Ethan White on The Carpentries

#Carpentries25 Testimonial Series: Ethan White

Wed, 27 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In July 2023, The Carpentries turned 25 years! On July 24th we launched the #Carpentries25 anniversary celebrations, which continued for the remainder of the year with a series of monthly events and weekly activities highlighting the global and regional contributions and impact of The Carpentries community.

This #Carpentries25 Testimonial Series is one way we will celebrated this milestone, and if you wish to revist previous contributions, please visit the #Carpentries25 tag on this blog.

The Structure of The Carpentries Executive Council

Wed, 05 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

The Executive Council is the main leadership body for The Carpentries. This post introduces the Executive Council’s roles and responsibilities, how the council is structured, and the reasoning behind this approach.

Roles and Responsibilities of the Executive Council

The Carpentries Executive Council is the highest leadership body of The Carpentries organisation. It is responsible for strategic and organizational planning, selecting the Executive Director and evaluating their performance, financial oversight, identifying revenue streams and resource development, approving and monitoring The Carpentries programs and services, and enhancing The Carpentries’ public image. Members of the council also serve as advocates and ambassadors for the organisation, leveraging their networks to benefit the organization’s reputation and fundraising. The Executive Council executes these responsibilities through a combination of monthly Executive Council meetings and regular correspondence and collaboration via email and online platforms.

Request for Comment on Carpentries Mission and Vision

Mon, 13 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

As announced two weeks ago, the Executive Council has been working on developing drafts of the mission and vision statements for the new joint organization. These drafts are now available and we request your feedback through two Requests for Comment and related GitHub issues by midnight (in your time zone) Friday August 31, 2018.

Requests for Comment (RFCs, also called Requests for Public Comment) are a tool used to solicit feedback on planned actions that affect a broad community. These RFCs build on those used during the merging of Software and Data Carpentry to ensure that these central guiding statements serve all members of our diverse community.

An extended Data Carpentry Workshop over 7 weeks instead of 2 days

Thu, 26 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Background

The UF R Users Group was formed in January 2017, and since then we’ve been running a weekly “UF R Meetup”: A two-hour session consists of a 30 to 60 minute presentation/tutorials followed by an “open lab” session. The meetup is meant to be a casual, informal opportunity to learn as a community, and seek face-to-face advice.

By the end of the second semester of running the meetup, we had identified a couple of issues:

A Look Back and A Look Ahead from the Data Carpentry Steering Committee

Mon, 15 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

On May 8-9, 2014 Data Carpentry hosted its first workshop at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent). That workshop came out of an identified unmet need for the skills and perspectives to work effectively and reproducibly with data, as data became more pervasive in many areas of research. The biggest difference from other trainings, including Software Carpentry, was not so much what we taught (specific tools), but how we taught it – with a focus on data management and analysis rather than writing software. In all our workshops, we use real publicly available data and the workshop is a narrative, going from start (data and project organization) to finish (analysis and visualization) through the course of the workshop, providing an onramp to using data skills in friendly, accessible workshops. The goal is to teach skills, and even more importantly, to show people what’s possible, and that they can do it, so people have the confidence and enthusiasm to go on to learn more and use these skills in their own research.

A Year to Build a Software and Data Carpentry Community at the University of Florida - The Impact of a Local Instructor Training Workshop on Building Computing Capacity

Mon, 27 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

This January was the one year anniversary of our effort to bring regular Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry workshops to the University of Florida. These workshops are aimed at helping students, staff, and faculty gain the computing skills they need to be successful in our data-driven world. The Carpentries are international organizations that provide materials, instructor certification, and organization of multi-day workshops on basic software development and data analysis tools. In January 2016 a Software Carpentry instructor training workshop held at the University of Florida Informatics Institute provided the start of our efforts. Since then, instructors trained here as well as experienced instructors already in the UF community have held four workshops, reaching 98 participants, including 70 students, 14 staff and 11 faculty. The participants received training in programming languages like R and Python, version control with Git and GitHub, SQL database queries, OpenRefine, and Excel spreadsheets.

A Year to Build a Software and Data Carpentry Community at the University of Florida - The Impact of a Local Instructor Training Workshop on Building Computing Capacity

Wed, 22 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

A Short Report from Utah State

Sat, 02 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

(The first in an occasional series about other ways people are teaching computing to scientists.)

My "Advanced Programming and Database Management for Biologists" course at Utah State is based almost entirely on Software Carpentry (though the full curriculum is obviously not just what we teach in two days). It is a blended classroom: for about 2/3 of the semester the students view SWC material before class, at the beginning of class I provide 5-10 minutes of additional introduction to the material or answer questions the students had after viewing the videos, and then they spend the rest of class working on problems related to the material. They also do an independent project related to their research and the last 1/3 of the semester involves primarily me helping individual students work on their research projects (plus I present a set of more advanced or discipline relevant topics that they choose by voting on, e.g., the GPU peta cloud). It's been fairly popular for a rather nerdy graduate class and scores off the charts.