Raleigh, NC
I'm a Ph.D. student at North Carolina State University with an intense affection for all things FOSS. I'm particularly interested in leveraging Open Source in the classroom and expanding the commons of freely-licensed educational courseware. I'm a Computer Scientist, so FOSS is obviously a big part of what I'm interested in, but I would particularly like to see Open Source and Libre Culture penetrate the non-technical disciplines, since there's a whole lot more to it than computing!
Authored Comments
I can't believe I've never heard of this!
One of the things that really draws me to security was the way that topics in InfoSec are able to help motivate curiosity to learn about how the systems we take for granted <em>really</em> work. I would love to see how a computer science curriculum that uses security as its long-term motivator fares.
Many CSC courses use gaming or mobile development to motivate learning, but it feels like these subjects simply encourage results-based curiosity (<em>how do I make the guy move to the right?</em>). Security, on the other hand, encourages people to think about systems and implementations themselves, funneling the creativity and curiosity towards the subject of Computer Science.
90% is a very sobering statistic... I knew it was bad, but I didn't know it was <em>that</em> bad.
One thing that's interesting is that during my first year as a Ph.D. student, the importance of reproducibility in research was never made explicitly clear to me by anyone. While perhaps this is a result of the discipline I'm in (Computer Science doesn't do the same kind of "empirical studies" as say, Education), it still feels like something is missing in the training of the graduate students who are most likely writing these papers.
I would love to see some NSF grant money go towards establishing and populating publicly accessible databases for scientific research. Perhaps if grant applicants can be enticed (or coerced) into making open data release as a condition of funding, we might see more data out there.