West Virginia University Bases Class on MozillaSunday October 3rd, 1999An innovative class at West Virginia University uses the open resources at mozilla.org to track and study the creation of a full-scale 'real-life' software project. Tim Newton, a student in the Software Anatomy class, has more: "The master’s program in software engineering at WVU holds a very interesting class based on the Mozilla web site. Software Anatomy, taught by Dr. John Callahan, structures the class around a huge software project. Dr. Callahan decided that Mozilla had everything needed to show students the complexity of a 'real life' software project, which takes several departments to function. Everyone in the class has to pick a topic from which Mozilla is structured around. Presentations and lectures from each student are required so that all class members can learn more detail about each process from their fellow classmates. So far, the class has proven very successful in keeping the student’s interest and demonstrating all the avenues needed to put a complex project together." As they analyse the structure of mozilla.org, I think, they'll have some useful proposals. I'd like to her them. I think you'll hear them, because according to the course website, Tim Newton (who submitted this article) is assigned MozillaZine as his project component :) I predicted stuff like this will happen. When mozilla is studied in universities, students will work on it and make it better. Will this course & the papers it generates be available to the general public? They could provide another useful source of documentation to help people who want to get into the code. Also, could the interesting stuff be put up on MozillaZine or some other site? web pages about University courses tend to be depressingly ephermal... I would like to make the student's presentation materials and our weekly reports available to the public, but I need to respect the student's ownership of their work. As soon as I work out the legal issues through the university, the stuff will make it to the course WWW pages (<http://www.csee.wvu.edu/~callahan/anatomy/>). I also think that a book or book series on Software Anatomy would be a good idea. Such texts could be used in other MSE programs. I have had some discussions with publishers, but nothing serious yet. I would like to make the student's presentation materials and our weekly reports available to the public, but I need to respect the student's ownership of their work. As soon as I work out the legal issues through the university, the stuff will make it to the course WWW pages at<http://www.csee.wvu.edu/~callahan/anatomy/> I also think that a book or book series on Software Anatomy would be a good idea. Such texts could be used in other MSE programs. I have had some discussions with publishers, but nothing serious yet. It's an excellent way to get people interested in the Mozilla project and it's much more interesting for the students to see a real life project in action rather than just talking theory with some made up case studies. This is a great prototype, we should all try to get similar efforts under way at our alma maters. Imagine hundreds of such courses, with thousands of students introduced to this project every year. I am sure this innovative way of teaching is going to be remembered as a great design pattern of getting "real software metrics" and would also help get feedback back to the public domain group involved with the same. It serves as a great motivation I am sure to the student community who always like to be involved with efforts such as Mozilla (browser framework) which has changed the face of the internet as we know it today. I remember a quote that I came across "Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one" What better place than the open source community. :-) - posted by Sudhakar Ramakrishnan <suramakr@us.oracle.com> I am sure this innovative way of teaching is going to be remembered as a great design pattern of getting "real software metrics" and would also help get feedback back to the public domain group involved with the same. It serves as a great motivation I am sure to the student community who always like to be involved with efforts such as Mozilla (browser framework) which has changed the face of the internet as we know it today. I remember a quote that I came across "Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one" What better place than the open source community. :-) - posted by Sudhakar Ramakrishnan <suramakr@us.oracle.com> |
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