Mel Chua is a contagiously enthusiastic hacker, writer, and educator with over a decade of teaching and curriculum development experience and a solid track record in leadership positions at Red Hat, One Laptop Per Child, Sugar Labs, Fedora, and other Free, Libre, and Open Source Software (FLOSS) communities. A graduate student at Purdue University, Mel bridges academic research on successful communities with deep personal experience getting her hands dirty building them.
These days, Mel spends most of her time with on open source in education, teaching professors how to teach open source and otherwise working to push patches of successful open source cultural habits around learning and teaching "upstream" to classrooms in academia. In her hypothetically existent amounts of free time, she collects quirky textbooks, works on undergraduate engineering education reform, and plays piano, occasionally at the same time.
Authored Comments
I just have to say - it's been an absolute pleasure working with your students, Matt. One of the most valuable things they've brought to the table is their perspective as articulate and thoughtful newcomers - fresh eyes often catch things that experienced ones take for granted, and we're learning a lot about how to improve the new contributor experience for Fedora.
Looking forward to the rest of the semester, and to doing this again next year!
Even if not all Moodle content is open to be shared (which is completely understandable), I wonder how many <em>could</em> be open, and haven't been opened simply because people didn't realize their work could be shared. I'm not familiar with the Moodle interface, but I wonder whether users are asked if they want their work to "default to open" (or whether this is part of the improvements that Joseph talks about).
For instance, the MediaWiki installer prompts people to choose a content license when they configure their wiki for the first time, and lists (and links to) Creative Commons licenses as the majority of options, so you have to click something to <em>not</em> have your work be open-licensed, and you are specifically asked to make a choice.
Not having been through a Moodle install (and only having gone through the course creation interface within it once, a long time ago), I'm not sure if a similar option is presented at some point, or whether it would help - if the problem is not that teachers don't know they can default to open, but that they <em>can't</em>, then that's a different bug entirely.