Monday, March 09, 2009

HFOSS - Interview with Leslie Hawthorn (Google)

Here is the interview with Leslie, you can either watch the interview or read over hear answers.
Here is a little biography of her:
Leslie is a Program Manager for Google’s Open Source Programs Office, where she’s the Community Manager for the Google Summer of Code Summer of Code community. She recently conceived, launched and managed the Google Highly Open Participation Contest, the world’s first global initiative to get pre-university students involved in all aspects of Open Source software development. Leslie has also organized more than 100 open source conferences and hackathons, most held at Google’s Corporate Headquarters in Mountain View, California, USA. When not wrangling F/LOSS developers, she’s usually speaking about Open Source, F/LOSS in education, and community building or writing for the Google Open Source Blog. Leslie holds a Honors B.A. in English Language and Literature from U.C. Berkeley. Her personal website is http://www.hawthornlandings.org.



Creative<br />Commons License
This video is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License

What's the big picture opportunity in connecting education and open source?
  • it is a big opportunity to learn and grow
  • they have heard through many employers that students are not immediately ready to contribute since they have never worked with version control systems, they have not worked with distributed teams
  • the opportunity for students to get real world software development skills
  • being able to connect theory and the real world components of software development
What specific projects or courses are you working on that make the link between open source and education?
  • Google Code University - curriculum around open source
Do you have any advice on how Mozilla could best engage with educators and students?
  • get students even younger
  • expose young people to technology
  • technology can be molded
  • source code is free speech
  • ask educators what they need
  • educators are normally poorly paid and poorly resourced
  • empower the educators by asking them what they need to be successful
  • create course ware materials, training workshops, etc
  • help them so they can pass it on to their students


NOTE: Modified to add license note

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