Workshops on The Carpentries

GenAI in Workshops: A Bonus Module to Instructor Training

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Carpentries is excited to launch a new bonus module to Instructor Training, GenAI in Workshops, designed to empower Instructors to account for learners’ use of generative AI chatbot tools in their workshops.

Why now?

We developed the bonus module in response to the growing numbers of reports we have received from Instructors who have observed frequent chatbot use among their learners. (This is a trend across many educational settings, which is probably one reason why the new series of community sessions on GenAI and Teaching is proving so popular.)

The Carpentries Receives a Catalytic Award for Training at Keweenaw Bay Ojibwa Community College

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Workshops and Instruction Team is thrilled to share that our project, Empowering Indigenous Research Through Open Science: Pedagogical Training at KBOCC, has received 15,000 USD in funding in the second round of the 2026 Open Scholarship Catalytic Awards Program.

This award supports a collaboration between The Carpentries and Keweenaw Bay Ojibwa Community College (KBOCC) to strengthen open scholarship at a rural Tribal College and expand equitable access to research training within Indigenous communities.

Ringing in the New Year: Instructor Community Accomplishments, Updates and Resources

Tue, 27 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

2025 was a year of growth, learning, and achievement for the Instructor community and the Workshops and Instruction Team (WIT). Together, we had many accomplishments, including the delivery of 29 Centrally-Organised workshops with no cancellations, welcoming 294 new Instructors into the community, and hosting two Carpentries-sponsored workshops that were open and free to the public (a long-time goal for WIT!).

Pretix for Community Sessions is now live!

We’re excited to carry this positive momentum into 2026. We already have three Centrally-Organised workshops in progress and filled by Instructors, with more planned for March and April. We’re also happy to share that registration for Community Sessions is now live in Pretix. This includes Instructor Meetings and a new event: Instructor Practice Sessions (more on this below). Pretix is an open-source event registration and ticketing system that offers several benefits, including better privacy, automated email reminders, and the ability to easily add events to your calendar.

Incentivising the Completion of Workshop Surveys: Tips for Instructors

Mon, 18 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

As all Carpentries Instructors probably know, it is very hard to get people to complete workshop surveys. It was time to find a solution, but what can we do to inspire folks to complete yet another boring survey. Despite all my promises to learners that we look at and consider all the comments and feedback we get, it has been a miracle every time we get more than 50 per cent of attendees to complete it. Giving people time, at the end of the lesson, to complete the survey helped a bit, but not much.

Community Session Report: Essential Knowledge and Common Misconceptions

Tue, 18 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In February, The Carpentries hosted the second of three pairs of AI and The Carpentries community discussion sessions. The topic of this pair of sessions was Essential Knowledge and Common Misconceptions. For the Curriculum Team, the primary objective of these discussions was to identify the aspects of LLMs and their use in programming/data science that are most important to discuss during a Carpentries workshop. This post summarises the main points raised and the perspectives shared by community members who joined the sessions.

Upcoming Changes to Self-Organised Workshops: Ensuring Sustainability and Continued Community Impact

Thu, 27 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We are writing to inform the community about changes to Self-Organised workshops (SOWs). Due to rising costs, The Carpentries is introducing a fee for Amazon Web Services (AWS) instances used in Data Carpentry Genomics workshops. Furthermore, we have updated the definition and submission guidelines for SOWs. These workshops are vital in advancing The Carpentries’ mission and vision, significantly contributing to the organisation’s overall impact. We sincerely appreciate your efforts in organising and supporting them, as we recognise that they provide an accessible opportunity to teach Carpentries material.

Community Session Report: The Ethics of Teaching LLMs in Carpentries Workshops

Wed, 19 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In January, The Carpentries hosted the first of three pairs of AI and The Carpentries community discussion sessions. The topic of this first pair of sessions was The Ethics of Teaching Large Language Models (LLMs) in Carpentries Workshops. They featured an exploration of various ethical implications of the development and use of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and GitHub Copilot, and a conversation about the scope for engaging with those implications while teaching Carpentries workshops. This post summarises the main points raised and the perspectives shared by community members who joined the sessions.

Carpentries Core Team Promotions: Congratulations Angelique and Danielle!

Tue, 11 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A Message From SherAaron Hurt

Cheerfully, I get to share some exciting news! Two of our outstanding and well-deserving Core Team members have advanced in their roles at The Carpentries, Inc.

Danielle Sieh, Workshops & Training Manager

Danielle Sieh, who joined The Carpentries in February 2021 as a Workshop Administrator, has been promoted to Senior Program Manager for the Workshops and Instruction Team. Over the past year as Junior Program Manager, Danielle has showcased exceptional leadership within the Instructor community, demonstrated outstanding organisational skills in shaping content for our new website and Handbooks, and successfully managed the Self-Organised Workshops project. In her new role, Danielle will take on additional leadership responsibilities, focusing on planning and process improvement within her areas of oversight.

Teaching LLM Assistants in Carpentries Workshops, part 2

Tue, 21 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Following our previous post summarising a pair of community discussions on the topic of teaching the use of LLM “assistants” such as ChatGPT in Carpentries workshops, here we describe the Curriculum Team’s plans to coordinate relevant updates to lessons.

Including discussion of LLMs in workshops

One key takeaway from November’s community discussions was the observation that learners are using/will use LLM assistants when learning to code, whether we want them to or not. In this context, we believe that our goal as Instructors should be to help learners develop a working mental model of how these tools can be used, the kind of task they are (and are not) suited to, and their strengths and limitations.

Teaching LLM Assistants in Carpentries Workshops, part 1

Thu, 16 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Generative AI “assistants” such as ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot, based on large language models (LLMs), have gained a lot of attention over recent years and are impacting how people learn about and practice coding and data science. Some members of The Carpentries community have reported observing learners using ChatGPT and similar tools to assist them in and after workshops. Others have reported on efforts to educate members of their local communities about the models behind these tools, their advantages and limitations, and how to judiciously approach their use.

A recap of the CZI sponsored Accelerate Precision Health (APH) Carpentries Workshops

Thu, 07 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In September 2022, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Foundation (CZIF) announced a partnership with four Historically Black Medical Colleges (HBMCs) based in the United States, aimed to further support the cutting-edge scientific research they are leading to address significant gaps in genomics research, create new tools and methods to prevent and treat disease and accelerate precision health for everyone, particularly Black people and other people of color.

CZIF’s Accelerate Precision Health (APH) program will advance genomics research by investing in genomics programs at each of the HBMCs — Charles Drew University College of Medicine in Los Angeles, California; Howard University College of Medicine in Washington, D.C.; Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee; and Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia.

Thank You to our Regional Coordinators

Wed, 04 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In 2021, we announced the development of the Carpentries Community Development Program, which merges the role of Regional Coordinators, Community Facilitators, and Champions into one role as Community Coordinators. The Community Development Team has worked effortlessly over the last 2 years to make this happen!

The Carpentries are extremely grateful for the work of our Regional Coordinators. These individuals were granted work hours or volunteered their personal time to help support the coordination of workshops in their region. This has been extremely helpful because Regional Coordinators are active in their local regions and understand the workshop needs of the Instructors, Hosts, and Learners.

Teaching targets with Penguins

Thu, 20 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Originally posted on the rOpenSci website

Many researchers are becoming more aware of the importance of reproducibility. Although reproducibility involves a diverse array of topics and tools, one rOpenSci package has gained considerable attention for enabling reproducible analysis pipelines in R: targets, by Will Landau.

Why a targets workshop?

Despite its popularity, targets can be challenging to learn because it requires code to be organized in a way that is different from what most people are used to.

Join the Monthly Instructor Meetings

Thu, 09 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

As a Carpentries Instructor, how do you get updated information? Through email, slack channel or a blog post? These are all great ways to gather information, however, it is not as conducive if you have questions, concerns or feedback regarding the information shared.

The Carpentries Workshop Administration Team recognized we were missing an opportunity to connect with Instructors and hear from you to make your teaching experience better. To bridge the gap we now host monthly meetings for Instructors!

Become an Instructor and help bring data and coding skills to people across the globe!

Tue, 10 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

We often receive inquiries from people who are interested in becoming certified Carpentries Instructors or in recommending an opportunity for certification to a friend or colleague. In this post, we will review a few frequently asked questions and share a new avenue for priority admission to our Open Instructor Training program.

How can I be trained as a Carpentries Instructor?

Carpentries Instructor Training seats can be purchased for groups and individuals through Membership and A-la-carte seat purchases. In addition, we offer free access to individual applicants through our Open Instructor Training program. Anyone with an interest in becoming certified as a Carpentries Instructor can apply to this program. Applications are scored periodically and admitted in order of rank as seats become available.

Teaching Centrally-Organised Workshops

Tue, 03 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

If you are a certified Instructor for The Carpentries, I am sure you have received an email/slack message or two announcing “Upcoming Teaching Opportunites” around the world. Specifically our Centrally-Organised workshops. These workshops are requested by organisations and come with the full support of The Carpentries Workshop Administration Team and Instructors.

Whether you are a newly certified Instructor or an experienced Instructor, this blog post will provide detailed information that will give more insight to Centrally-Organised workshops.

Introducing Sher!, Director of Workshops

Fri, 28 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

A Message from Erin Becker

I am thrilled to announce that SherAaron Hurt is advancing to a Senior Team Lead role and will now be serving as The Carpentries first Director of Workshops. SherAaron joined the team in 2017 in a part-time administrative support capacity. Over the past four and a half years, SherAaron has epitomized The Carpentries value of “Always Learning”, growing her teaching skills, technical abilities, and leadership skills immensely throughout her tenure with The Carpentries. I know that SherAaron will continue to lead the Workshop Administration Team with heart and confidence, and am excited to follow her as she blazes a new path for The Carpentries workshop of the future.

