Carpentries Instructors’ meeting
- Monday, December 2, 2019
- 9:30-11:00 AM
- Watson 455 and Zoom
Present:
Albin, Brooks-Kieffer, Buffington, Everman, Russell, Thomas, Trana
Agenda
- Announcements
- Check in on checkout tasks
- Upcoming instructor training sessions
- January 2020 workshop
Discussions
Announcements
- (Updated since November notes) CarpentryCon 2020 has been announced for June 29-July 1, 2020, at the University of Wisconsin Madison. This will be the second global Carpentries community meet-up. 2018 took place in Dublin and 2021 is scheduled for South Africa (no announced city yet), so Madison is a relatively convenient destination from Lawrence. The call for proposals is open until mid-February and applications for financial aid will open in early December.
- The Carpentries has a wide array of discussion lists on many topics. All topics and contents are publicly viewable at carpentries.topicbox.com. You can subscribe to any groups you want just as you would with any listserv. The discuss list is the most general of the lists.
Checkout Tasks and Extensions
One attendee reported that checkout tasks should be completed by mid-December. Another instructor trainee will be getting an extension from The Carpentries. Anyone who has yet to complete the checkout tasks or is planning to attend instructor training in early 2020 should keep in mind the availability of an extension. If you think you might need it, it’s better to request it ahead of time than to run out of time and potentially have to re-take instructor training. You can request the extension yourself by sending an email to team ‘AT’ carpentries.org or talk to Jamene for more information.
Upcoming Instructor Training Sessions
The Carpentries has posted some upcoming instructor training sessions for early 2020. Paul and Casey are going to attend training in 2020 and will attempt to schedule themselves for the same session. One person raised a question about attending a session not based in North America and whether that was allowed. We aren’t sure whether there are restrictions on what session an individual can take, but for sessions based outside of North America, it’s possible that the session would be conducted in a language other than English. This would be something to check on before registering for a session based outside of North America.
January 2020 Workshop
Tami and Elizabeth will be teaching Bash, Git, and R for a Software Carpentry workshop on January 15-16, 2020. Samantha volunteered to coordinate helpers for the workshop; Jamene will send her the helper tracking spreadsheet template. Other attendees indicated whether they would be available to help. Jamene will also schedule a separate meeting with the instructors and helper coordinator to make sure that all are on the same page about workshop logistics and other details. This is an attempt to address some of what we learned in the August 2019 workshop. We also agreed to once again not charge a deposit. Jamene is hoping to have many details finalized by the end of the week so that the Libraries’ communications team will have time to promote the workshop.
We discussed pros and cons of R gapminder and R inflammation. We also briefly discussed determining the payoff point of a lesson and teaching to that goal. Samantha mentioned R Markdown as a potential payoff point for some attendees. Jamene mentioned that some methods of teaching Git use a Markdown file as the sample file for the lesson. In the future, we might think about combining these adjustments to the lessons for attendees who are especially interested in Markdown.
Post-meeting Updates
- Samantha has the helper tracking spreadsheet template
- Jamene has scheduled a follow-up meeting with Elizabeth, Tami, and Samantha
- Samantha will shadow Jamene for making the workshop website
- Jamene has scheduled LEEP2 G415 (in the Engineering complex) for the workshop. The room is oversized for our event, but it’s an active learning classroom where students sit in groups and have their own screen. Once again, thanks, KU Engineering!
Notes by JBK