Justin Kitzes on The Carpentries

Further Thoughts on Building Better Teachers

Wed, 10 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

On Greg's recommendation, I just finished reading Building a Better Teacher - it was an interesting book, and a well-written story. It turns out that I completely agree with Greg's assessment of the book's lessons and the challenges facing Software Carpentry, but I very much disagree with his proposed solutions!

Collaborative Lesson Development - Why Not?

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

A few weeks ago, Greg Wilson asked me:

Why is there so little open, collaborative development of lesson plans and curricula? Is there something that makes teaching different from coding (e.g., open source software) and from writing (e.g., Wikipedia)?

A dozen emails later, I can't claim that we're much closer to a definitive answer, but we have come up with a working hypothesis. We'd be very interested in feedback.

Feedback from UC Berkeley

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Last weekend we held a bootcamp at the University of California, Berkeley, that was targeted for environmental scientists and ecologists. We had a great group of attendees (31 registered, 28 at start, and 24 at end) and instructors/helpers, and, as a major bonus, had no major technical or logistical emergencies to deal with (but see below for some minor ones).

Before the workshop, we had participants fill out a brief pre-workshop survey that we set up on Google Drive. The idea was to gather some initial impressions that would help us tailor the workshop content. We learned a few particularly useful tidbits from this exercise. First, about half the attendees had tried Python before and half had never used it. Second, nearly a third had used some form of version control before (big surprise), and half of these had used Git. Third, the most requested topics, by far, were related to importing and manipulating different types of data and to integrating Python with R and/or ArcGIS.

Second Round at Lawrence Berkeley

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Last week we finished up our second workshop at Lawrence Berkeley Lab. This time around, we tried a more free-form version of the feedback exercise in which students live-typed their feedback into an Etherpad at the end of each day. This went very well, as it gave us time to gather unique comments, get a rough idea of the amount of support for each comment, and to respond to some of the comments in real time. We asked three questions: what was good, what was bad/confusing, and what we didn't do or talk about that we should have.