Carpentries Instructors’ meeting
- Monday, November 6, 2023
- 9:00-10:00 AM
Present:
Brooks-Kieffer, Busch, Kisielinski, Ramos, Sanderson, Swift
Announcements
None
Agenda
- Updates about Data Carpentry Genomics
- Updates about mini R workshop plus feedback on developing materials
- Announcing KU Carpentries listservs
- Q&A and support for instructor training and checkout tasks
Discussions
Data Carpentry Genomics Workshop
Caroline and Katie are lead instructors and organizers; Rob is helping organize but unlikely to be available for the workshop. Others expressed interest over email and in the meeting in helping. A call for helpers will go out soon over the new instructors’ listserv.
Workshop will be the second week of January, in person, using the stock DC-Genomics materials. The RNASeq lesson won’t be included. Jamene is working on getting a Nautilus image for the workshop that can include updated software and packages. Jamene also reserved a classroom in Watson Library for the workshop; the classroom includes a laptop cart.
Suggestions to hold office hours ahead of time or assume there will be connection/software issues and devote the first ~30 minutes to getting everyone connected and oriented to the computing workspace.
Mini R Workshops
Joel has been working to shorten and simplify the DC Ecology R lesson to teach the essential basics to smaller groups of learners more frequently. His lesson is on GitHub; he’s requested feedback about what he’s included and on the final section, where learners apply the previous sections in a mini project.
Feedback in the meeting included observations from recent R sessions that the early sections of the lesson may need more time, depending on the learners’ previous experience. This can take time away from getting to the cool stuff later but is necessary for true beginners. A little time can be saved by skipping some of the very early exercises.
There were questions about rendering the lesson from RMarkdown into HTML. Joel successfully does this on his local computer, but GitHub doesn’t render RMarkdown into HTML automatically. Options included:
- Render using GitHub Pages (Jamene can help)
- Generate GitHub flavored Markdown so GH renders the pretty page inside the repository (Brian can help)
- Download the files and render the pages locally (existing)
He has 3 learners ready to try the lesson and some Biometry classes that would like to use it if the pilot goes well. Brian excited to see this project since he has been thinking about making something similar.
KU Carpentries Listservs
Jamene has made two new listservs for KU Carpentries communication:
ku-carpentries-instructors is for communications among the instructor cohort. This listserv is replacing the manually-maintained list. Instructors and folks interested in instructor training can (un)subscribe at any time.
ku-carpentries-news is for announcing upcoming workshops and other public-facing KU Carpentries news. It’s currently linked on KU Libraries’ Carpentries page and is available for anyone to join.
Instructor Training and Checkout Tasks
Brian is interested in the intersection of the Carpentries cohort with the Genomics Data Science Core.
Michelle anticipates finishing her last checkout task this week.
Notes by JBK, posted by JBK