The Future of Online Workshops

Tue, 30 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

It has been 20 months since The Carpentries convened a Task Force to address the urgent demand for remote Carpentries workshops. To date we have run over 700 online workshops. With the feedback and recommendations we have received from Instructors and Host we have been able to provide updates to the Official Guidelines for teaching Carpentries Workshops Online.

We know that the transition to online workshops presents its own set of pros/cons and it may not have been easy but our community rose to the occasion. The demand for our workshops did not suffer, in fact, we saw an increase with requests for Centrally-Organised workshops.

Integration and reuse of Library Carpentry content into curricula

Mon, 08 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Library Carpentry website

By Jeff Oliver, Julie Goldman and Konrad Förstner

There is a growing need to teach students professional data handling skills. Luckily, nobody has to start from scratch for this. While the lessons of The Carpentries including the Library Carpentry lesson program are designed to be taught as defined combinations in two-day workshops, they can be reused in other contexts. In this blog post members of the Library Carpentry community describe how they include Library Carpentry lessons in academic curricula and use the training methods to teach computational skills to students.

Developing Data Skills at Macquarie University Library

Tue, 25 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Library Carpentry website

By Grai Calvey, Fiona Jones and Heather Cooper

In 2016, Macquarie University delivered a Data Science and eResearch Platform Strategy. In response, the Library embarked on a series of initiatives including:

Developing workshops to improve the data skills of all our library staff
To grow confidence when engaging in data science practice, eResearch conversations and the support of researchers

Our three goals were to:

Genomics Workshop Pilot and BugBBQ at University of Arizona

Wed, 15 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

This February, a small group of committed community members, led by Taylor Reiter at the University of California, Davis, completed a major update to the Data Carpentry Genomics curriculum. A huge thank you to everyone who contributed! This update included significant changes to both the data set and the software used for the lessons, modernizing the workshop and keeping it relevant to researchers working in the genomics field. The new version of this curriculum is already live and will be officially published in the upcoming lesson release in June.

Data in the desert

Wed, 12 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

By Jeff Oliver

Back by popular demand, the University of Arizona Libraries held its second Library Carpentry workshop on 6-7 August, 2018. Braving the intense desert heat, learners from the University of Arizona Libraries and Arizona State University Library showed up to learn about research computational tools and best practices in dealing with data.

The workshop included 21 learners, five instructors, and two helpers, representing a total of nine departments from the two universities.

Report back from University of Calgary Libraries

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

This post originally appeared on the Library Carpentry website

By Chris Erdmann

Thanks to the University of Calgary Libraries

Thanks to the University of Calgary Libraries for recently hosting both a Library Carpentry Workshop (28-29 August) and a Carpentries Instructor Training for Librarians (30-31 August). The events were possible thanks to support from John Brosz, Renee Reaume, Susan Powelson, Ingrid Reiche, Paul Pival, Calum Center, and University of Calgary Libraries staff. The Taylor Family Digital Library’s state-of-the-art teaching and collaboration spaces were perfect for The Carpentries hands-on pedagogical approaches used by the trainers and instructors, Juliane Schneider, Karen Word, and Chris Erdmann.

Data Carpentry for Atmosphere and Ocean Scientists

Tue, 04 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Back in late 2012, I was a couple of years into my first job out of college. My undergraduate studies had left me somewhat underprepared for the coding associated with analyzing climate model data for a national science organization, so I was searching online for assistance with Python programming. I stumbled upon the website of an organization called Software Carpentry, which at the time was a relatively small group of volunteers running two-day scientific computing “bootcamps” for researchers. I reached out to ask if they’d be interested in running a workshop alongside the 2013 Annual Conference of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society (AMOS), and to my surprise Greg Wilson - the co-founder of the organization - flew out to Australia to teach at our event in Melbourne and another in Sydney (the first ever bootcamps outside of North America and Europe). I trained up as an instructor soon after, and from 2014-2017 I hosted Software Carpentry workshops alongside the AMOS conference, as well as other ad hoc workshops in various meteorology and oceanography departments.

Geospatial Workshop is Now Ready to Teach!

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

The long-awaited Data Carpentry curriculum for working with Geospatial data is now ready to teach! As with all our newly developed curricula, these lessons are now in ‘beta’. We are actively promoting workshops and collecting information from those workshops to improve these lessons as they are taught more broadly and in different contexts. We will also be onboarding Instructors to prepare them to teach these new lessons. Keep reading for more details.

New England Libraries Team Up to Become Carpentries Members

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

This post originally appeared on the Library Carpentry website

By Joshua Dull, Thea Atwood, Andrew Creamer, Julie Goldman, Kristin Lee, Lora Leligdon, Sara Oelker, Chris Erdmann

How can libraries get involved and become Carpentries members? The New England libraries had an innovative approach to this question: work as a team. The New England Software Carpentry Library Consortium, or NESCLiC for short, brought together library staff from seven academic libraries: Yale, Harvard, Tufts, Dartmouth, UMass Amherst, Brown, and Mt. Holyoke.

NESCLiC shares the costs and benefits that go along with Gold Tier membership, but the Consortium also allows staff from the different areas of academic librarianship and technology, including the digital humanities, statistics, high performance computing, sciences, engineering, medical libraries, and data services, to work together on Carpentries initiatives in their libraries.

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.

Seventy-One Workshops... and Counting

Wed, 01 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

By Belinda Weaver, Chris Erdmann, Tim Dennis, Juliane Schneider, Carmi Cronje, Jez Cope

Seventy-one Library Carpentry workshops have now been taught around the world, including one-day, two-day, and multi-day events, with future workshops being added every day.

With this milestone behind us, it is important to pause and appreciate what has been achieved so far by the community. Since 2015, more than 102 instructors and 123 helpers, 225 in total, have contributed to Library Carpentry training events in 13 countries. We have collaboratively developed open educational lessons to teach software and data skills for anyone who works in libraries or similar organisations.

A Carpentries-Based Approach to Teaching FAIR Data and Software Principles

Tue, 24 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Library Carpentry website

By Chris Erdmann

Recently, I was lucky to participate in an innovative workshop held at Technische Informationsbibliothek (TIB) Hannover from 9 - 13 July, 2018, which paired The Carpentries’ pedagogical style of teaching and lesson material with in-depth background on the FAIR Data Principles. FAIR comprises a set of guiding principles to make data findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (Wilkinson et al., 2016). FAIR is a relatively new initiative that is gaining momentum. Key stakeholders across the research lifecycle are exploring how the underlying FAIR Principles can be applied and assessed at various points. For instance, at the 2018 Research Data Alliance (RDA) Plenary Meeting in Berlin, FAIR was mentioned in at least 23 of the sessions:

Eight Days, Four Workshops, Two Islands, One Earthquake

Wed, 18 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Library Carpentry website

By Belinda Weaver

Teaching four Library Carpentry ’express’ workshops within eight days might sound quite taxing but the enthusiasm of the people I taught made it pretty easy. I also had some help from Jonah Duckles with workshop one at the University of Otago in Dunedin (this formed part of the Dunedin ResBaz event) and from Aleksandra Pawlik with the workshop at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch.

The Carpentries Instructor Training for Librarians

Tue, 26 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Library Carpentry website

By Chris Erdmann, John Chodacki

We are pleased to announce an open Carpentries instructor training course on 30-31 August geared specifically for the Library Carpentry movement supported by a grant to the California Digital Library from the IMLS.

Open call for instructor training

This course will take place in Calgary, Alberta, Canada at the University of Calgary Libraries. The two-day course is open to anyone and the event will focus on preparing members of the library community as Carpentries instructors. The sessions will be led by Carpentries staff and community members, Karen Word, Juliane Schneider, and Chris Erdmann.

Pancakes on a Stick, and Other Things I Learned at UCLA

Mon, 04 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Library Carpentry website

By Juliane Schneider

It was not my best teaching effort. But it was one of my best learning experiences, and for an instructor, that’s a maybe selfish but definitely great outcome. For me.

I learned that the UCLA campus is truly gorgeous, and their campus catering serves delicious coffee and pastries. I learned that engaged learners can save you. I learned that these people were so into the workshop that most of them showed up for the entire Friday - a Friday before a three-day holiday weekend, possibly the best altmetric ever for interest in a workshop. I also learned about the mechanics of advanced whiteboard technology (wheels).

Library Carpentry at The University of Melbourne

Fri, 11 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Library Carpentry website

Post by Belinda Weaver.

Peter Neish and I taught a one-day Library Carpentry workshop to around 24 library staff at the University of Melbourne on 4 May.

We covered jargon busting, regular expressions for pattern matching, the Unix shell, and OpenRefine. This was a fairly ambitious program for a single day, but we managed to get through it, losing only a little skin as we tore through the shell lesson. Things went a little off the rails when the main projector started switching on and off randomly. This resulted in a total rearrangement of the room with a subsequent loss of visibility for some learners.

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:

Updates on the new Geospatial and Social Sciences lessons

Thu, 19 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

In December 2017, we made a call for community members to contribute to two new sets of Data Carpentry lessons, targeted towards researchers working with geospatial data or survey data for the social sciences.

There was overwhelming interest from the community in working to develop and publish these two curricula. In the past few months, six new Maintainers for the Geospatial lessons, and five new Maintainers for the Social Sciences lessons have gone through Maintainer onboarding and begun to work with their lessons. Please join our community in welcoming Chris Prener, Geoff LaFlair, Peter Smyth, Juan Fung, Stephen Childs, Tyson Swetnam, Lauren O’Brien, Janani Selvaraj, and Lachlan Deer as new Maintainers on these lessons (Chris Prener and Juan Fung will serve as Maintainers for both the Geospatial and the Social Sciences lessons), as well as Leah Wasser and Joseph Stachelek, who will be continuing on as Maintainers for the Geospatial lessons.

Running workshops on limited budgets

Fri, 13 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Anelda van der Walt and co-host Toby Hodges ran the first themed discussion session in March to brainstorm ideas about running workshops with little to no funding. Attendees from Australia, the US, the UK, and Canada joined to hear and contribute ideas.

