Carpentries Instructors’ meeting
- Monday, March 2, 2020
- 9:30-11:00 AM
- Watson 455 and Zoom
Present:
Albin, Brooks-Kieffer, Buffington, Deakyne, Everman, Russell, Trana
Agenda
- Announcements
- Instructor training checkins
- April 2020 workshop
- Digital Agility conversation
Discussions
Announcements
- Cort is stepping back from regular participation in Carpentries activities; he and Casey are considering developing a way to offer Carpentries workshops to Kansas community colleges and other small institutions that would have difficulty offering workshops more than once a year with traveling instructors. Likely more to come on this front, with opportunities for KU instructors to participate.
Checkout Tasks and Instructor Training
One attendee reported that checkout tasks are complete. Yay! Two attendees are registered for instructor training in mid-April.
April 2020 Workshop
Discussion of offering the workshop during Friday mornings in April. This is a method Oklahoma State has used several times and, because KU does not hold Friday classes, would avoid the problem of scheduling a two-day workshop when classes are in session. We agreed to try it and see what happens.
The order of topics would be:
- Bash shell (instructor TBD)
- Git and GitHub (instructor TBD)
- Python Gapminder I (Matt)
- Python Gapminder II (Matt)
Jamene will get a workshop syllabus page up and attempt to get registration open in the next week or so. Other instructors can consider whether they’d like to teach one of the available topics can let Jamene know. Jamene will also put Matt in contact with the instructor at Oklahoma State who has run broken up workshops (update at the time of posting these notes: this contact did not happen (yet) because the world turned upside down).
Digital Agility conversation
Prior to the meeting, Jamene sent out a post from Educause, “Digital Agility: Embracing a holistic approach to digital literacy in the liberal arts”. The group held a conversation about things that stood out from the post and how these ideas might interact with the way we run Carpentries workshops.
Takeaways included:
- Grading and assessment are a lot harder with course-integrated projects and client/service style deliverables than with traditional classroom activities.
- Many secondary students are ill-prepared for college curricula, much less for the kind of project-based learning that the post describes.
- Assumptions about what students do and do not know about technology are folly. Instructors must reset expectations about just about everything.
- We have talked about this before, particularly in workshop debrief conversations and with regard to computer file systems.
- Regarding what learners do and do not know, it’s helpful to keep the question in mind, “What problems are you interested in solving?”
- When those problems are “How do I stay entertained?” or “How do I communicate with people?,” the skills people develop are readily apparent.
- But the jump from consumer problems (entertainment, communication) to researcher problems (efficient use of time and computing, programming, version control) is not trivial.
- “Digital Divide” problems are real; some of these are not lack of access to technology, but of the need or ability to apply technology to what people want to do.
Notes by JBK