Carpentries Instructors’ meeting
- Monday, June 03, 2019
- 9:30-11:00 AM
- Watson 400B and Zoom
Present
Buffington, Russell, Koseva, Brooks-Kieffer
Highlights:
- KU’s Carpentries membership is official and we have 6 spaces for instructor training. Boryana emphasized that a good place to look for candidates is in our pool of previous and potential helpers. Casey also had some possible leads. This will be a developing topic in the coming month(s).
- KanREN is investing in some state-based cyberinfrastructure efforts, particularly for the smaller regional schools, and is applying for NSF CC* funding to boost those efforts. Casey Russell guested at this meeting and talked about some of his outreach within KU and elsewhere in the state. Casey is an XSEDE champion and currently has 20% of his time devoted to CI efforts. In the short term, he is interested in attending/helping with future one-topic and full workshops. Thanks for joining us today, Casey!
- Also from KanREN, we learned that in the near future Wichita State will be spooling up a cluster for academic use, and accounts will be free (as in beer, not as in puppies) for Kansas higher ed. affiliates. This means that there could be a platform for hosting an instance of HPC Carpentry without incurring costs on KU’s cluster or coordinating cluster space and time for learners through XSEDE.
- KanREN may also be able to pitch in on re-upping KU’s Carpentries membership. Cort and Jamene will discuss further as KanREN’s CI efforts develop.
- Jamene recounted her own novice learner experience from four days of Python Camp through KU’s Center for Research Methods & Data Analysis. In short, the Carpentries method of focusing on the pace that learners need is way less frustrating than focusing on getting through all the material.
- This point led to a discussion of getting to the payoff point of a lesson (something we’ll discuss more next time), particularly for the programming language. Do you focus on the basics first or on showing off the magic to reel learners in to learning more? Lots of opinions in the room. Boryana has developed a scenario to tie the threads of a workshop together; she used this at Arkansas to great effect. This topic was also the subject of a thread on the Carpentries discuss list that talked about the differing origins and audiences for the Python gapminder and inflammation lessons: https://carpentries.topicbox.com/groups/discuss/Tce92361a8c9f8279/plotting-and-programming-with-python-vs-programming-with-python
- Boryana recapped her recent workshop on making a website using an R-based toolkit. Things blew up for the Windows users, although the Mac users had no problems. She is going to revisit the Windows instructions and revise.
- Jamene reported slow progress with making the instructors’ static website on GitHub. Basically, wrestling with Jekyll doesn’t mesh well with other looming deadlines, but it will get done.
- Discussed possible dates for an August workshop:
- Casey pointed out that the PEARC conference (computing, CI, and HPC) happens at the end of July and beginning of August
- Classes start Monday, August 26.
- Boryana confirmed that only new GTAs are required to take the GTA instructor training, which is on Monday, August 19.
- The KU Teaching Summit (typically a big draw for faculty) is Thursday, August 22.
- Given our previous pattern of offering a workshop the week before classes start, Tuesday-Wednesday, August 20-21 look like real possibilities. Jamene will check with IT on the availability of Price Auditorium.
- Instructor availability for an August workshop:
- Cort is available to instruct.
- Jamene is available to instruct.
- Boryana may be available to help.
- Casey may be available to help and/or attend.
- Tami: TBD
- Samantha: TBD
- Other instructors by then? TBD
- Topic for an August workshop:
- Samantha has completed her certification and could teach if she wants. In that case, we could offer R again. In this scenario, Cort could teach bash and Git, or Cort and Jamene could split these topics.
- If Samantha doesn’t want to teach this time, Cort can teach Python and Jamene can teach bash and Git or split these topics with another instructor.
Notes by JBK