Existing Funding Models

The Brisbane model is to use Eventbrite to charge a low fee (around AUD $60) for attendance at workshops. This has a few benefits - waitlists can be managed, the booking widget appears in the workshop website, fees can be easily refunded up to a week before the workshop, and attendance is generally good because people have paid out of their own pockets or have been sponsored by their school to come. The fee covers the costs of room hire and the fairly lavish morning and afternoon teas that keep people from wandering off in search of sustenance during breaks. The Brisbane instructor pool is fairly large so there is no need to fly people in, which means we don’t have to factor in those costs. One drawback is having to pay the catering and room hire costs up-front by personal credit card as the Eventbrite payout comes only after the workshop. This is a break-even charge - we could charge more and return some money to The Carpentries, but our main interest is in keeping costs low.

DC Genomics Workshop, UC Davis, January 2018

Wed, 28 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

From January 24-25 (Thursday and Friday) we held a Data Carpentry Genomics workshop at UC Davis, led by Sue McClatchy. This was a “sold out” workshop, which filled up about a day after the registration went live. This indicates to us that we should host it again!

Overall, it was a great workshop. The learning workflow included:

Data organization and management -> Introduction to the shell -> Downloading sequencing data files -> QC (fastqc and trimming) -> Assembly -> Variant calling

Workshop Template Enhancement Proposal

Tue, 16 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Over the last couple of years, many emails and issues on GitHub requested moving the setup instructions in the Workshop Template to a separate page for valid reasons. To provide some reference, see swcarpentry/DEPRECATED-bc#415, swcarpentry/DEPRECATED-bc#729, swcarpentry/workshop-template#194 and swcarpentry/workshop-template#408.

What did we discover during those years and trials?

Finding the balance to accommodate long time and advanced instructors, novice or intermediate instructors and learners is as hard as carrying a watermelon with a tea spoon. So why are we having this discussion again?

How do instructors get placed at workshops?

Sun, 14 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

If you are a badged Carpentries Instructor, you have most likely received emails about upcoming workshops that need Instructors. After the emails go out, we sometimes get questions about how Instructors are actually chosen and placed, so we want to share our methods with you.

First, it is not first come, first served.

That would not be fair, as that just shows who was lucky enough to be online and able to check their calendars at the moment my email went out. Rather, we give it a few days, or sometimes even a couple of weeks, depending on how quickly the workshop may be coming up.

The Centrality of the Code of Conduct

Wed, 10 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

This is the first in a series of posts about Carpentries’ teaching practices. Subsequent posts will cover the other practices - live coding, sticky notes, helpers, challenges, etherpads - that make Carpentries’ workshops the success that they are.

I gave a talk recently for the Australian National Data Service on ’teaching the Carpentries way’. Originally I planned to cover six reasons why our workshops are effective, but ended up covering thirteen, with the thirteenth being the Carpentries’ Code of Conduct.

Our 2017 Community Service Award winner: Anelda van der Walt

Wed, 13 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

The Carpentries are happy to honor Anelda van der Walt as our 2017 Community Service Award winner. We received seven independent nominations for Anelda this year, which is a testament to her commitment to both individual people and the broader community.

Starting from scratch, Anelda planted the tiny seed that has now become the phenomenal growth of Software and Data Carpentry in South Africa, not to mention its spread to an ever-growing list of other African countries, such as Namibia, Botswana, Ghana, Gabon, Mauritius, and Ethiopia.

When Do Workshops Work? A Response to the 'Null Effects' paper from Feldon et al.

Mon, 11 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Author: Karen R. Word

Contributors: Kari Jordan, Erin Becker, Jason Williams, Pamela Reynolds, Amy Hodge, Maxim Belkin, Ben Marwick, and Tracy Teal.

“Null effects of boot camps and short-format training for PhD students in life sciences” is the provocative title of a recent article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Those of us who enthusiastically design and deliver short-format training promptly took note, then scratched our heads a bit. We waited a little for a response, wondering if one or more of the programs that participated in the study might step up to their own defense. Nothing happened. We thought about letting it go - we’ve got our own programs, with distinct goals, and our own assessment data, so maybe this broad-brush study isn’t so important. But … it keeps being raised. Someone will bring it up here and there, asking what we think about it. Whenever this paper comes up in conversation, its title certainly throws some weight around.

satRday Cape Town 2018

Sun, 03 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

satRdays are community-led, regional conferences to support collaboration, networking and innovation within the R community.

satRdays are the brainchild of Stephanie Locke, and were inspired to a large extent by the success of SQLSaturdays. SQLSaturdays focus on developing technical knowledge around SQL Server and related technologies. The first SQLSaturday was held in 2007, and there are now well over 100 events across the globe.

North West University Mafikeng Data Carpentry workshop

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

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Data Carpentry workshop, 1-3 November, 2017

Background/Introduction

Conducting the first Data Carpentry workshop by members of NWU Mafikeng campus and teaching my (Caroline Ajilogba) first workshop was a great task with support from NWU and our mentor, Anelda van der Walt. The support from the co-instructors Martin Dreyer (NWU Potchefstroom) and Amy Hodge (Stanford University), and from helper Bennett Kankuzi (NWU Mafikeng) was great. Other helpers from the R study group at Mafikeng’s NWU campus, like Olubukola Aremu and Ayansina Ayangbenro, were available to enhance the workshop.

CAB-Alliance Bioinformatics Workshop in Franceville, Gabon

Thu, 09 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Over the past five years, researchers from the University of New Orleans (UNO) in the USA and the Université des Sciences et Techniques de Masuku (USTM), Franceville, Gabon and University of Buea (UB) - have been working closely together as part of a larger collaborative initiative to map patterns of genomic and phenotypic variation in rainforest species across central Africa. This international partnership known as the Central African Biodiversity (CAB) Alliance is made up of a number of institutions in the US, Africa and Europe and is primarily funded through the National Science Foundation’s Partnership in International Research and Education program.

Toads in Vancouver: using Stencila to teach SQL and R at UBC

Fri, 29 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

One of Stencila’s goals is to create an easy way for people who don’t yet code to learn data science and statistics skills, and to feel comfortable trying out powerful scientific computing languages like R, Python and Julia. We’re doing that by providing interfaces that are similar to the word processors and spreadsheets that they already use. It’s a way for people to “dip their toe” into code - without having to dive into the daunting ocean of IDEs, text editors, packages, version control etc.

Waxing poetical in a Software Carpentry workshop

Thu, 31 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Hi everyone! I just finished running my first segment of a Software Carpentry workshop. I massively overprepared last evening and my notes for the first four lessons of unix shell are on google drive if anyone would care to reuse them.

In any case, one of my students (who had audited one of my other classes) made the following tweet: “Never heard anyone present fundamental computing concepts so poetically as @DenubisX @swcarpentry #MacquarieUni”

Helping the Helper - practical advice for Library Carpentry Helpers

Fri, 04 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Library Carpentry website

Post by Claire Wallnutt

A couple of months ago my line manager asked if I would be interested in helping out at an upcoming workshop our Library was helping to deliver. The workshop was entitled Library Carpentry. The first thing I asked was “is this to do with the Library Furniture Working Group?” A fair response if you ask me, as we do have a Library Furniture Working Group tasked with the job of creating a functional space (complete with said furniture) for our now empty Microfiche room. He explained it had nothing to do with carpentry actually, but was a software skills workshop aimed at information professionals borne from the Software Carpentry Foundation. Relieved, and with the image of me whittling a new piece of library furniture fading, I agreed to help.

Keep Calm and Write a Blog Post

Tue, 25 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Writing a blog post should not be hard. A blank screen can seem very daunting, but if you populate it with a few questions, such as Who? What? Where? When? Why? and How?, then you have the genesis of a post.

Workshop report? Once you’ve answered the questions above, you’re pretty much done. Throw in something that went well or a funny story about something that didn’t, and that’s it.

Library Carpentry at the University of Sussex

Mon, 17 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Library Carpentry website

Post by James Baker

Last Wednesday 14 Librarians from 8 libraries in the Brighton area convened at the Sussex Humanities Lab for a Library Carpentry workshop. The session was organised by the University of Sussex Library and colleagues from there were out in force both to instruct and as helpers. The workshop covered Regular Expressions, Shell, Git (in a short introductory session organised by local company Serano), and OpenRefine.

First time for everything

Tue, 11 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

This spring I found myself back in a new situation, an anxious instructor in front of a room full of anxious students. My last teaching was many years back, as a teaching assistant in graduate school, and then a few lectures as part of an intermediate-level course for graduate students. But those were rather theoretical, blackboard affairs. This was my first attempt at teaching software, and with live coding demos. Didn’t Steve Jobs himself say “never give a software demo”? (Okay, maybe not.) In the end though, I was happily surprised by the experience.

Two Workshops at NASA DEVELOP (or, Python De-Fanged)

Tue, 11 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

On 8-9 June, 2017, Katie Moore, Deputy Data Management Team Lead for the NASA CERES Science Team, and Ryan Avery, Geoinformatics Fellow with the NASA DEVELOP National Program, ran a Self-Organised workshop in Hampton, VA.

On 12-13 June, 2017, Kunal Marwaha, a software engineer with Palantir, Kelly Meehan, Geoinformatics Fellow with NASA DEVELOP, and Ryan ran another Self-Organised workshop in Norton, VA.

Both workshops focused on building skills in NASA DEVELOP participants, who work on 10-week feasibility projects that demonstrate how to apply NASA Earth observations to environmental concerns to enhance project partner decision-making. In the process, both partners and participants gain a better understanding of NASA’s Earth-observing (EO) capabilities and improve their professional and technical capacity to use EO data. For Katie, Kelly, and I, these were the first workshops in which we taught entire lessons and we found it to be an extremely rewarding experience.

Analysis of Software Carpentry Workshop Impact

Mon, 10 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

We’ve begun to look at our pre- and post- workshop surveys and are sharing the draft reports to stimulate conversation about our workshops and their impacts on learners. For this first cut, we looked at our post-workshop survey data.

