Carpentries Instructors’ meeting
- Monday, September 14, 2020
- 9:00-10:00 AM
Present:
Albin, Brooks-Kieffer, Deakyne, Everman, Russell, Trana
Agenda
- Using The Carpentries for professional development
- Instructor training congrats and debrief
- Capacity and scheduling for next workshop
Discussions
Recorded discussion using a live shared document; link upon request if you don’t have it. These notes summarize and organize the shared document.
Using The Carpentries for professional development
The Carpentries is a bigger community than our cohort, with discussions and lesson development going on in a lot of areas. Discussion centered on activities folks in the cohort have worked on, both within and outside of The Carpentries.
Community calls
Carpentries makes it easy and inviting to join in community calls for certification and for ongoing communication. Most everyone in the cohort has participated in a community call for certification, and we conduct the preparation and debrief conversations for our local workshops. The community calls do this on a global scale; the international perspective is fascinating. One of these calls was the source of the idea that led to Jamene and Tami’s project combining Git with LEGO. Especially with other responsibilities, these calls can be difficult to make time to attend. Find the schedule of Community Calls on The Carpentries Community Calendar
Professional learning
Some instructors rely on time from their employers to engage in professional development on topics like Python, using resources including freecodecamp, codeacademy, and Carpentries materials. Others are self-taught using books and Carpentries lessons. Others are learning R and statistics with Python through formal coursework outside of The Carpentries and their positions. However it happens, documented professional development is important for grant proposals and performance reviews.
Links to some resources
Carpentries resources that can be helpful for networking and development include:
- Carpentries listservs, now all at https://carpentries.topicbox.com/latest. You can still subscribe to receive email messages from a specific thread.
- There is a new Midwest-centric Carpentries local community. Zoom calls are on the last Monday of the month. Find the schedule and thread at https://carpentries.topicbox.com/groups/local-us-midwest
- There is an existing Carpentries regional monthly call run by the Great Plains Network (GPN). Let Jamene know if you want to be put in touch with GPN to join these calls.
- The Carpentries Handbook is full of all kinds of information on organizing and running workshops, maintaining curricula, setting up local interest groups, and much more. Find the Handbook at https://docs.carpentries.org/index.html
Teaching new topics
People use The Carpentries approach and lesson template to develop lessons on all kinds of computing and data topics. These fall broadly under the topic of “community lessons,” also known as The Carpentries Incubator and The Carpentries Lab. Many are listed at https://carpentries.org/community-lessons/. Some examples that might be of interest on campus are Docker, Conda, and Jekyll.
HPC Carpentry is not listed in the community lessons, but several folks in the cohort are interested in its development. Likewise not listed is a pretty robust LaTeX lesson that the Libraries used in a LaTeX interest group.
Teaching and helping in other places
As Certified Carpentries instructors, we can teach at other institutions. These opportunities can be useful for networking or teaching a different curriculum. Assuming in-person work is possible, host institutions are responsible for guest instructors’ travel expenses. While remote workshops are common, we can volunteer for these Carpentries-organized events without worrying about travel. Find these opportunities on the Carpentries Instructors listserv.
During remote work, we can also volunteer as helpers and sit in on remote workshops as observers. Jamene has volunteered at Mizzou and OU; contact her if interested in helping at upcoming workshops at either of these locations. Folks from other Midwest institutions on the most recent Midwest Community Call were also open to helpers and observers for their upcoming workshops and mini-workshops:
Teaching techniques for the programming language
A question came up about teaching the programming language - specifically R. Is it better to start with charts or data? Different sources take different approaches. The Carpentries R lessons take the data approach. Elizabeth, our most recent R instructor, started with how she uses R, and focused on where she uses it frequently to cover the topics that most people would find valuable. She left out some techniques that weren’t useful for some datasets.
In the Carpentries Python lessons, this split is apparent. The Inflammation lesson begins with visualizations, then jumps back. The Gapminder lesson starts at the beginning and then works toward visualization. A Fun and flashy lesson at the beginning can be good; can show what we are going to get to. When we stop and go back to the fundamentals, we need to narrate the basics and explain the concepts so learners can feel like they are getting somewhere. The ‘reward’ of a high-level programming language at the end of the ‘first’ day (in-person) can help people feel motivated to keep going and to come back for the basics.
Instructor training congrats and debrief
Congrats to Casey, who completed his certification in the last month. Yay!
Capacity and scheduling for next workshop
Since KU’s Fall 2020 course schedule runs straight through the end of November, and Spring 2021 classes begin in February, the group decided to aim for a December/January timeframe for a next workshop. A KU faculty member has requested R; we could pair this with Data Carpentry Ecology or Data Carpentry Social Sciences for a different flavor of workshop than we have offered previously. It’s also possible that some of our cohort, or previous members of our cohort, might be interested in offering Data Carpentry Genomics. We can also take cues from other Carpentries members in the region and offer one-topic mini sessions instead of three-topic full workshops.
Notes by MD, posted by JBK