• how learning happens in FOSS communities / distributed technical communities
    • Chua, M. (2014). Hacker school begins to write a book: A massive collaborative autoethnography by a maker community (pp. 1–4). IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/FIE.2014.7044397
    • Edupsych for hackers - repeated talk, one version was filmed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xzpi1G-L78w
  • interface-building between academic systems and open source communities
    • Jadud, M. C., & Chua, M. (2011). A Walk In The Commons. Invited talk presented at the Kenyon College Center for Instructional Excellence series, Kenyon College.
    • Ellis, H. J. C., Hislop, G. W., Chua, M., & Dziallas, S. (2012). How to Involve Students in FOSS Projects. In Proceedings of the Frontiers in Education Conference. Rapid City, SD: IEEE.
    • Chua, M., & Dziallas, S. (2012). Work in progress: From sage on the stage to guide on the side: Examining shifts in teaching practice through stories of open community participation (pp. 1–2). IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/FIE.2012.6462252
    • http://redhat.com/posse
  • engineering (and computing/technology) curricular cultures: what they are, how to study them, specific examples
    • Chua, M. & Edmonds, T. (2017). Curricular culture literacy and miscodes in its absence: Making sense of conflicts in cross-institutional curricular collaborations. In Proceedings of the Frontiers in Education Conference. Indianapolis, IN: IEEE.
    • Edmonds, T. & Chua, M. (2017). Curricular culture transferability, openness, and literacy: A framework for the curricular culture change capacity of individuals. In Proceedings of the Frontiers in Education Conference. Indianapolis, IN: IEEE.
  • prototyping alternate-universe (curricular) cultures: how they come to be and how people can nudge that
    • haven’t really gotten solid pubs out in this yet, honestly - can merge into prior category, or leave as “watch this space b/c it’s coming”
  • engineering faculty development (curricular (re)design and change, identity/reflection, revealing rhetoric)
    • Chua, M. and Cagle, L. E. (2017). You can change the world, but not this homework assignment: The contradictory rhetoric of engineering agency. In Proceedings of the Frontiers in Education Conference. Indianapolis, IN: IEEE.
    • Chua, M. & Edmonds, T. (2017). Conversation and Participation Architectures: Practices for Creating Dialogic Spaces with Engineering Students. ASEE Conferences.
    • Strong, A., Chua, M., & Cutler, S. (2016). Talking “Faculty Development” with Engineering Educators, Then Talking “Engineering Education” with Faculty Developers: A Collaborative Reflection on Working Across Communities. ASEE Conferences. https://doi.org/10.18260/p.26010
    • Cutler, S., Strong, A. C., & Chua, M. (2015). Exploring the black box of dissemination: The role of professional and organizational development (pp. 1–3). IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/FIE.2015.7344091
    • Chua, M., & Dringenberg, E. (2014). The quest for the Mythical Phoenix: Attendee narratives at an engineering education faculty workshop (pp. 1–4). IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/FIE.2014.7044260
    • Thompson, J. D., Chua, M., & Joslyn, C. H. (2014). Engineering and Engineering Education as Spiritual Vocations. Presented at the 2014 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Indianapolis, IN. Retrieved from https://peer.asee.org/20382 (Best Paper award, Liberal Engineering / Engineering in Society division)
  • I was the student columnist for ASEE Prism for a while (geared towards engineering faculty interested in engineering education)
    • Chua, M. (2016). Engineering as a Physical Art. ASEE Prism. Retrieved from http://www.asee-prism.org/unstable-equilibrium-oct-2/
    • Chua, M. (2016). Set an Example of a Normal Life. ASEE Prism. Retrieved from http://www.asee-prism.org/unstable-equilibrium-jan-3/
    • Chua, M. (2015). The Privilege of Being Oblivious. ASEE Prism. Retrieved from http://www.asee-prism.org/unstable-equilibrium-sep/
    • Chua, M. (2015). Communicating Is So Inefficient. ASEE Prism. Retrieved from http://www.asee-prism.org/unstable-equilibrium-jan-2/
    • Chua, M. (2014). More Than Words and Numbers. ASEE Prism. Retrieved from http://www.asee-prism.org/unstable-equilibrium-oct/
    • Chua, M. (2014). Culture Clash. ASEE Prism. Retrieved from http://www.asee-prism.org/unstable-equilibrium-jan/
  • qualitative research methods (multimodal, collaborative, narrative, (auto)ethnographic)
    • Chua, M., & Adams, R. S. (2014). Using realtime transcription to do member-checking during interviews (pp. 1–3). IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/FIE.2014.7044251

  • I draw comics and so forth about engineering edu / learning theories, see “graphical works” section

  • NOT THE DEAF/WOMEN/DIVERSITY STUFF: that’s under a different section, but is not primary scholarship
    • Chua, M., Ray, B., & Stein, L. A. (2017). A Behind-the-Scenes Look at Access Setup: A case study of the Deaf Professional / Designated Interpreter model in engineering education research. In Proceedings of the Frontiers in Education Conference. Indianapolis, IN: IEEE.

Past projects

Radically transparent research (RTR) was an early graduate school methodology project that continues to influence how I structure my qualitative workd. It is a change initiative and an emergent qualitative research methodology inspired by the radical realtime transparency practices of open communities such as Free and Open Source software, hardware, and content projects. It results in public and collaboratively constructed artifacts with the potential to broaden awareness of and participation in research while creating a compendium of stories that can be shared with other practitioners considering similar transformations to their own practices.

