Here are the workshops we have lined up for the next few months:
- International Center for Theoretical Physics, Trieste, February 18 – March 2
- University of Toronto, February 23-24
- Indiana University, March 7-8
- Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, March 26-27
- Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, March 28-29
- University of Chicago, April 2-3
- Utah State University, April 14-15
- University College London, April 30 – May 1
- Michigan State University, May 7-9
- University of Alberta, May 16-17
We could use help with all of them, both in person as they’re running, and online as participants follow up with self-paced material. If you’d like to help out, please get in touch.
Our first online tutorial with the folks at the Space Telescope Science Institute via Skype, and I think it worked well. Our setup was:
- The students got together in a meeting room. Each student brought their own laptop.
- One extra laptop was connected to the projector; its webcam was pointed at the room, so that I could see the students, and its microphone (mostly) picked up their voices.
- I shared my desktop, so that instead of seeing me, the students could see what I was viewing and typing.
- I (mostly) used a full-screen terminal window, white on black, with an 18-point font, switching back and forth between my editor and running my evolving program on the command line.
That was pretty much it, and as I said, I think it worked as well as live coding in the classroom works as a lecturing technique (which is pretty well). There were a few times when I wanted to see what was on their screens, and going forward, we’re going to have to find a way to do that. Overall, though, I think that using Skype for connecting, and native desktop tools for everything else, works better for small groups than things like Elluminate (now part of Blackboard) that try to do it all in one. I know it won’t scale to dozens of people, but this will certainly get us through the next six months. If anyone has tips to share, they’d be very welcome.
I’ve recorded a first draft of the quick introduction I mentioned yesterday. Feedback would be very welcome.
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People have questions and want answers, or ideas and complaints they want to share. Right now, the only ways for them to do this on our site are:
- Mail us.
- Add a comment to a page or blog post.
- Um… that’s it.
We experimented with forums last year, but they never reached critical mass (and have since filled up with spam). What should we do going forward? Should we try to resurrect those forums? Set up a Q&A mailing list? Or direct everyone to the computational science area at StackExchange? The pros and cons as I see it are:
- Forums: hosted here, hence under our control (and could potentially be tightly integrated with the learning content), but really, the last thing the Internet needs is another place to look for information.
- Mailing list: if there isn’t much traffic, it’s not useful; if there’s lots, people will mostly unsubscribe or tune out.
- StackExchange: control (or lack of it) is an issue, but it’s well engineered, and once scientists get used to looking there, they might start using its siblings (like the original Stack Overflow).
I’m obviously inclined to #3—what are your thoughts?
Later: as an experiment, I’ve asked a question on Stack Exchange about core computing skills for scientists. Please feel free to answer it (and vote it up 
.
It’s time to revise Software Carpentry’s three-minute pitch. Here’s what I think I need to say; as always, comments would be welcome.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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