It’s time to reorganize this web site. Here’s my plan; comments would be welcome. In particular, WordPress might not be the right tool to use going forward, but I’m not sure what else would be as easy to set up and maintain.
I originally wrote these descriptions as part of a post on formats for learning material. I’m finding them useful in other contexts as well, so I’m re-posting them separately. Our description of our audience describes four scientific users in more detail.
Before going further with the redesign of the Software Carpentry curriculum, I need to define a few terms and their relationships. These definitions refer to another post on learners and their needs, which you may want to read first.
Frequency a page is viewed (as a percentage of total views) vs. pages (ordered by frequency); data taken over the last 90 days. I guess there’s something to this “long tail” stuff after all.
I’m still gnawing on the problem of how to construct content for 21st Century learning—or, more prosaically, what I should use to build the next version of Software Carpentry. My starting point is the need to serve several different kinds of users [1], whose descriptions I have moved to a separate post on learners and their needs.
I’m trying to be systematic about re-designing the core curriculum of Software Carpentry. So far, I’ve identified 11 common questions:
Based on the feedback we’ve received so far (both as comments and by email), it looks like we should take development methodologies (i.e., agile development) out of the core curriculum and replace it with two hours on:
I am quite arbitrarily limiting options to those five. Please cast your vote (one vote, not three out of five) in comments. We’d be grateful if you could include a brief explanation as well.
Once again, Cameron Neylon explains things much better than I ever could:
“The impact factor of a journal is a better predictor of the chances of a paper being retracted than…of the number of citations.”
One of the things we need to do in the next six months along with running boot camps and updating our online content is to create some sort of badging to recognize people’s skills and contributions. As we said in the proposal to the Sloan Foundation, “A badge program will provide near-term incentives for both learning and mentoring; a framework to support viral, peer-driven engagement with the program; and facilitate recognition by partner institutions and potential employers.”
I’ve been thinking some more about what the foundation and core of Software Carpentry actually are (and not just because Jon Pipitone keeps pestering me to do so). My last attempt had a foundation of seven principles and dozen topics in the core. I think I can slim that down even further; in fact, I think three big principles form the foundation of computational thinking: