Carpentries Instructors’ meeting
- Monday, May 2, 2022
- 9:00-10:00 AM
Present:
Albin, Brooks-Kieffer, Dwyer, Everman, Loecke, Ramos, Thomas, Trana
Agenda
Discussions
Q&A for instructor checkout
What is the format for the teaching demo?
- Entire group joins the Zoom room at one time
- At the start, facilitator tells everyone the order they’ll be going in and what section they’ll be teaching
- Group is expected to offer feedback on others’ teaching and receive feedback on own teaching
- 5 minutes goes by very fast
- Pretty relaxed environment
Debrief Open Science Workflow with RStudio Workshop
Reorganization of the lesson order might be good. Talking about Markdown syntax is hard to make interesting. Next time move to the RMarkdown exercise first. Overall, the Markdown cheatsheet exercise was simplistic. Keep using RMarkdown through the whole workshop, not only the middle. Provide an overview of how RMarkdown works as a combination of R, Markdown, and YAML before starting to use it. Didn’t run out of time, so things didn’t feel rushed. Possibility that some learners opted out of running things and just started taking notes instead. Give there is extra time, pacing could be adjusted. The final topic on a chart tool was presented too quickly.
OneDrive was an issue again that disrupted installation for some Windows learners. Installation office hours, as well as an installation how-to video, were available, but many learners didn’t take advantage of that. Suggestion to have learners work from the ~/Downloads directory to avoid OneDrive issues.
Registration for the workshop was full to overflowing (max 26 out of 25 seats), but only about half of registrants attended (max 12 learners).
Debrief Intro to OCR and Unix Shell workshop
Kaylen and Jamene offered this mostly non-Carpentries workshop through KU’s Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities, including 1 hour of introduction to the Bash shell and 1 hour of introduction to Tesseract, a command-line OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software. Because of potential/likely installation issues with Tesseract, the workshop was offered using remote computing resources with assistance from the Great Plains Network. More lead time was needed to get the OCR image set up correctly for the workshop, but enough components were in place to make it mostly successful. By contrast, many Tesseract workshops are demo-only or brought to a halt by installation issues.
Remote Computing Resource
Jamene demonstrated the remote computing resource used for the OCR workshop. We have access to this JupyterHub for workshops if we want to use it; Jamene will work with other KU folks to get a portal to the resources that uses a KU domain. Many images are available to offer lots of different software, e.g. Python, R/RStudio, OpenRefine, and other specialized options. Most include a selection of packages relevant to a field or task, such as data science or machine learning.
Plusses from the OCR workshop included:
- Consistency of the environment for all learners and instructors
- Persistence of files and the workshop image for learners to keep using
- Zero installation issues on individual computers
- CILogon authentication works with KU SSO and other InCommon or Shibboleth institutions
- Authentication options also include GitHub, Google, and ORCID
Deltas from the OCR workshop included:
- Shell installation is minimized; needed to specially request installation of the manual to demonstrate getting command help using
man
- Instance setup and testing needed to happen earlier to be worry-free
- Some learners were routed to compute resources that stalled, sticking their JupyterHub logon in a queue for a while. While these issues were eventually sorted out, not all learners had immediate access at the beginning of the workshop
Notes by ERE, posted by JBK