Naoe Tatara on The Carpentries

The Carpentries Community Facilitators Program: 6-months in

Thu, 29 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

In September 2020, The Carpentries introduced the Community Facilitators Program. This new initiative sought to create new pathways for active involvement in everyday community activities by more community members. This program was developed to sustain the growing Carpentries community and support other core programs that contribute to the advancement of our mission. In November 2020, we met The Carpentries Feedback Facilitators, who were onboarded as our first cohort of Community Facilitators, focussing on feedback facilitation.

Outcome of October Community Discussion for Nordic and Baltic Countries

Wed, 16 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This blogpost is repost of a blogpost at CodeRefinery and is based on the notes made on Carpentries Community Discussion Etherpad on the 30th Oct. 2020.

Summary

The Carpentries say “never touch learners keyboard”. Should instructors rigidly follow this advice in online workshops or should we be more flexible in order to overcome the challenges of teaching online?

On October 30th 2020, a Carpentries community discussion was held with discussion focused on Nordic and Baltic countries. The host was Annika Rockenberger (Carpentries instructor trainer). Including the host and the co-host, totally 15 participants joined: 6 from Norway, 3 from Sweden, 3 from Finland, 2 from Denmark, and 1 from Bangladesh (Thanks for joining, all!). A complete list of the participants can be found below.

Report from the Mega-Coderefinery workshop

Wed, 26 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This blog post was originally posted on the CodeRefinery website. In the CodeRefinery project we teach research software engineering tools and workflows, using the Carpentries style.

In May/June 2020, CodeRefinery ran a large online workshop with about 100 learners in attendance. We overcame the challenges with some clever strategies, and we feel the learning outcomes were similar to that of in-person workshops of around 30-40 participants.

After that workshop, some of the same staff held an even larger “High-performance computing (HPC) Kickstart” workshop (180 learners, more than four universities). This provided another perspective and reinforced some of the lessons learned during the large online CodeRefinery workshop.