We attended a Faculty Development Program(FDP) held at Thiagarajar College of Engineering. It covered various FOSS topics for one of the elective subjects. During our stay we met the HOD of Computer Science Department Dr.S.Mercy Shalinie. She is a great teacher, she told us (Puneeth and me) about their various activities related to campus wide network management, website development and computing related infrastructure, which were very apt for creating active student community.
She asked her students to show us the features of tcenet and other initiatives for student participation and development. First of all, they declined to take services from their hardware (servers, routers etc.) providers, so that students can setup things on their own and get a chance to work on live projects. Faculty members also play a very minimal role in these activities. Students are given the freedom to try, test and fix. Then they told us about their hierarchy and work-flow. Their website, intranet, and mailing lists, are all managed by students (passed-out and present). They have an svn repository for all these projects. A few fourth year students have the commit rights and some alumni who were involved previously have commit rights from outside the campus. They have a trac based system for project management, and active mailing lists for discussions related to all these projects. Students from second year are encouraged to participate, initially they are required to submit patches for fixing bugs, and then just like all other open source projects they also have to prove themselves to get commit rights (AMAZING).
Not only that, they also provide an svn repository for all the final year students for their Major projects, even for non CS/IT students. For beginners, they had a poster system with sticky notes to paste the tickets and tasks so that they can get hang of version control systems and trac. All students, current and passed out, are provided shell access (feature which I find really essential and handy to try out some things which are not possible cause of work restrictions). Continuation of a previously done major project by new final year students is encouraged, so that code keeps on building and improving, which makes sense to me. Student sitting around in the lab, during the hands-on sessions were all into Python and Emacs whose limitless powers were unknown to me until recently.
To add to this, Shalinie madam was visibly taking pride in the achievements of her students when she was mentioning all this. She never forgot to mention that all this was new even for her and she hung around with her students to learn all of this. For each tech-fest and event, they try to invite passed out students to interact with current students and work together to fix issues, which is really ideal thing to create efficient learning atmosphere.
All this perfectly fits a Chinese proverb used in kurose-ross computer network book which goes like this:
Tell me and I'll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I'll understand.
