I just came back from Jordan’s class. He couldn’t finish his demo because of the wireless connection problem on the campus. The Eclipse p2server could not make through the wireless security that has been set up here. Some students were eager to help him out without much success.
Nevertheless, Jordan perservered. Today he emphasized again that we need to ASK PEOPLE FOR HELP. I think this is a new mindset and practice that many students(me as well) have to grasp here. First, who are the people here? The professor? The classmates? The developers in the Eclipse community? I wonder if many students still have the old tendency of asking help from the professor and their immediate friends who sit next to them in the classroom. In the classroom today, I noticed that students put forward questions to the professor rather than to their fellow classmates. The students did not interact much with each other.
Second, I have the impression that some students are not used to being “open” in asking for help. If they do not make their questions and problems known by BLOGGING and wiki-ing, how could they get help from anyone?
It seems that many of them are going through a kind of cultural shock. If I were one of the students, I would tend to think in the old way: “I am going to choose a bug that I want to fix and I want to be able to fix it on my own. Then I can tell the world that I’m a very good developer.” It could be a pretty foreign concept that one will be rewarded by helping others to solve their problems. Shouldn’t I take care of my own problem first?
Maybe blogging and reading the blogs of our fellow students will lead us into this collaborative mode of thinking and practice.
Pliu's Blog - Teaching and Learning Open Source Development 