Sheldon McKay on The Carpentries

2016 Post-Workshop Instructor Debriefings, Rounds 04 and 05

Thu, 10 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

On February 23, Rayna Harris, Sheldon McKay, and Tiffany Timbers ran the 4th round of post-workshop instructor debriefing. On March 8th, Rayna Harris, Raniere Silva, and Belinda Weaver ran the 5th round of post-workshop instructor debriefing.

New lesson materials

Data Carpentry Genomics Lesson. Greg Wilson recently sent out an email about updating the lesson maintainer roles for Software Carpentry to jump-start finalizing the Ecology and Genomic lessons. These aren’t final yet, but the Iowa State University instructors spent about considerable time putting together a genomic lesson. You can view the Git repository with their lessons here.

2015 Post-Workshop Instructor Debriefing, Round 18

Thu, 15 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

On September 15th, the mentoring subcommittee held the 18th round of debriefing for instructors. At this round, we have a great discussion about teaching (or not) branches during the Git lesson and about Python packages used in examples.

2015 Post-Workshop Instructor Debriefing, Round 14

Tue, 04 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

On July 21 the mentorship team ran the 14th round of instructor debriefing session and received feedback from workshops at the NIH, UC Berkeley and UC Davis.

2015 Post-Workshop Instructor Debriefing, Round 13

Sat, 18 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Last week the mentorship team ran the 13th round of instructor debriefing session and received feedbacks from the workshops at Brigham Young University (check Belinda's post about it), Johns Hopkins University, Notre Dame University, Pennsylvania State University, the Jackson Laboratory, the University of Queensland, the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and the University of Toronto - Women in Science and Engineering (check Pauline's post).

2015 Post-Workshop Instructor Debriefing, Round 10

Tue, 09 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

The mentorship team ran the 10th round of instructor debriefing session on May 26. Thanks to David Dotson, Daniel Chen, Sahar Rahmani, Christina Koch, David Merand and Laurent Gatto for feedback on their workshops. Rémi Emonet and Fan Yang, instructors at upcoming workshops, also attended.

2015 Post-workshop Instructor Debriefing, Round 5

Fri, 13 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

At our fifth round of post-workshop debriefing this week, we discussed workshops held at the New York Academy of Sciences, the University of Oslo, and the University of British Columbia. This was a very instructive meeting with important lessons learned from the perspective of both new and veteran instructors. One of the key take-home lessons is that new instructors would benefit from attending an instructor debriefing prior to doing their first workshop.

2015 Post-workshop Instructor Debriefing, Round 4

Fri, 27 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

We had our fourth post-workshop debriefing of the year this week, in which we discussed recent workshops at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland, and Michigan State University. All four instructors from the Krakow workshop attended the debriefing and we had a fairly in-depth discussion about that workshop

2015 Post-workshop Instructor Debriefing, Round 2

Thu, 05 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Greg Wilson and I recently hosted a second post-workshop debriefing session for January to capture more experiences and lessons learned from instructors in the field. This meeting was attended by 10 instructors covering four recent workshops. We discussed how the workshops went, what worked, what didn't, and what could be improved.

Post-Workshop Instructor Debriefing, Round 1

Wed, 21 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

In the first two weeks of January 2015, 14 Software Carpentry workshops were held at various locations. Every workshops brings its share of lessons learned and new experiences, particularly with new instructors coming online. On January 14, Greg Wilson hosted a post-workshop debriefing meeting attended by 21 instructors from 10 recent workshops. We got together to discuss how the workshops went, what worked, what didn't, and what could be improved.

2015 Election: Sheldon McKay

Wed, 14 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

I started my career as a molecular biologist working in the data-intensive field of functional genomics, enventually becoming a full-time bioinformatician. With the perspective of a person who transitioned from the wet lab to informatics, I have often served as a liaison between researchers and software developers and truly enjoy empowering scientists by teaching them computing skills to accelerate their research. Over the past decade, I have contributed to a variety of outreach and training efforts in scientific computing. When I learned about Software Carpentry, its mission resonated with me and I wanted to get involved. I completed instructor training in May 2014 and have been an instructor at six workshops since then and continue to do about one workshop every six weeks. I also serve as a volunteer topic maintainer for SQL. I am very proud to be associated with the Software Carpentry Foundation and have a lot of experience to offer. I would like to contribute more to our ongoing success by becoming a member of the steering committee.