I wrote Olin College’s Open Access Policy with Dee Magnoni, who was then Olin’s Library Director, and Purdue librarian Amy Van Epps.

POSSE is a workshop that introduces professors to the world of teaching open source and the art of coaching their students through their journey as novice contributors in thriving, distributed technical communities of practice that the professor may never have seen before. I ran the initiative and taught many of the workshops while at Red Hat from 2009-2012 (press release). In less than 3 years, POSSE reached over 1000 undergraduates through the courses of about 100 professors. When I left for graduate school, professors Heidi Ellis and Greg Hislop took over leadership of POSSE with funding from an NSF grant.

Appropedia is a peer-generated resource library for appropriate technology development initially inspired by the desire to reduce duplication of effort between engineering groups working on similar problems. I was a volunteer advisor to the project, largely on technical-related issues, from approximately 2007-2009.

Fedora is a Linux distribution; among other things, I served as the Marketing lead in 2009-2010, running the first Marketing FAD (Fedora Activity Day) in Raleigh in 2010. One of the coolest parts of my tenure in Fedora was watching Robyn Bergeron go from brand-new Marketing Team volunteer to Marketing Team Lead to being hired as the Fedora Project Leader in a 3-year timespan. I also converted FUDCon (the Fedora Users and Developers Conference) from a  specialized job that could only be done by the project leader into a bid process that empowered local teams to guide themselves through taking on the job on behalf of the international community. In order to test out that process, I co-organized the 2009 FUDCon in Toronto, then watched someone else do it for the next North American FUDCon in Tempe, Arizona. I’ve served as the community point of contact for multiple professors who’ve had their students work on Fedora as a class project.

The Internet: Issues at the Frontier (IIF) was a Spring 2009 Harvard Law seminar with Profs. Jonathan Zittrain and Terry Fisher. I was the only non-Harvard student on the course design/teaching team (equivalent to a TA). It was a student-run class experimenting with different technologies for discussion as we debated internet-related topics from a legal perspective.

One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) is a nonprofit dedicated to improving educational opportunities in the developing world via 1-to-1 deployments of rugged laptops running open-source educational software in support of a Constructionist learning paradigm. I started volunteering for OLPC in 2006 by deciding that they needed a hackathon, then proceeding to run it; the event (Boston Jame Gam 2007) spawned an entire “OLPC Jam” phenomenon that has since hopped across multiple continents. I built and ran a Summer of Content internship program based on Google’s Summer of Code program, but focused on content and open to teams from around the world, represented OLPC at conferences around the world, started the college chapters program coached numerous college chapters through kicking off local deployments, spent countless hours on volunteer recruitment, wiki administration, and lightning-fast meeting management, and more. They funded me off and on as they could, and finally hired me full-time as an engineer in 2009. As a full-time employee, I fielded support questions from everywhere between Alabama and Mongolia while facing the task of testing an entire hardware/software stack in the 2.5 months before the first production versions of the machine debuted. I managed the testing task by recruiting, training, and leading a test team entirely composed of volunteers from around the world. Shortly after launch, OLPC had to cut 50% of its employees, including nearly its entire engineering team, for financial reasons, but I continued to volunteer in order to wrap up and pass on all the projects I’d started.

The Open Mobile Consortium (OMC) is a coalition that works on bringing together groups working on initiatives in the open-source mobile development space, formulating best practices and standards and generally working to bring this fragmented industry a little closer together. I coached the UNICEF Innovation Team through setting up RapidSMS as an open source project.

Sugar Labs (SL) is the community organization behind the Sugar Learning Platform, a free and open-source educational software project originally developed for the OLPC XO-1 netbook and now used every school day in 25 languages by almost 1,000,000 children in more than 40 countries. Regional, autonomous “Sugar Labs” around the world work to tailor Sugar to local languages and curricula. I ran the Marketing team, served as a member of the 2nd elected board of Sugar Labs, and was one of the original core members of the Sugar on a Stick project team.

Tracbacks is a plugin that provides internal trackback functionality between tickets in a Trac instance; I’m the original developer.

IRC is a Sugar Activity for Internet Relay Chat originally authored by Eduardo Silva. I was its maintainer for a while.

ILXO was an independent skunkworks lab for OLPC grassroots groups based in Chicago, IL during Summer 2008 with an aim of being effective enough to render ourselves obsolete by September of that year. We were a young bunch, ranging in age from 12 to 23 at the time we started the office.

Rhomeo and Julihat was a mathematical play based on Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet.” I wrote it. It was the type of play that had lines like “But soft / what flux through yonder plane doth break / It is the E-vector / and Julihat is the source!” and got a standing ovation when we performed it at Olin College on what happened to be my 18th birthday.

Thing was an EMG-controlled robotic hand; you put electrodes on your forearm, and they’d pick up the electrical signals sent by your muscles when you opened and closed your fist, and the robotic hand would do the same. It was named after the Addams Family character, and I built it with Lilly Cho and Hans Borchardt when I was 17 as my first electronics project.

In the press

My work and I have been covered by a number of media outlets, both formal and informal.