From this survey data, we can see that learning to program can be quite intimidating for many learners. About 44.5% of Software Carpentry learners who responded to the post-workshop survey feel that at least one of the tools covered in the workshop they attended was either slightly or very intimidating to them before attending a workshop.

Teaching Library Carpentry at the New Librarians' Symposium

Thu, 06 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Library Carpentry website

Post by Carmi Cronje

My colleague Fiona Jones and I recently taught a workshop called Introduction to the Library Carpentry Toolbox at the National Library Australia (NLA) for the ALIA New Librarians’ Symposium (NLS).

The New Librarians’ Symposium is held every two years - aimed at LIS and GLAMR students, managers, mentors, coders, hackers and more. This year’s was themed DIY Library Career, and held in Canberra 23rd-25th June. It was our first time at NLS so we weren’t sure what to expect, but it didn’t take long to get a sense of the positive environment outlined in their Inclusion Statement.

Why be a helper at Software Carpentry workshops?

Sat, 01 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

“I’m not an expert on R”, “I don’t know any Python”, “I’ve never used Git” - these may be true statements but they should never stop you from helping out at a Software Carpentry workshop.

Even the workshop instructors themselves may not be “experts” - and all the better if they are not!

Experts don’t necessarily make the best teachers. Many have lost sight of - or, worse, patience with - the beginner mindset.

Job Posting: Workshop Administrator

Mon, 26 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

With the growth of Carpentry workshops all over the world, we are excited that Maneesha Sane is moving from Program Coordinator to Program Manager of Software and Data Carpentry. As Program Manager, she will continue to be involved in workshop coordination and instructor training and will oversee and ensure the quality and consistency of program operations. She will also work to develop processes, infrastructure and communications to consistently improve the workshop experience for instructors, hosts and learners.

Instructor Training at Macquarie University

Tue, 20 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Software Carpentry Executive Director Jonah Duckles and I ran instructor training for new member institution Macquarie University in Sydney on 19-20 June.

There were a few firsts at this workshop - Jonah’s first time as an instructor trainer, my first day in the job as the new Community Development Lead for Software and Data Carpentry, and Macquarie’s first-ever instructor training event.

We may also have had the biggest-ever workshop etherpad, coming in at 1400+ lines, but that would be a tough claim to substantiate. Certainly the eventual size of the etherpad mirrored the deep engagement of attendees, who all worked very hard.

Announcing Belinda Weaver as our Community Development Lead

Wed, 07 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

We’re excited to announce Belinda Weaver has accepted our offer to become the Community Development Lead. Belinda will join the Carpentries staff later this month, please give her a warm and enthusiastic community welcome!

Many of you may already know of Belinda from her work all over the community as a Software Carpentry Steering Committee Member, the Mentorship Subcommittee, the Trainers Subcommittee and a champion and leader of Library Carpentry. As part of our bylaws Belinda will be stepping down from the Software Carpentry Steering Committee on Friday June 16th and the Committee will finish the 2017 term with a membership of 6. For those of you who don’t know her yet, look for her introductory blog post later today. In short, Belinda is a very active community member and a delight to work with, we’re incredibly excited to have her contributing to our community full-time very soon!

Instructor Access to Workshops

Tue, 06 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Software and Data Carpentry share a mission to spread computational and data literacy to the broader research community at a wide range of institutional types across the world. We also share core community values of openness and inclusiveness.

Recently, we learned that some of our host sites have selective criteria that limit physical access to their sites on the basis of nationality. These policies have the effect of excluding some Carpentry instructors from teaching at these sites. We recognize that often these criteria are imposed by the broader security and bureaucratic apparatus at the organization that the host operates within and are beyond the control of our contacts at those sites. Nevertheless, these policies can cause conflict with our mission and core community values.

Three Instructors, Two Coasts and One Spatula

Wed, 17 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

In the space of a year, interest and participation in the Library Carpentry community has exploded like an amoeba who over-ate at an algae banquet and attempted one too many pseudopods.

For Library Carpentry, though, this is a good thing; the pseudopods are propelling us forward across institutions, disciplines, and continents. The community, grounded in collaborative tools like Github and Gitter (I always want to type Glitter) is coalescing around lesson development and holding new workshops. Why is the buzz so strong? I think it’s a combination of relentless energy from people like Belinda Weaver and Tim Dennis (to name just a few), the acceptance and active encouragement of new people who want to contribute in some way, and the mutual recognition by all of us that in any one thing, we are all absolute beginners, and we all give each other permission to be terrible until we aren’t.

What is the reward for empowering others?

Sun, 14 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Following a few round-table discussions with Software Carpentry instructors, I gained some insight into what drives so many of us to volunteer our time so enthusiastically. I came to the conclusion that many of us share a sense of accomplishment when we empower others through mentoring and education. Software Carpentry gives us a fountain-full of opportunities to contibute through community developed lessons, community supported workshops, and world-wide community conversations. We start out volunteering a little when there is time, but we soon carve out more and more space in our schedule for Software Carpentry events and activities that provide the opportunity to empower others.

Data Carpentry Genomics comes to the Netherlands

Thu, 04 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Twenty-five life science researchers from across the Netherlands and Germany joined the event on March 22nd and 23rd in Science Park Amsterdam. The workshop covered multiple aspects of working with genomics data.

Lex Nederbragt from the University of Oslo, kicked off the event with an introduction to the core dataset. The rest the first day focused on working with R in RStudio environment to explore, clean and visualise metadata in a tabular format, presented by Mateusz Kuzak from the Netherlands eScience Center and has been wrapped up by Anita Schurch from UMC Utrecht introducing the Unix shell and file system navigation.

Instructor Training in Puerto Rico

Mon, 24 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

On March 24-25, Rayna Harris, Sue McClatchy, and Tracy Teal co-taught an instructor training workshop at the University of Puerto Rico (UPR). This was a very special workshop in many ways, and we are excited to share some of the highlights with you.

Also, be sure to check out an accompanying blog post by Humberto Ortiz Zuazaga about the combined Replicathon and Instructor Training events.

Software Carpentry workshop in severe conditions

Mon, 19 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Usually the main struggles preceding Software and Data Carpentry workshops involve the laptop setup, signposting the room and making sure the washrooms are unlocked. But the recent workshop in New Zealand, held at National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) was facing much more extreme conditions.

The day before the workshop New Zealand was hit by what is now known Kaikoura earthquake. Wellington, where the NIWA offices are, was also affected. Fortunately, NIWA buildings remained safe and the hosts, Fabrice Cantos and Wolfgang Hayek, decided to go forward with the workshop.

Belonging: Developing a Community of Practice among Data Carpentry Learners

Mon, 14 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website Two schools of thought regarding learning and how it is achieved are the acquisition metaphor and the participation metaphor.

The acquisition metaphor asserts knowledge is acquired individually, applied, and transferred.

The participation metaphor asserts knowledge is formed by becoming a member of a community of practice.

The computational scientist of old personifies the acquisition metaphor. She is someone who learned and worked in isolation, spending hours upon hours coding and debugging until her problem was solved.

Community Call on Assessment

Thu, 20 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Dr. Kari L. Jordan, Data Carpentry’s Deputy Director of Assessment, will be speaking on the Community Call on the impact our workshops have on our learners. Kari will cover the results of our post-workshop surveys including learner attitudes, learner data management and analysis skills prior to and following our workshops, and learner attitudes toward Data Carpentry instructors. Come and hear about our successes and share your thoughts. It’s going to be an informative community call!

Software Carpentry at Oklahoma State

Wed, 19 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

I recently instructed Git for the third time at a Self-Organised workshop on the Oklahoma State University main campus. I enjoy instructing and helping with the Software Carpentry workshops (and hopefully will get to do a Data Carpentry soon) and each workshop is always different from the last, so I was excited to participate again.

Because of a scheduling conflict, we only had the lab for five hours on Day One. In five hours (with two 15-minute breaks), we went through the entire bash shell lesson without many hiccups. One thing we did create for the bash shell lessons was a series of three-question quizzes we launched live on Socrative before each break. The learners had good feedback about this and felt it was a good way to break up the lessons and provided a good review of concepts they had just learned.

Perth Software Carpentry - A Tale of Three Trainers

Fri, 30 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Andrew

Perth’s journey into Software Carpentry began when Andrew Rohl attended eResearchNZ in 2014, for which he has to thank Nick Jones of NeSI for financial support. There he met the director of the Mozilla Science Lab, Kaitlin Thaney, and learned about the Software Carpentry movement. Fast forward to the end of the year and David Flanders was arranging a “Train the Trainer” Software Carpentry course in Melbourne and he even had funds to cover travel costs for those selected to attend! Andrew convinced Raffaella Demichelis, a fellow computational chemist, to also apply and they were both fortunate enough to be chosen. They enjoyed the training in February 2015, followed by the first Research Bazaar conference and returned to Perth enthused.

Software Carpentry Workshop Attendance: a New Zealand Perspective

Wed, 28 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Having taught and helped at a series of workshop over the past few months Tom Kelly, PhD Candidate in Genetics at the University of Otago, wrote up some of his reflections on the issues related to workshop attendance. This spurred further discussion via email among the New Zealand instructors. We decided to put these thoughts together in hope that this could help other sites struggling with the attendance problems.

SWC: First Impressions

Wed, 28 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

This post is a simple telling of the beginning of my experience with SWC and hopefully first of many encounters with SWC as a community as well as a learning experience. I attended a session a couple of months previously and was very impressed by my experience. I had a chat to the other attendees and found that their experience as complete beginners was as positive as someone who had some experience in python, git and shell as I did. I have always held a firm belief that digital literacy in research and education is both vital and sadly lacking, my own experience is entirely self taught throughout a university education, so it is no surprise that myself and my fellow attendees were drawn to the SWC workshop to fill that gap. SWC addressed the digital gap in research, and had me so hooked that I just had to stay involved. Over the next couple of months I looked for any opportunity; I incorporated just the python novice material into an independent workshop that I ran on Python for data pipelines, and now I have just instructed my first SWC session. The more involved I get the more I feel like SWC is something that I want to be involved in, because it addresses an important need in research, and because it does so in a way that is accessible and tailored by its community. I think my experience with SWC is not unique, and that hundreds of people around the globe have been in the same boat as I was. In fact I am sure it is not unique, as every contact I have seems to be with people as interested as I am.

