Cam Macdonell on The Carpentries

What constitutes a Library Carpentry workshop?

Tue, 07 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Library Carpentry website

By Chris Erdmann, Belinda Weaver, John Chodacki, Juliane Schneider, Jez Cope, Kayleigh Lino, Tim Dennis, Cam Macdonell

Given that Library Carpentry currently has nine lessons on its books, and a couple more in draft form, the question of exactly what constitutes an ‘official’ Library Carpentry workshop is timely.

On 17 May, Belinda Weaver opened an issue about this question, proposing what lessons should be taught for a workshop to be badged as Library Carpentry. The issue asked others in the community to comment. The issue received 10 comments from Chris Erdmann, Jez Cope, Kayleigh Lino, Juliane Schneider, Veronica Ikeshoji-Orlati, Greg Wilson, James Baker, and Lauren Ko. Out of the current Library Carpentry lessons, the bulk of comments identified Introduction to Data, the UNIX Shell, Introduction to Git, and OpenRefine as the core lessons that should be taught at a Library Carpentry workshop.

Library Carpentry is coming to Africa

Fri, 19 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Library Carpentry website

The first Library Carpentry workshop in Africa will be held in Pretoria, South Africa on August 25 & 26. Here is the site for the workshop which is being generously hosted by CSIR.

This Library Carpentry workshop is supported by NeDICC, North-West University and Talarify.

2016 Election: Cam Macdonell

Fri, 08 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Background & SWC Involvement ----------

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at MacEwan University in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. My involvement with Software Carpentry began in 2009 as a helper. I helped at a handful of Edmonton bootcamps before completing instructor training in 2013. I have been an instructor for 9 bootcamps, 6 for Software Carpentry and 3 for Data Carpentry.

Pulling In Those Left Behind

Thu, 29 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

A common challenge that arises before or during a workshop is that participants' prior expertise in programming or broadly speaking their abilities of using computers for science is distributed randomly. At best, this distribution peaks at the expectations of the instructor. Usually, this distribution is quite wide and thus a considerable portion of the participants do lack the necessary predispositions for the workshop level, or have a slower learning rate or simply are too shy to ask questions. I recently taught a follow-up workshop to the Software Carpentry (SWC) Novice material and struggled to keep the pace of teaching at a level so all learners would come along. Given the feedback on the SWC mailing list (see the original post), this problem occurs quite often. Thus, this blog post is a summary of the discussion initiated among fellow SWC instructors on how to pull in those learners again that fall behind or how to pace/design a course so that a minimal portion of learners fall behind.

Three Bootcamps for Librarians

Wed, 13 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Over the past month and a half I have been fortunate to (co-)lead three bootcamps targeted at librarians, a relatively new audience for software carpentry. These bootcamps have been located in Edmonton, Toronto, and New York, and in the same way that the term "librarian" is very broad encompassing many different disciplines and skill sets, the three bootcamps had their share of similarities and important differences. I'll start with similarities and then discuss each bootcamp's differences.