I was invited to come to the University of Toronto and participate in a panel at KMDI called CODE: Building the New Agora. The event was looking at various virtual communities, presence vs. on-line, how open source informs new social networks (e.g., BarCamp/DemoCamp). I spoke on the Mozilla community, globally distributed development as practiced in open source projects, and the stuff I'm doing at Seneca. I think my points were well received, and I took away lots to ponder from the other speakers.
It was good to catch-up with David Crow and Jay Goldman and hear about how well things at Radiant Core are going. I was also glad to bump into Ken Chase again, and hear about his work at Harmony Mobile (NOTE: PuTTY running on a phone is cool).
I might write something about my thoughts on the day's discussion another time. But I'll end by saying that I had a fantastic meeting with David Bolter and Greg Wilson, two profs working on CS and open source at U of T. We talked about research ideas, and then got brainstorming about offering an open source course simultaneously from multiple institutions (universities and colleges), similar to what I'm doing with the Mozilla courses. These two seem to understand the value of pragmatic and applied computing--it was really refreshing.
It's something we'll have to discuss in more detail, but I'd love to get more students involved in Mozilla projects from other schools. This might be one good way. Maybe you'd be interested in offering it at your school and joining us. Let me know.