I think I can - Self-Efficacy and the Carpentry Learner

Tue, 20 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

The Little Engine that Could had it absolutely right. Thinking you can is one of the best ways to succeed at a host of activities ranging from public speaking and bungee jumping to cooking a souffle and learning R. What the Little Engine didn’t know, however, is that this concept of “thinking I can” is actually a theory known as self-efficacy, and plays a major role in how we approach our goals.

Responding to your Learners

Fri, 09 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Picture for a moment one of your undergraduate university courses, or a recent meeting of your department’s research seminar. If your experience is typical, more likely than not the instructor or presenter came in with a prepared set of materials on a slide deck (or for the old-school, on projector overheads), talked at you for an hour, maybe asked if there were any questions, and then packed up and left. If this sounds familiar, you’ve probably had lots of experience with the standard lecture.

Teaching Library Carpentry to Librarians at UCSD

Wed, 17 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

I sort of knew what I was getting into. I’d done the excellent instructor training in February at UC Davis, which is a good thing, because I didn’t know the first thing about instruction. I didn’t know the first thing about organizing workshops, either, but I figured what the hell; my colleague and partner-in-crime Tim Dennis had reserved the big conference room in our library, which is really hard to get. If you’re in academia you know the first rule, which is never waste a reserved prime conference room. With lots of prompts and help from my colleague Tim Dennis, we put together a Library Carpentry workshop at UC San Diego.

Resources for Running Workshops

Mon, 08 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

A successful workshop is the result of coordinated effort among many different types of participants, including instructors, helpers, hosts, learners and staff. Software and Data Carpentry offer two types of workshops: Self-Organised and Centrally-Organised. These workshop types differ in terms of instructor training requirements, fee structures, and participant responsibilities, with local hosts and instructors at Self-Organised workshops taking on administrative responsibilities normally handled by Carpentry staff.

Resources for Running Workshops

Mon, 08 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

A successful Data Carpentry workshop is the result of coordinated effort among many different types of participants, including instructors, helpers, hosts, learners and Data Carpentry staff. Data Carpentry offers two types of workshops - Self-Organised and Centrally-Organised. These workshop types differ in terms of instructor training requirements, fee structures, and participant responsibilities - with local hosts and instructors at Self-Organised workshops taking on administrative responsibilities normally handled by Data Carpentry staff.

Library Carpentry in Toronto

Sat, 30 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

On July 28-29, a group of volunteers from the University of Toronto’s libraries ran a two-day workshop for thirty-five of their fellow librarians. People came from as far away as Sudbury, Ottawa, New York City, and even Oregon to spend two days learning about:

regular expressions,
XPath and XQuery,
OpenRefine,
programming in Python, and
scraping data off the web.

While there were inevitably some hiccups getting software installed on learners’ machines, everything ran pretty much on schedule, and the instructors got through most of the material they had planned to cover. What was particularly nice was the way the modules fit together: the Python lesson closed by showing people how to write programs using regular expressions, while the scraping lesson referred back to the XPath material.

Library Carpentry workshop at James Cook University, Townsville

Fri, 29 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

We held a two-day Library Carpentry workshop at James Cook University, Townsville on 14–15 July, 2016. The workshop was a first on several fronts - the first course run by Software Carpentry trainers Jay van Schyndel and Daniel Baird from the JCU eResearch Centre and the first Library Carpentry course run at JCU. Collin Storlie, the local QCIF eResearch Analyst, agreed to help out too.

How was the workshop proposed?

Software Carpentry at Curtin

Tue, 26 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

The first Software Carpentry workshop to be held at Curtin University (and the third so far in WA) started on Monday 18 July. We decided early to experiment with the timetable and spread the course over four half days. Monday was for the [Unix Shell](https://twitter.com/CurtinIC/status/754850455797190657), Tuesday and Wednesday for [Programming with Python](https://twitter.com/CurtinIC/status/755613286192721920) and Thursday for [Version Control with Git](https://twitter.com/CurtinIC/status/755959937574907904).

We offered 40 places, and it was already fully booked with a couple of weeks to go. Most participants were from Curtin University, but there were also some attendees from CSIRO and other places.

Genomics R Software Carpentry workshop at the University of Auckland, New Zealand

Mon, 25 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

A two day Software Carpentry workshop with R was held at the University of Auckland Winter Bootcamp on 11-12 July. After a brief battle with the projector in the room, Day 1 consisted of an eventful morning session on Unix Shell, the spontaneous explosion of a glass door, followed by an introduction to programing with R.

Survey on workshops for for-profit organizations

Mon, 25 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Data Carpentry’s vision is “building communities teaching universal data literacy”. All our activities are focused on working towards this vision.

One of our signature activities is running and teaching workshops. Except for two, we have so far run such workshops only for non-profit organizations - universities, non-government non-profits and government organizations. We have also been assessing the idea of running workshops for for-profit organizations. One goal would be to raise additional revenue to subsidize workshop fees at non-profit institutions and to support long-term sustainability for Data Carpentry. Another is to provide Data Carpentry training and perspectives to people conducting research in industry. We’re still evaluating this idea, and before making any long-term policy we wanted to run pilot workshops and survey the instructor community on their thoughts about workshops for for-profit organizations.

A Tale of Two Workshops

Fri, 22 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Brisbane and Toowoomba are 125 km apart in Queensland. Software Carpentry workshops were held in both cities a week apart (11-12 July and 18-19 July). I taught at both.

The Brisbane R workshop was held at The University of Queensland. This was a tie-in workshop for the annual UQ Winter School in Mathematical and Computational Biology. Attendees are generally very keen to learn as they want to emulate the amazing computational work they have seen demonstrated during the week by the stellar speaker line-up at the Winter School. We had no trouble filling a workshop with 40 places, and no-one left the workshop. It was one of the best workshops I have organised - the buzz in the room was palpable and the feedback was overwhemingly positive.

Software Carpentry workshop at the University of Auckland - Winter bootcamp, New Zealand

Wed, 20 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

A two day Software Carpentry Workshop wiht Python was held at the University of Auckland 11-12th July as part of Winter Bootcamp. For myself,it was the first time helping with Software Carpentry training. It was a great experience to assist as a collaborator, helping others resolving problems with software installation and hands-on exercises, but also learning from all the unexpected situations that could happen with different people around the room, with different laptops, configurations, and different sets of skills.

Software Carpentry workshop at the University of Otago, New Zealand

Mon, 04 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

A three day Software Carpentry workshop was held at the University of Otago from June 29 - July 1. The instructors for the course were Mik Black, Nick Burns, Murray Cadzow, David Eyers, Tanya Flynn and Tom Kelly, with Anthony Shaw and Riku Takei providing additional assistance as helpers. This was Tanya’s and Nick’s first time teaching at a SWC workshop, so it was great to add them to our Otago carpentry team.

Software Carpentry workshop at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand

Thu, 30 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

A two day Software Carpentry course was hosted at the University of Canterbury (UC) the 22nd and 23rd of June. The instructors, all of whom are from UC and are certified Software Carpentry instructors, were Paul Gardner (School of Biological Sciences), Richard Clare (QuakeCoRE), and Constantine Zakkaroff (Accounting & Information Systems). They were aided by three helpers: Christopher Thomson, Viktor Polak and Michael Gauland. Organising the event was greatly assisted by Sung Bae of the New Zealand eScience Institute (NeSI). NeSI also sponsored the refreshments for the coffee breaks during the workshop.

Three workshops in Brazil

Thu, 30 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

In Brazil, like in many other countries that we are starting to run workshops, there are many open questions that we need to answer such as

how do we advertize our workshops?
do we charge a registration fee? If yes, how much do we charge?
how do we create a local community after the workshop?
how do we get new partners after create a local community?

Thanks to the work of many instructors like Anelda van der Walt, Belinda Weaver, Bill Mills, Lex Nederbragt, Selene L. Fernandez-Valverde, and Tiffany Timbers we are getting some hypothesis to the questions above across the world. In terms of Brazil, the three workshops that we ran in May added more data to help answering the questions.

Teaching Library Carpentry

Wed, 22 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

## Teaching Library Carpentry

I ran a two-day ‘Library Carpentry’ workshop for librarians at The University of Queensland on 13-14 June. The class covered

jargon-busting and data structures
writing and using regular expressions
command line tools to find data in files
version control
OpenRefine for data cleanup

Eighteen people from six organisations attended, out of a pool of 26 who intially expressed interest. (In the small lab I was using, I only had room for 18.)

Workshop Satisfaction Survey

Wed, 22 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

## Calling all Software Carpentry workshop attendees!

I’d like 10 minutes of your time to complete a survey about the Software Carpentry workshop you attended.

Why should you bother?

The data will be useful for Software Carpentry in the future planning of workshops.

While individual Software Carpentry workshops are assessed at the time of delivery, no long term follow-up study has been done on the efficacy of the training delivered, nor of any impact the training might have had on attendees’ work practices, further skills acquisition, or subsequent career paths.

Software Carpentry and HPC class hits Palmerston North (New Zealand)

Thu, 16 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

On 7th and 8th June 2016 we gave a Software Carpentry training consisting of four blocks. We started with bash (presented by Markus, Landcare Research Hamilton), Python (Ben, Landcare Research Palmerston North), went on to git (Hannes, Massey University) and finally had a session around using High Performance Computing (HPC) as it is offered by the NeSI, the New Zealand eScience Infrastructure (Wolfgang, NIWA Wellington and NeSI). This last session is not one of the official SWC modules, but was taylor-made and rounded up the training very well, as it used the skills acquired during the preceding three sessions. It included hands-on training, working remotely on the NeSI Pan cluster in Auckland; all attendees managed to log on and submit jobs to the SLURM scheduler successfully.

