Carpentries Instructors’ meeting
- Monday, July 1, 2019
- 9:30-11:00 AM
- Watson 400B and Zoom
Present:
Albin, Koseva, Brooks-Kieffer, Thomas, Buffington, Russell
Highlights:
- We have a minutes website! Forthcoming to the site will be a page with a minutes rotation. When it’s your turn, you’ll need to practice the fork/branch/pull request workflow in GitHub to contribute your notes. Lots of documentation and assistance will be available.
- Lots of discussion of August workshop:
- Dates: Tues, Aug 20 & Wed, Aug 21
- Price Auditorium is confirmed
- Samantha will teach R
- Cort will teach Bash
- Jamene will teach Git (assume with LEGO)
- Boryana is tentatively available to help
- Casey will help/attend and will be a resident Windows expert, especially for installations
- Tami will cover nametags and registration and help as much as possible
- KanREN will tentatively sponsor refreshments
- Try out no deposit, since that may be a barrier for folks returning from summer with no paycheck. Strategies to address potential attendance issues:
- Daily reminders leading up to the workshops
- Advertise that we are NOT REQUIRING A DEPOSIT this time please be a good citizen and cancel if you can’t attend
- Guilt - “you not showing up takes a spot from someone on the waitlist; our waitlist is currently X people”
- Allow overage on registration - 35 instead of 30
- Discussion of install and software issues that occur in a workshop and how to deal with them:
- Software installs don’t always happen ahead of time
- On Windows, OneDrive Sync can create a virtual desktop that messes things up if the install isn’t done to the local machine
- On Mac, iCloud sync can create a similar situation, especially if the computer loses connectivity before finishing its Sync
- Install issues are most likely to impact the first day
- Flash drives can help with download time - Casey will take lead on updating the flash drives with the most recent installers; someone will send him these links
- Hold an install party as Boryana and Jamene did in January - one Windows person and one Mac person. Advertise more heavily this time.
- Discussion of workshop organization
- Cort will help with the workshop website this time
- Jamene has a project board that lists all the things to do: https://github.com/jbkieffer/swc-workshop-helps/projects/1 - this is the template so you can see - it will get copied into the August workshop site
- KU Libraries will run Eventbrite registration
- Demo of how to create and name the workshop Etherpad
- (new topic) Questions and discussion on certification process, teaching, etc.
- Q: How do you know when to do a sticky check?
- A: It’s something you get a feel for as you prepare the lesson. After an exercise, definitely. After something that’s complicated enough to confuse you, the instructor, absolutely. There’s not a hard and fast rule that you need to do a sticky check every N new items.
- Q: Where do you want to leave learners in terms of how much material / what topics covered by the end of the workshop?
- A: It’s better to go at a pace that works for the learners (assume novice, always) than to try to cover a certain amount of material. You want them to get to the payoff point, where they can see how the skills they’ve been learning apply to their own work, but they also need time to practice what they are learning. Covering material for the sake of getting to a specific point in the lesson will lead to learners getting frustrated and tuning out.
- Boryana showed the demo she created for a previous workshop where she tied all the topics together into a scenario that most grad students could relate to: https://github.com/boryanakis/swc_demo
- This demo was created for a Python lesson
- Boryana and Samantha will work together to create one for the R lesson
- Discussion of the gapminder data and the R-gapminder lessons
- There’s way too much material in that lesson to cover in two afternoons. Pick and choose, with the option to consult the R-gapminder instructor notes: http://swcarpentry.github.io/r-novice-gapminder/guide/
- It’s not worth trying to come up with a different sample dataset for the lesson. Other strategies to get over the hump of “why do I care about this dataset?” include coming up with research questions to apply to certain points in the lesson, e.g.: plots
Action Items:
- Boryana and Samantha will get together on the R lesson and the Demo
Jamene and Cort will get together on the workshop website and Etherpad Done 2019/07/03- Someone will provide Casey with links to the installers for the flash drives (I wasn’t sure who wound up volunteering for this - Cort, can you do it?)
Jamene will check with Catering on the rate charged for an internal versus an external entity Emailed 2017/07/03Jamene will kick off creation of Eventbrite registration inside the libraries Emailed 2017/07/03Jamene will schedule a tech check at Price either Friday, 8/16, or Monday, 8/19 and send the appointment to Samantha and Cort Tech check is Monday, 8/19, 2-2:30 pm in the Price Auditorium; sent Cort and Samantha the appointmentJamene will schedule an install party at Price, perhaps to back up against the tech check for convenience install party is 2:30-4:40 on Monday, 8/19, in Price Computing Center; emailed instructors group
Notes by JBK