October 7, 2019 Meeting Notes

October 07, 2019

Carpentries Instructors’ meeting

• Monday, October 7, 2019
• 9:30-11:00 AM
• Watson 455 and Zoom

Present:

Albin, Brooks-Kieffer, Buffington, Deakyne, Everman, Hill, Koseva, Thomas, Timmons, Trana

Guests:

We were joined by Lisa Timmons (Molecular Biosciences) and Paul Trana (KU Edwards). Both are interested learning more about the Carpentries. Paul is interested in Carpentries instructor training; he has attended a Software Carpentry workshops at KU. Thanks for joining us!

Agenda

• GPN call for an instructor for SWC at U. South Dakota later in October
• Possibility of bystander intervention training as an alignment with the Carpentries Code of Conduct
• Debrief recent instructor training; offer support for checkout activities
• Offer tips to prep for instructor training
• Discuss potential dates for next full workshop(s)
• Discuss other uses for Carpentries curricula, e.g.:
  • One-topic workshops, especially since The Carpentries has changed how they track and give credit for these. See https://carpentries.org/blog/2019/09/Workshop-request-forms-and-more/
  • Embedding Carpentries lessons into for-credit courses

Discussions

Bystander Intervention training (Koseva)

Boryana is in touch with a professor who teaches two-hour bystander intervention workshops. Given that instructors, hosts, and organizers are responsible for the Carpentries Code of Conduct, she proposed holding one of these training sessions. She will send a poll to determine the best date; then we will look for a space.

Debrief recent instructor training

Elizabeth and Matt discussed some takeaways from their September instructor training. The sessions were interactive and hands-on, which wasn’t really expected from a Zoom workshop. The Carpentries do a good job of modeling norms for virtual meetings, including all participants having their video on. Checkout sessions for October are getting full, and scheduling earlier just makes sure the process gets done. All certified instructors in the group are available for support for checkout activities.

Tips for upcoming instructor training

Elizabeth and Matt offered tips to Tom, who will take part in an October instructor training session. Expect the Zoom link about a week ahead of time and, if it doesn’t come, start asking questions early. The training is about teaching and learning, not lesson content. It’s better to be by yourself (e.g.: in a meeting room or at home) when attending via Zoom unless you have someone else in person who is attending with you.

Potential dates for upcoming workshop(s)

Folks expressed various topics of interest to them as instructors and to their units or disciplines:

• Matt: Python, specifically for dataframes
• Samantha: R Spatial Analysis, R for visualizations, HPC topics
• Tom: Python, particularly an introduction
• Elizabeth: R
• Tami: Bash and Git

This list started to sound like two whole workshops plus one or more one topic workshops:

• Software Carpentry:
  • Bash
  • Git
  • Python Gapminder
• Data Carpentry, depending on the discipline interest (To date, KU has not offered DC, so this is potentially a new set of learners for us):
  • Ecology
  • Genomics
• R Spatial Analysis
  • There was a bit of concern that this is a beta lesson. It’s only been around in published form for 12-18 months. Carpentries instructors at the University of Oklahoma have been teaching and contributing to the lesson, so we could get a call together to chat with them about the content and delivery.
• HPC
  • There was concern that this curriculum is not affiliated with the Carpentries. While it’s not an officially affiliated lesson, many of the developers are a part of or in touch with the Carpentries community. There’s a quasi-active discussion group available on the Carpentries discussion lists.

Instructors present who had taught one or more of these topics offered tips on structuring and delivering the lessons. Some topics were:

• Choosing python-gapminder or python-inflammation
  • Gapminder data is real data; Inflammation data is fake.
  • Inflammation lesson begins with complex mathematical operations and eventually backs down into basic skills.
  • Learners often need to keep a research question in mind when working with the data, which the instructor can model, e.g.: “This is my question. We are going to subset the data to answer this question” (This advice is also relevant for other lessons).
  • Both lessons are too long for the allotted time; the instructor has to pick and choose episodes while planning in order to present a cohesive lesson to the learners.
• This previous point applies to most of the lessons; it’s important for the instructor to intentionally choose a path through the material that presents a basic, useful set of skills to the learners in a cohesive way. There is no requirement to cover all the material in a lesson. Practice and help from other instructors will show you what pieces of the lessons are helpful and what pieces are too much.
• It’s also a good idea to remember to take time to talk about and contextualize the data that a lesson works with. It’s easy to take the data for granted, but learners often need more insight into the data in order to feel that they understand what they’re doing with the tool.

In terms of dates, we didn’t get very far. Typically we schedule a full workshop during the week before Spring semester classes start (January 21, 2020). We try to schedule around classes, exams, and major breaks, because the two day commitment is significant. Given that our instructor cohort is growing, it’s worthwhile to take the 2020 schedule as an opportunity to plan out what a calendar year of workshops would look like.

We briefly discussed possible spaces for upcoming workshops in light of what we learned about classroom vs. auditorium in the 2019-08-20 workshop. Possible spaces could include:

• Watson 455 (probably 25 max)
• Watson Clark Instruction Center (probably 25 max)
• Engineering LEEP active learning classrooms (scheduled through Engineering)
• Slawson and Ritchie active learning classrooms (Ritchie is centrally-scheduled)
• Wescoe EGARC active learning classroom (scheduled through EGARC, probably 25 max)
• KU Unions spaces (need to confirm whether we would be charged)

Anyone who wants to go scouting through Haworth and Malott to find good classrooms should feel free! One important note about centrally-scheduled classrooms is that no food or drink is allowed, so catering would be more difficult.

Other uses for the curricula

We briefly discussed the fact that The Carpentries is changing how they track and give instructor credit for one topic workshops. See this recent blog post. This means, in theory, that as instructors we would be able to have our one topic workshops count in The Carpentries database. These are workshops that we can self-organize; they have the same characteristics of a full workshop; e.g.: helpers, sticky notes, website, live coding; but they don’t include all the topics that make up a full workshop. See the Libraries’ summerGit workshop as an example.

Other potential uses for Carpentries lessons include embedding all or part of a curriculum in a for-credit course. Samantha is talking to someone putting together a metagenomics class - this class could find existing Carpentries lessons about, e.g.: Bash and R, useful. Boryana drew attention to the Data Carpentry semester-long course as another example.

In all of these cases, it’s necessary to cite the source of the lesson material and not to call the workshop or course “Carpentry” since these uses don’t adhere to the organization’s definition of a “Carpentry workshop.” For more information, read The Carpentries’ definitions of the core curricula. For more information on one topic and other non-standard workshops, check out this page of The Carpentries Handbook.

Action Items:

• Boryana will send out a Doodle poll to determine a date for a bystander intervention workshop (Done 2019/10/07)

Notes by JBK