This was a very successful workshop with almost 40 attendants, organised and presented by a mixed team of new and more experienced instructors. The participants were very responsive and there was a lot of learning happening for the attendees and for instructors. The feedback was mostly positive and the negative feedback was very constructive. An aspect mentioned by several participants was that the number of attendees was probably too large, possibly with respect to the venue size - something we have to consider in the future. The logistical support with refreshments, received from the Massey in the person of Colleen Blair, was behind the scenes, but timely and well prepared. So we had a hydrated group, and a lot of fun was had by all. The new friendships made will hopefully lead to more cooperation between colleagues. Hannes’ favourite critique was: “It is impossible to listen and type as well!” – Note to self :)

Workshop at Unicamp

Mon, 13 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

A Software Carpentry workshop took place at Unicamp (State University of Campinas, Brazil) on May 23rd and 24th. Raniere Costa was the host and lead instructor, while Felipe Bocca, Monique Oliveira, and I completed the instructor's team.

Day 1: Although we had issues with the first booked classroom due to the student’s strike against budget cuts in public university education, Renato Santos gave the Unix shell lesson without problems. To solve the complication with facilities, we found an available computational lab to continue the workshop with the help of professor Doctor Francisco de Assis Magalhães Gomes Neto, IMECC’s director. After lunch, Felipe Bocca taught some R and then Raniere Costa taught RMarkdown.

Darwin Data Carpentry at Charles Darwin University

Mon, 23 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

##First Data Carpentry workshop in Darwin Australia##

The COMBINE Data Carpentry R workshop at Charles Darwin University was filled with joy, enthusiastic attendees and extra degrees of warm.

This was a Self-Organised workshop led by COMBINE with help of local organisers mainly from the Menzies School of Health Research. After some emailing back and forth, three months before the workshop, we planned to have an R data carpentry workshop based on the answers of a custom-made survey (prepared by Steven). Then, two COMBINE instructors were called, so Westa and I volunteered for this workshop and started with preps. The workshop was capped for 30 people with a nominal fee to cover for catering ($50 AUD). People were well-disposed and a good sign was that 45 days before the workshop the registration reached its limits. Later on, there were 2 dropouts and we were able to add 2 people from the waiting list.

A Common Sense Review of a Software Carpentry Workshop

Wed, 18 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Re-posted with permission from the author's blog.

Rationale

This Fall, I am teaching graduate-level biostatistics. I have not had the good fortune of teaching many graduate-level offerings, and I am really excited to do so. A team of top-notch big data scientists are hosted at NCEAS. They have recently formed a really exciting collaborative-learning collective entitled ecodatascience. I was also aware of the mission of Software Carpentry but had not reviewed the materials. The ecodatascience collective recently hosted a carpentry workshop, and I attended. I am a parent and use common sense media as a tool to decide on appropriate content. As a tribute to that tool and the efforts of the ecodatascience instructors, here is a brief common sense review.

R Instructor Training

Tue, 17 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website Thanks to generous sponsorship from the R Consortium, Software Carpentry is running a two-day R instructor training class in Cambridge, UK, on September 19-20, 2016. If you are active in the R and/or Software and Data Carpentry communities, and wish to take part in this training, please fill in this application form. We will select applicants, and notify everyone who applied, by June 30, 2016; those who are selected will be responsible for their own travel and accommodation. If you have any questions, please mail training@software-carpentry.org.

Software Carpentry in Brisbane

Sat, 14 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Brisbane Software Carpentry sputtered into life some time in 2014 when scattered local supporters finally met and began to form a group. Having heard about the initiative via Twitter, I managed to contact Nathan Watson-Haigh who got me on to the Aus/NZ mailing list. Then I met Philipp Bayer (now in Perth) and we started planning our first workshop at The University of Queensland. PyCon Australia was coming up in Brisbane and we were able to get Damien Irving from Melbourne and Tim McNamara from New Zealand to teach for us as they were in town for that. So we ran our first ever Software Carpentry workshop with Python at UQ in July 2014.

Software Carpentry with R at Griffith University

Wed, 04 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

We had 27 people register to attend, with 22 attending the first day. We offered these workshops free of charge so we had been cautious about drop-out numbers.

I had 2 who had previously mentioned they were only coming to partial sessions and one dropped out the next day. We accepted everyone who registered and attempted the software install (our capacity was 30).

Installation Video Tutorials

Tue, 12 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

I recently created videos for installing the software needed for most Software Carpentry workshops. Links for these videos are now added to the lessons template for a workshop and listed below.

Windows:

Mac:

So far, we only have Windows and Mac videos. If anyone wants to make Linux versions, I’m happy to answer any questions. Or if you want to make the recordings and not the voiceover, I’m willing to narrate.

Hello, Spatio-temporal Data Carpentry

Mon, 28 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

By: Leah Wasser
NEON Supervising Scientist, Education & Public Engagement
@leahawasser

I am sitting here in my hotel room in Oslo, Norway, floating on a high from the past few days of Carpentry workshops. We taught the NEON / Data Carpentry spatio-temporal Carpentry lessons for the first time this week at the University of Oslo in Norway. These lessons are the result of unique a collaboration between the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) and Data Carpentry. I thought I’d take some time to share my experiences with creating and teaching the lessons, while letting the community know that this great new resource is available for both workshops and self-paced learning!

Software and Data Carpentry Instructor Training Comes to Africa

Fri, 18 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

by Anelda van der Walt

North-West University eResearch, UCT eResearch, and Talarify are excited to announce that a Software & Data Carpentry Instructor Training event will take place in Potchefstroom, North-West Province, South Africa from 17 - 20 April 2016.

The lead trainer will be Aleksandra Pawlik, a Data Carpentry Steering Committee member. She will be joined by several of the more experienced South African instructors who provide additional support working with the trainee instructors.

More of a Difference Than You Realize

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

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

We received this after an online instructor training workshop earlier this week, which reminded me that small differences for some people can be large ones for others:

Thanks for a great workshop the last two days… I wanted to share a separate positive comment that I should have included on the Etherpad: I’m profoundly/severely hard-of-hearing in both ears, and depend quite a bit on lip-reading when listening to people. As such, I have great difficulty with online material if the audio is bad, the speaker is not well lit, or the speaker is simply not on video.

Starting off Data Carpentry in 2016

Mon, 25 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

In 2015 we were just starting out as an organization and ran limited workshops as we were working to scale. With many Software Carpentry instructors now certified as Data Carpentry instructors, our Program Coordinator, Maneesha Sane, coordinating workshops, a new website and an instructor database, in 2016 we’re set to do a lot more!

The website was a bit behind our 2016 activities, so we’d like to highlight some workshops that have happened already.

A Year Of Software Carpentry in South Africa

Wed, 06 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

After the [Software Carpentry workshop]({{site.baseurl}}/blog/2014/12/cape-town-swc.html) ran jointly with the [eResearch Africa conference](http://www.eresearch.ac.za/eresearch-africa-2014)in November 2014, we were looking for opportunities to run more workshops in South Africa in 2015. In May we ran our [first remotely instructed workshop]({{site.baseurl}}/blog/2015/06/remote-workshop-cape-town.html) (with thanks to [Laurent Gatto](https://twitter.com/lgatt0) and Software Carpentry for the remote option) focusing only on R to counter possible time loss due to technical glitches. Then it was onto [remote instructor training]({{site.baseurl}}/blog/2015/05/online-instructor-training.html) together with two groups on other continents (one in the USA and another in the UK) in June. Six new instructors were trained, four of them having gone on to teach one or more subsequent workshops. In July we joined forces with [UCT eResearch](http://www.eresearch.uct.ac.za/) to host a [third local workshop](http://www.eresearch.uct.ac.za/news/software-carpentry-powerful-initiative), joined by an experienced SWC instructor, [Matt Lammens](https://mlammens.github.io/) from the US, who happened to be visiting. Another workshop was offered in conjunction with the [SAEON Graduate Student Network Indibano](http://www.saeon.ac.za/enewsletter/archives/2015/october2015/doc11) in September. The next one was co-organised by [Adrianna Pińska]({{site.baseurl}}/blog/2015/10/jozihub-workshop.html) from the Cape Python User Group in October in Johannesburg. In November 2015 we ran the sixth Software Carpentry workshop in 12 months at [North-West University](http://www.nwu.ac.za/).

In all, six new instructors were trained, approximately 28 helpers recruited, and more than 200 learners from over 18 local organisations have participated in the 6 workshops between November 2014 and November 2015. There have been a number successes, but of course also some large, and small, bumps in the road.

Software and Data Carpentry Workshop in Stockholm

Wed, 09 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

On April 14, three Software Carpentry Instructors from Stockholm, Radovan Bast, Olav Vahtras and myself got an email from Greg Wilson:

Subject: Any interest in putting together a workshop for Stockholm this summer?

Workshop in Brussels, 2-3 Nov 2015

Wed, 25 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Belgium has a flourishing biological research community and skills in data handling have become an essential tool for anyone conducting biodiversity science. The workshop was jointly organised by the VIB and the Botanic Garden Meise as part of a series of “Empowering Biodiversity workshops” supported by the Belgian Science Policy Office.

The thirty-five attendees of the workshop came from a wide variety of backgrounds in biology, including marine biology, bioinformatic, plant biology and ecology. They were also at many different points in their career, some were students wanting to gain experience, while others were established scientists looking to learn new tricks. Nevertheless, this diversity was not a problem for the workshop as everyone came with enthusiasm and an interest in improving their knowledge. We were instructed by Leszek Tarkowski and Frederik Coppens with support from Dima Fishman and Christof De Bo.

