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User:David.humphrey/Boston

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[edit] Mozilla@Seneca

Goal: incorporate open source and Mozilla into the Seneca College curriculum and into student activities and projects, with a view to creating reusable learning materials and processes suitable for other institutions.

Rethinking the traditional academic views of:

  • cheating
  • plagiarism
  • collaboration
  • interaction with peers and outside individuals (e.g., Mozilla community)
  • Also, trying hard to remove the separation between faculty and student, Mozilla community member and student, etc.

[edit] What I'm working on

This year I've been working as an educational liaison with the Mozilla Foundation, helping promote and foster Mozilla education at Seneca.

[edit] Academics: Mozilla in the Curriculum

  • Leveraging the existing Open Source culture at Seneca (pdf)
  • Applied Research and Grants - started with "foxtouch," a haptic interface for Firefox (completed in August 2006). It showed me that our students could become active Mozilla contributors. I set-out to make Mozilla more accessible to new developers.
  • Curriculum

[edit] Community/Social

[edit] Industry

[edit] Infrastructure

  • Hera computing cluster at Seneca for Mozilla projects (Windows, Linux, and soon Mac servers)
  • Used by Seneca faculty and students, as well as Mozilla

[edit] Results

  • Since the fall, more than 100 students have taken courses on Mozilla development and worked on Mozilla-related projects
  • Some interesting work that is under way or now completed:
  • APNG (bug 257197) (andrew)
  • distcc + msvc (mystic_ca and cesar) is now complete, and they are porting distcc to msys
  • Mozilla buildbot extensions (bhearsum)
  • Buggy Bar Bug Triage Extension (inveigle)
  • CSS guide (lsblakk) being ported to MDC
  • Armenian Localization of Firefox (armenzg)
  • Font Testing at Seneca's English Language Institute (ELI) - 15 international and non-technical students are looking for font related problems in Minefield. They haven't found one yet, but they are loving being able to use "Firefox 3" before their friends, and being able to get involved and help even though they don't know how to program.
  • complete list here
  • Created a thriving on-line community in #seneca, for students from Seneca and elsewhere, as well as many Mozilla employees and community members.
  • Originally, I had to seek out students. Now the students recruit one another.
  • Brought many people into the community who would never have joined on their own. This helps diversify and expand the community, leading to new ideas and new sorts of contributors.
  • Some students have become part of MoCo
  • Some students have joined the community
  • Many students enjoyed their experience but work on other things now. They will go into industry with a better sense of how they could use/leverage Mozilla's technologies in other sectors and become advocates for Mozilla, open source, and the open web.

[edit] Future

  • Expanding the courses in the fall to allow more students to participate
  • Creating more on-line learning resources for future Mozilla developers. You can help with this by giving us ideas for topics/labs/etc.
  • Working with other institutions in order to help them get started doing Mozilla as well (e.g., University of Toronto, Mozilla Japan and Keio University)
  • Working on establishing a Centre of Excellence in Open Source at Seneca. One of the things this centre would do is fund a Developer in Residence
  • Getting ready to start a two year research project exploring the potential for Gaming on the Web using Mozilla (e.g., canvas and canvas3d)
  • Other open source projects have taken notice and are interested in doing similar work (e.g., OpenOffice.org). This model could be expanded to more academic institutions and open source projects
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