Add blog post on open source course material

- Discusses the importance of reusability and Git for the source - and
  what the difficulties are.
- As usual, an early draft.  Please make direct changes and add
  yourself to authers.
- I have a feeling that there is more to add here than usual (as in,
  there is more to say that I'm not saying yet).  Actually, now that I
  think about it, maybe we should do the "collaborative course"
  lessons first.

Author: rkdarst

content/blog/2022-10-17-future-of-teaching.md

@@ -68,11 +68,12 @@ is the "start page" of the series):
 * [Co-teaching](@/blog/2022-10-31-co-teaching.md)
 * [Teams](@/blog/2022-11-28-teams.md
 * [Hybrid courses vs reverse-hybrid courses](@/blog/2022-11-07-reverse-hybrid.md)
-* Open source courses
+* [Open source courses](@/blog/2022-12-12-open-source-courses.md)
 * Registration and learner management
 * [Livestream courses](@/blog/2022-11-14-livestreaming-courses.md)
 * Collaboration in organizing
 * [Publishing videos supports more learning styles](@/blog/2022-11-08-video-publishing.md)
+* Sphinx-lesson
 * Working together as a team
 * Comparison to MOOCs
 * Effort needed for organizing big courses

content/blog/2022-12-12-open-source-courses.md

@@ -0,0 +1,107 @@
++++
+title = 'Open source courses'
+slug = "2022/12/12/open-source-courses"
+description = "Courses should be open source: not just the course, but the source and procedure to modify"
+
+[extra]
+authors = "Richard Darst"
++++
+
+
+*Part of a series on the [Future of
+Teaching](@/blog/2022-10-17-future-of-teaching.md)*
+
+CodeRefinery courses (like many these days) are open source.  This
+should be the minimum requirement for most (all?) courses, and many
+are - but it's important to clearly specify just what this means and
+why.
+
+
+## Four freedoms applied to course material
+
+As usual when we mean "open source", we actually mean "free (as in
+speech)".  Let's look at the [Four essential freedoms of free
+software](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software#Definition) and
+see how they apply to teaching
+
+* **Freedom 0: The freedom to use the program for any purpose.**: You
+  can use the material and re-teach the lesson yourself.
+* **Freedom 1: The freedom to study how the program works, and change
+  it to make it do what you wish.**: Not just the material is
+  released, but the necessary planning and instructor hints to do so.
+  Beyond that, you should be able to see the "source code" so that you
+  can use those techniques yourself.
+* **Freedom 2: The freedom to redistribute and make copies so you can
+  help your neighbor.** This is hopefully somewhat clear: a license
+  lets you redistribute it yourself, not just link to the current location.
+* **Freedom 3: The freedom to improve the program, and release your
+  improvements (and modified versions in general) to the public, so
+  that the whole community benefits.** This is the most interesting
+  one.  Can you improve it and reshare?  Do these reshares get lost in
+  your fork, never to be seen by others, or can others take advantages
+  to them?  Or even, can you improve and send back to the original
+  source?  This is a lot harder for course material
+
+
+## How we do it
+
+This should be clear if you know the main CodeRefinery workshop - it
+is basically a tutorial to the practices we use!
+
+* Git for version control [git-intro lesson]()
+* Github for platform for collaboration [git-collaborative lesson]()
+* Sphinx + Github Actions + Github pages for the actual lesson material [documentation lesson]()
+* [sphinx-lesson](https://github.com/coderefinery/sphinx-lesson)
+  provides some minor Sphinx extensions for lesson-like documentation
+  sites.
+
+The lessons are treated as open-source software projects - except it's
+documentation, not code.  All of the tools nicely fit into place.
+
+
+## The benefits
+
+And what do we get?  Anyone can contribute, and even propose changes,
+with minimal effort and without having to ask for permission or files
+first.  These changes can easily be tracked, and people can even
+easily create their own versions (linked to ours via forks, so we can
+see and integrate changes later if desired).
+
+**Is there any other way?**  At one meeting, we were discussing if
+there is any other reasonable option (other than git + PR/MR workflow)
+that can provide this level of collaboration.  The closes we could
+think of was "google docs-like tool" where someone can suggest
+changes.  But still, changes can either be suggested, or the lesson
+can be copied and with no more easily suggestions.  **From what we can
+tell, we need to use git.**
+
+
+## Why open collaboration is harder for course material
+
+Open collaboration on teaching can be hard, **because everyone wants
+their course to have material perfectly suited to it,** with nothing
+extra.  This leads to a tendency to fork material, rather than
+contribute upstream.  It might also lead to the tendency to not design
+for reuse, since who would want to use it, anyway?
+
+**How we get around this:** We have to consider this in the design: we
+have to design in enough modularity so that a lesson can be taught
+multiple ways.  It can be hard, and not perfect - but it's better to
+have upstream changes to an imperfect lesson, rather than many
+diverged lessons (that probably aren't perfect anyway, since they are
+)
+
+
+## What do we hope others can do?
+
+Try to be more open than before.  We don't expect that everything can
+be perfect: git for everything is too much, and not everyone has time
+or skills to do that.  But for larger, collaborative courses, it's
+important.  CodeRefinery is happy to help advise you in the mechanics
+of things.
+
+
+## See also
+* Our
+  [community-teaching](https://coderefinery.github.io/community-teaching/)
+  workshop covers this (or will, once it gets more developed)