Data Carpentry in Africa

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

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

by Matt Collins at iDigBio x Data Carpentry conducted its first workshop on the African continent in September! As part of the pre-conference training week held before the Taxonomic Databases Working Group’s (TDWG) annual conference, Deb Paul, Matthew Collins, Libby Ellwood and Kevin Love put on a two day Data Carpentry workshop at the Multimedia University of Kenya. We taught the ecology lessons (spreadsheets, OpenRefine, R, but no SQL) to participants from 12 African countries. The participants were all graduate students and young researchers whose travel and participation in both the training week and the TDWG conference were paid for by the JRS Biodiversity Foundation. This was a significant investment on their part to build capacity for biodiversity informatics in Africa and we were excited to have Data Carpentry be a part of the effort.

Feedback from a Software Carpentry workshop at PyConZA 2015 in Johannesburg

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

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

On the 3rd and 4th of October we ran a Software Carpentry workshop associated with PyConZA 2015, a conference for Python developers in South Africa. The workshop ran concurrently with the post-conference sprints, in a neighbouring room in the same venue.

Because we expected little overlap between the attendees of the conference (who are mostly existing Python programmers) and the target audience of the workshop, we organized the workshop as a separate event with separate tickets.

A Workshop in Brisbane

Wed, 07 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

A sea of green stickies: that really sums up the 28-29 September Brisbane Software Carpentry bootcamp—it ran extremely smoothly. We had 40 people signed up (with a waitlist of six) but lost one at the last minute to acute appendicitis—ouch—and another to project deadlines. The remaining 38 comprised post docs (7), Master's candidates (2), PhD candidates (19), research technical support (4), and four people from industry (one from an NGO and three from a virtual lab). We also had one undergrad (a first for us) and one very bright high school student.

Workshop at the University of Arizona

Sun, 13 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Software Carpentry Workshop

Who: Practicing and aspiring research scientists

When: October 3 and 4, 2015 (9am - 5 pm on both days)

Where: UA Integrated Learning Center

How: Register at http://iplantsc.eventbrite.com

Reporting on a Commercial Workshop

Wed, 09 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

On August 22, Marty McGuire (@schmarty) and I (@joshua_r_smith) taught a for-profit workshop based on Software Carpentry materials, particularly the novice Python lesson. This post is a debrief of that workshop.

Teaching in Bali

Fri, 14 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

On July 2015, I was fortunate to receive an invitation to the first international workshop of the Diversity of the Indo-Pacific Network (DIPnet), which explains the "Bali" part, in order to teach R and the Unix command line during the first two days. The weeklong workshop was co-hosted by the Hawai'i Institute of Marine Biology and Indonesia Biodiversity Research Center (IBRC), and lead by Dr. Eric Crandall from CSU Monterey Bay. The theme of the workshop was "Molecular Ecology and Bioinformatics in Developing Countries", which featured lectures and labs developed by the invited participants in their area of expertise. For this, a two-day software carpentry workshop was very much needed to begin the week and prepare all participants for the computational sessions coming up in the week.

A Workshop for Undergraduates at UC Berkeley

Thu, 06 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

We ran a workshop for undergraduates at UC Berkeley on July 9-10, 2015. This was a quickly planned workshop from concept to completion (~19 days). I was excited to run a workshop geared towards undergraduates, especially those involved in research projects in the summertime.

SciPy 2015 Workshop Videos

Wed, 29 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Software Carpentry was pleased to present a full two-day workshop during the recent SciPy Conference tutorials. The entire conference was recorded, including all sessions of our workshop:

The course materials are accessible via the workshop webpage and GitHub repo.

The course would not have been possible without the help of several Software Carpentry members: Azalee Bostroem, Matt Davis, Jess Hamrick, Ted Hart, Katy Huff, Thomas Kluyver, Jens Nielsen, April Wright, and Elizabeth Seiver. Many thanks to these talented folks and to the SciPy organizers for inviting us!

WiSE Workshop at UC Davis Aug 17-18

Thu, 23 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

We are pleased to announce that the latest in our series of workshops for women in science and engineering will be held at UC Davis on August 17-18, 2015. This workshop is aimed at those in science, engineering, medicine, or related fields who identify as women, female, or on the non-binary spectrum. Our instructors are experienced with creating safe spaces for those on the trans* spectrum, and one openly identifies as a trans woman; ensuring that we maintain an inclusive environment is a top priority for this workshop. For more information, or to register, please see the workshop website.

Changes to Workshop Administration Fees

Mon, 20 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

After discussion with our Advisory Council and Data Carpentry, we have agreed to make some changes to the administration fee we charge for workshops that we help organize in order to reflect the real cost of our staff's time and our overheads, and to reflect the value of the training. Please see the workshop request page for the updated pricing information.

Data Carpentry Workshop Fees

Mon, 20 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

After discussion with our Steering Committee and the Software Carpentry Foundation, we have decided to increase our workshop coordination fee in order to better reflect the real cost of our staff’s time, our overheads and the value of the training. This is part of our broader efforts to make sure that Data Carpentry provides the best training possible and is sustainable long into the future.

Data Carpentry Goes to the Netherlands

Wed, 01 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Last week, between 22nd and 25th June, we ran a Data Carpentry hackathon and workshop at the University of Utrecht, Netherlands. Both events were a part of ELIXIR Pilot Project aiming to develop Data and Software Carpentry training across the ELIXIR Nodes. The project is coordinated by ELIXIR UK and a number of other Nodes are partnering up, including ELIXIR Netherlands, ELIXIR Finland and ELIXIR Switzerland.

Workshop at CERN

Thu, 25 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

At the beginning of June Rémi Emonet, Kwasi Kwakwa, and Chelsea Chisholm ran a workshop at CERN. Rémi has just posted a review. It went well, and there are a lot of good ideas in his write-up—from using a whiteboard for diagrams to the IPython Notebook's successor (Jupyter) and some semi-improvised intermediate material.

Another Good Workshop in Brazil

Tue, 23 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

The indefatigable Raniere Silva has just posted a description of a workshop at the University of Ceará that he and Dani Ushizima just finished teaching. It went well, and there are a lot of good ideas in his write-up — please check it out.

Running a Remote Workshop in South Africa

Sat, 13 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Last month we ran a workshop at Stellenbosch University in South Africa. The workshop instructors were Laurent Gatto (from the UK - coming in as remote instructor), and two local instructors - David Merand and Anelda van der Walt. We had four helpers in the room and 32 participants.

Teaching at NIH

Thu, 11 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Reposted from Fan's blog.

I just finished my two day software carpentry workshop held at National Cancer Institute (NCI), Rockville, MD. The course went for 2 days, from June 9th to June 10th and taught by Jonathan Guyer, Adina Howe, and I. I was in charge of the unix shell and version control (git) sessions (Also many thanks to Dilip Banerjee, Lynn Young for the help!). Personally, I think the course went really well but there are definitely things I could adjust and improve in the future. Below is the run downs.

A Remote Workshop at the University of Campinas

Sun, 07 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Raniere Silva has posted a summary of a workshop at the University of Campinas at which Jennifer Shelton, Maneesha Sane, and Natalie Robinson taught over the web. 23 learners from 3 countries enjoyed lessons and pizza, and we learned a few more things about how to teach remotely.

Software Carpentry at SciPy 2015

Fri, 05 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

This year at SciPy 2015 Software Carpentry is excited to be running a full two-day workshop during the tutorials that precede the main conference. We'll be covering our standard topics of shell, introductory Python, and version control with Git. We'll also be teaching a unit introducing the basic libraries of scientific Python. Attendees need not have any experience with the topics we cover.

We have our usual goals of helping scientists do more in less time with less pain, but at SciPy we also have a bonus goal of easing Python novices into the conference. A technical conference can present a steep learning curve to people unfamiliar with the field and we hope that a Software Carpentry workshop beforehand will give attendees a boost before wading into the conference deluge by exposing them to basic Python concepts and fundamental scientific Python libraries.

There is still plenty of room in the Software Carpentry tutorial, so if this seems useful to you please register with SciPy. And if you know anyone who would benefit from a workshop and would be interested in the conference please share this with them. Hope to see you in Austin!

Workshop at OU Libraries

Mon, 01 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

During 19-20 May 2015, I taught a Software Carpentry workshop at the University of Oklahoma (OU) at their fantastic Bizzell Memorial Libary with Jonah Duckles, Logan Cox, and Jeremiah Lant. Jonah and I taught in one room, and Logan and Jeremiah in the other (about 30 students in each room). Tuesday morning was the Shell with Jonah, Tuesday PM and Wednesday AM was Python with me (except the command line section which Jonah covered), and Wednesday PM was git with Jonah. This was my first time teaching the workshop so I decided to write up my observations and student feedback.

AAS Reflections

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

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

We just finished^* a workshop at the American Astronomical Society. I was lucky to recruit 3 instructors (in addition to myself) - Matt Davis, Erik Bray, and Phil Rosenfield. We also had Pauline Barmby volunteer as a helper (and on the fly instructor). While I wrote this blog post, you will see comments inserted by the instructors.

Reflections Following a Women in Science Workshop

Sun, 12 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

The number of women pursuing careers in STEM fields has increased over the last few decades, yet, there are still major gender gaps in the areas of mathematics, computer science, engineering and physics (Hill, Corbettt and St Rose, 2010). In the US, women make up close to 50% of the work force yet the percentage of STEM jobs occupied by women is only 25% (Beede, Julian, Langdon, McKittrick, Khan, and Doms, 2011). Part of this gap may be linked to biases and stereotypes that suggest "boys are better than girls" at math. These stereotypes can affect a girl's performance on tests and her perceived skill at math, ultimately influencing her decision to pursue a career and education in fields that require a foundation in mathematics and computing (Shapiro and Williams, 2011; Gunderson, Ramirez, Levine, and Beilock, 2012).

How does this relate to Software Carpentry? Software Carpentry's mission is "to teach researchers basic lab skills for scientific computing." Given that female participants may experience an added anxiety related to gender biases when learning computing skills, Software Carpentry instructors should be aware of these stereotypes and how they might affect their learners. Further, workshops with at least one female instructor can counteract these stereotypes by showing that women are skillful in computing tasks.

