have
use of the project afterwards, it probably needs to be fairly
self-contained and be reasonably finished by the time it ends.


I was toying with the idea of offering "real" projects from within OSS
when I was teaching (in the field of UI design and usability
prototyping). The special considerations above just made it too
impractical, however. 


-- 
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
 
Tel. (Japan) 090-3622 8920            Dr. Jan Morén (mr)
                                      Dept. of Cognitive Science
http://lucs.lu.se/people/jan.moren    Lund, Sweden