Carpentries Instructors’ meeting
- Monday, March 4, 2024
- 9:00-10:00 AM
Present:
Brooks-Kieffer, Busch, Hanson, Ramos, Swift, Trana, Wilhelm
Announcements
None
Agenda
- Debrief Data Carpentry Ecology R (Feb 26-27)
- Preparation for Data Carpentry Geospatial (March 25-26)
- Q&A and support for instructor training and checkout tasks
- Other projects
Discussions
Debrief Data Carpentry Ecology R Workshop
This workshop turned out to have a hybrid environment, with many learners on Zoom and some learners in an auditorium at a partner institution. Episode 1 took all morning of Day 1; it took a long time for all learners to be able to download the data and put it in the working directory. In-person helpers in the auditorium did all they could and were stretched thin. From Zoom, it was difficult to help learners in the auditorium. Day 2 was much smoother, but we lost a number of learners from Day 1 to Day 2. Takeaways included:
- Introduce the path and working directory at the beginning
- Demonstrate downloading the data
Preparation for Data Carpentry Geospatial Workshop
The second workshop hosted by AIMS is coming March 25-26, led primarily by Idaho State University. DC-Geospatial assumes some existing R skill.
Project Updates
We will miss Paul, who is taking a step back.
Joel brought some pre-beginner issues he has seen while teaching R; some of these issues also popped up in the February R workshop:
- File system / directory structure
- Path differences between operating systems
- Balky behavior of R/RStudio with OneDrive - maybe this has resolved with RStudio updates?
- What are the right words to get learners to do some pre-reading? This is a similar issue to convincing learners to attend software installation office hours; mostly they don’t.
Notes by JBK, posted by JBK