Carpentries Instructors’ meeting
- Monday, October 4, 2021
- 9:00-10:00 AM
Present:
Albin, Brooks-Kieffer, Deakyne, Dwyer, Everman, Machado-Stredel, Ramos, Russell
Agenda
- Debrief modular Software Carpentry workshop topics, Python and Bash Shell
- Updates on remaining topics, Git and R
- Other Topics
Discussions
Debrief Python and Bash Shell
Python: Matt instructed; Samantha, Boryana, and Greta (KU Libraries) were helpers for this all-day workshop. The virtual format went fine but looking forward to in-person events again. Participants were engaged. In the virtual format it is hard to gauge how people are actively engaging with the practice problems and to judge how much time and space to give for people to work. May need extra sticky checks throughout the workshop. Maybe be a good idea to put people in breakout rooms for exercises. Especially for programming language lessons, don’t forget to talk about the application you’re using and how to shut things down at the end. Is there a way to make coding interactive? Possibly Google Colab? For this workshop, 12 registered and 11 attended; seems the deposit is helping.
Bash Shell: Casey and Rob instructed; Elizabeth, Samantha, Boryana, and Jamene were helpers. There wasn’t enough time to get to the more advanced material. Maybe break into two sessions, or make a full day and finish early? Interest in an advanced topics Bash workshop*. 14 learners out of 20 registered attended and stayed. The data and directory structure download was not included in software setup instructions, delaying the start of actual instruction by a little bit. It would be good to have an intentional and guided check on the programs and data learners need to have downloaded - maybe before the workshop begins. In the past we’ve tried to accommodate this in the schedule, but there were some complaints about not starting on time. Make it clear at the beginning of the workshop how and why this time is being spent.
Helpers encountered OneDrive issues during the Bash Shell workshop. Some learners had their ~/Desktop locations on OneDrive unintentionally, so the path given by the instructor wasn’t working for them. This keeps coming up as an issue in multiple workshops (see September’s notes debriefing Data Carpentry Geospatial). It may be worth building in some notes in the lesson about the possibility of cloud storage defaults. Docker may provide some solutions but they are changing their terms of service and subscriptions may cost $5/month**. Possibly have a helper create softlinks to solve the path problem? Adding OneDrive to the path (~/OneDrive/Desktop) did solve the problem for some learners during the Bash lesson. Boryana discovered that the Downloads directory was not located on OneDrive and directed one learner to change their path for the lesson to ~/Downloads/ and do the lesson work there. Using Git on OneDrive might cause problems; the possible solutions brainstormed here may not help, especially if OneDrive sync is enabled. In these cases, learners may need to make a new directory in their home directory to use for the Git lesson.
* Extra Bash Shell lesson material is available in the Carpentries Incubator
** Update: Docker’s description of the service tiers indicates that personal, educational, and non-commercial use for open source projects will remain free
Updates on Git and R
For Git, the interactive collaboration component where people practice pushes and pulls may not be feasible in the time allotted. There is an alternate version that demonstrates pull requests; this is less confusing to teach because there isn’t a role switch between the learner’s roles. Still, time is an issue and it may not be possible to get to much GitHub lesson material.
No R updates at this time.
Other Topics
Fernando is in the process of signing up to schedule to finish up training. Yay!
Kaylen ran through her IDRH workshop topics for the remainder of the semester: Storymaps with Rhonda Houser (KU Libraries) followed by Omeka and Neatline. She is interested in Git training since she’s collaborating on a project using Git. Boryana suggested an Atlassian tutorial, which is where she goes when she needs to remember how git rebase works: https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials
Notes by a mystery contributor, posted by JBK