Carpentries Instructors’ meeting
- Monday, April 4, 2022
- 9:00-10:00 AM
Present:
Albin, Brooks-Kieffer, Dwyer, Kisielinski, Koseva, Loecke, Nibbelink, Ramos, Russell, Thomas, Trana, Wheeler
Announcements
One of our potential professional development topics is a demo/practice doing a GitHub pull request. At a recent Midwest Carpentries Community Call one of the hosts demonstrated this process using a contribution to a Carpentries lesson as the frame. The session was recorded and is available on YouTube. This recording might be helpful for instructors looking to complete the lesson contribution checkout task.
Agenda
Discussions
Welcome and Q&A
Instructor training and checkout questions and comments:
- Is there a central list of Carpentries lessons? Looking for a RegEx lesson and didn’t see it; it’s something a lot of folks use every day
Instructor training recap:
- Day 1: lots of notes as a student, learning about pedagogy
- Day 2: practicing live coding and making a welcoming learning environment
- Point is to bring you out in instructor training; you’re not expected to be perfect or 110% prepared
- Preparation for lessons is valuable, AND nothing ever goes according to plan – this is a main takeaway of instructor training
- Troubleshooting is a useful skill in workshops – this can be more valuable than the content of the workshop – teaching people to google their error messages is a really powerful lesson
- A helpful environment to do well and figure out what you can do better next time
- Cross-platform is always a challenge; having an install get-together can be helpful; having helpers with different OS expertise is helpful, having some knowledge of multiple OSs can also help
Checkout task check-in:
- Be sure to include your GitHub username in instructor training registration, since it’s tied to checkout tasks
- If it’s something you need to fix later, can email instructor.training@carpentries.org
Open Science Workflow with RStudio Workshop
This will be a half-day workshop on Wednesday, April 27 (12-4pm) over Zoom, no deposit, capped at 25. Based on a Carpentries Incubator lesson. Focus is practicing a typical open science workflow that includes pulling in a live data stream, R code, writing reports with Markdown/RMarkdown, and version controlling the whole thing with Git/GitHub.
Approach and Contents:
- Everything taking place in RStudio
- Introduction to Markdown and GitHub
- Pulling in data from USGS
- Making a mock report with RMarkdown
- Intentionally messing it up to show the power of version control
- Publish the report on GitHub
- Hoping to get a demo of
dygraphs from one of the instructors
Helpers needed, with skills in troubleshooting, RStudio, Git/GitHub, making a GitHub account, decoding R error messages. Two folks volunteered during the meeting - thanks!
Is the report output to PDF or HTML? HTML only, not planning to support LaTeX installation.
Other Spring/Summer/Fall 2022 Workshops
Folks are excited by the elements of Data Carpentry Ecology:
- Chris excited for Intro R for Ecology
- Rob brought up the Spreadsheets lesson; will be teaching a data viz / data wrangling course at Haskell in the fall; could also teach OpenRefine (Samantha also tentatively interested in OR)
- These two lessons work together to show the utility of spreadsheets combined with data cleaning in a different program
- Installation problems slowed down OpenRefine in DC-SS (March 2021)
- Future workshops will benefit from dedicated installation help with OR
- Requires Java or a comparable OpenJDK program (e.g. Amazon Corretto)
- Admin rights can trip up folks without admin access to their computers
- Modified spreadsheet lesson delivered for HERS (Haskell Environmental Research Studies) interns (July 2021); instructor had concerns about intensity
- Lots of folks are excited about SQL
- Spacing once per week would be good since the lessons build on one another
- A vote for Fridays
- End of semester due dates conflict with workshops
- Summer fieldwork also conflicts
- Maybe early August, as with Data Carpentry Geospatial (August 2021) – a sweet spot between end of fieldwork and beginning of semester
- Format?
- Online or hybrid have the most interest
- Largely a decision for the instructors and helpers
- More to come
Notes by JBK