But how much intervention is necessary and could extra support for women actually be a detriment? Following a Data and Software Carpentry workshop for Women in Science at the University of British Columbia, we have thought about the advantages and disadvantages of holding a workshop for women only. We have posed the following question:

"Is a women-only Software Carpentry workshop helpful or harmful for increasing the number of women in STEM?" A few points in each category are given below.

Workshops for Companies

Thu, 09 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

At our March 12, 2015 meeting, the Software Carpentry Foundation Steering Committee discussed whether and under what terms to provide workshops to for-profit corporations. There were no objections to the idea of doing workshops for corporations, but it is something new to Software Carpentry. We've decided to run a pilot program encompassing five corporate workshops so we can learn more about working with corporations. The pilot program will allow us to gauge corporate interest and collect feedback from instructors, coordinators, and others about how things go.

Teaching in Yangon

Wed, 25 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

On Sat 7 March I spent a full day teaching a Software Carpentry workshop at the University of Yangon with 23 archaeologists from the Department of Archaeology. The workshop is part of a training component of an archaeological research project funded by the Australian Research Council, the University of Washington and the University of Wollongong. The group included graduate students, tutors and lecturers. Archaeology in Myanmar has a strong art history flavour, partly due to its British colonial heritage (where archaeology and art history are often paired, compared to the where US archaeology is usually a sub-field of anthropology) but mostly due to the country's extreme isolation from the rest of the world, where archaeology has taken a scientific turn in recent decades. This isolation takes several forms: travel restrictions that make it difficult for locals to travel overseas, and until recently, for foreigners to visit; small library budgets that make it difficult for university libraries to keep their collections and subscriptions current; and slow and unreliable internet connectivity make browsing the web, watching videos, and downloading files a lengthy, uncertain and frustrating process. All of this meant that the group's familiarity with using computers for research was lower than what might be expected from a Western audience, and so we adapted the SWC materials to accommodate this. We knew we wouldn't get through as much as a typical workshop, but we had the advantage of everyone starting at an equivalent skill level, so the sticky notes all went up and down at much the same time and we had a pleasant and relaxed atmosphere.

Workshop in Krakow

Wed, 04 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Last weekend we (Paulina Lach and Piotr Banaszkiewicz, both from AGH; Klemens Noga from Cyfronet and myself from Cztery Bity organized a workshop in Kraków. We decided to do itourselves, as a group of certified Software Carpentry instructors, which was simply a faster and more effective solution than finding an institution which would act as a host. However, we received significant support from a few organisations. The PhD Students' Association at the Jagiellonian University offerred the venue. Thanks to the support provided by ACC Cyfronet AGH and Cztery Bity we were able to offer small catering. We were also supported by great helpers: Iwona Grelowska, Jakub Kruczek and Tomasz Jonak, all from AGH and Marcin Klimek, from Cztery Bity.

The First Software Carpentry in Korea

Mon, 02 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Last week, xwMOOC xwMOOC ran the first Software Carpentry workshop in Seoul. The workshop delivered not only an introduction to Unix Shell, Git and GitHub, Python and SQL but also computer science unplugged, rur-ple, python for informatics and cloud basics. Listening to attendees feedback, attendees concerns such as software business, all about what start-ups should know, how software business environment looks like and so on are provided during three days workshops.

Software Carpentry Set to Explode in Australia and New Zealand

Sat, 21 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Given the global success of Software Carpentry (10,000 learners and counting), it's easy to forget that the first two-day workshops were held only three short years ago. Excited by the potential of the project in those early days, Josh Madin (Macquarie University) and myself (University of Melbourne) pooled our funds and got Greg Wilson out to Australia to run the first ever workshops outside of Europe and North America. Since those initial Sydney and Melbourne workshops in February 2013, an additional 15 have been held around Australia and New Zealand and there are a dozen or so active local instructors.

Workshop at the University at Albany, SUNY

Mon, 16 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

We recently ran a workshop hosted by the University at Albany, SUNY's Department of Informatics. The workshop ran on the weekend of January 31 and February 1, 2015 with the following schedule:

Day 1 AM:	Automating tasks with the Unix shell (instructor: Thomas Guignard)
Day 1 PM:	Building programs with Python (instructor: Jeramia Ory)
Day 2 AM:	Version Control with Git (Jeramia)
Day 2 PM:	Managing data with SQL (Thomas)

Workshop in Illinois

Tue, 03 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Last week (29-30 January), Matthew Turk (NCSA), Ivan Gonzalez (Martinos Center), David LeBauer (UIUC, and a new SWC instructor), and I (Neal Davis, CSE, UIUC) taught a SWC workshop co-sponsored by NCSA and CSE. We introduced two innovations into the workshop model different what that used in prior events I've participated in:

Our First Workshop in South Korea

Mon, 02 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

We are very pleased to announce that our first workshop in South Korea will be taking place in Seoul later this month. Many thanks to Kwangchun (Victor) Lee for organizing and teaching, and to the Korea Radio Promotion Association for hosting.

Workshops in March at Lawrence Berkeley Lab

Mon, 02 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

I will be teaching a two-day Software Carpentry instructor training course on March 10-11, 2015 at Lawrence Berkeley Lab, and a one-day course on web programming on March 13, 2015. Details are given below; the instructor training is open to LBL staff and to graduate students and staff associated with the Berkeley Institute for Data Science, while the web programming class is reserved for LBL staff alone.

Workshops in Oxford

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

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

The Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics at the University of Oxford hosted its first Software Carpentry workshop on 13th and 14th January. Instructor and co-organizer Philip Fowler has blogged about it, and included both photographs and some bubble charts of the feedback he received.

Separately, James Allen has blogged about the first and second days of a separate workshop that he ran at Oxford for people in atmostpheric, oceanic, and planetary physics. This was James' first time teaching for us, and his summary of things that he thinks could be improved includes some ideas that we'll fold back into the main notes.

Feedback from Workshop at UFSC

Tue, 20 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Last December we ran another R-based SWC workshop at University of Santa Catarina (Florianòpolis, SC, Brazil). The primary target audience encompassed grad students from the Biology Faculty who had some experience in programming and R. Raniere Silva (an undergrad in Applied Maths at UNICAMP, Campinas, SP, Brazil) co-taught the workshop with me and the Ecology grad students Renato Morais Araùjo and Juliano Bogoni (Department of Ecology and Zoology) acted as our hosts and in situ organizers.

Feedback from the MSc Clinical Bioninformatics Workshop

Sat, 13 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Early in November we put on Software Carpentry for the students of the MSc course in Clinical Bioinformatics run by the University of Manchester, UK and the British National Health Service (NHS). The course combines academic curriculum with work-based programme. The students (who already are qualified professionals) are based at various clinical units in the UK and meet only a few times to attend short intense training sessions. The instructors at the Software Carpentry workshop were Aleksandra Nenadic, who taught for the first time, and myself; we were helped by Mike Cornell and Andy Brass.

Feedback from WiSE in Krakow

Sat, 13 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

A week ago Krakow in Poland hosted the Software Carpentry workshop for Women in Science and Engineering. The registration filled up within 72 hours which clearly shows the need for such events.

Software Carpentry Returns to Edinburgh

Mon, 08 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Last week, EPCC's ARCHER training team ran another Software Carpentry workshop here in Edinburgh, on 3rd and 4th of December. The workshop provided attendees with an introduction to version control and Git, building programs with Python, automating tasks with Make, and how (and how much) to test programs. These were set within the context of best practices for scientific computing.

Google to Support WiSE Poland

Fri, 05 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

We are happy to announce that Google will support the Software Carpentry workshop for Women in Science and Engineering which will take place this weekend in Krakow! We are grateful for their support, and look forward to the event; to which registration filled up within 72 hours!

New Accessibility Guidelines

Fri, 05 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Software Carpentry values the participation of every member of the scientific community and want all attendees to have an enjoyable and fulfilling experience. Thanks to Pauline Barmby, we now have an accessibility checklist for instructors and workshop hosts. Please have a look and send us fixes and suggestions for improvements.

Cape Town South Africa Workshop

Thu, 04 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Last week we ran the biggest software carpentry workshop in South Africa to date. We had more than 80 participants in two rooms, each using the novice Python material. Pre-workshop assessment surveys showed that we'd have a mostly novice crew, but with a few outliers on the upper end. We accepted slightly higher than 80 enrollment cap and encouraged those with more advanced skills to evaluate their interest in becoming SWC workshop instructors themselves and help us out as helpers.

Announcing WiSE Krakow!

Sun, 23 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

After running several Software Carpentry workshops for women in science and engineering in North America, we are moving east: on 6th and 7th December we will run a WiSE workshop in Krakow, Poland.

Like previous WiSE workshops, this one is open to women at all stages of their research careers, from graduate students, post-docs, and faculty to staff scientists at hospitals and in the public, private, and non-profit sectors. The instructors at the workshop will be Paulina Lach of Krakow's University of Science and Technology AGH and Aleksandra Pawlik, the Software Sustainability Institute's Training Leader. The helpers are Agnieszka Celińska (Pedagogical University of Krakow), Iwona Grelowska (University of Science and Technology AGH), Patrycja Radaczyńska (Creativestyle), and Anna Ślimak (Lunar Logic).

Workshop Summary: Gerstein Science Information Centre, University of Toronto

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

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Last week we ran a Python-based SWC workshop at the University of Toronto's Gerstein Science Information Centre. The advertised audience was graduate students, post-docs and other researchers in science, engineering and medicine at the University of Toronto.

The workshop had about 20 learners. Most were grad students or postdocs in life sciences. The pre-workshop assessment said that about three-quarters of learners had some programming experience with about half of those having some Python; maybe half of the total had some familiarity with the command line. Almost none had experience with version control or SQL. The instructors were Pauline Barmby, Greg Wilson, and Thomas Guignard; helpers were Sahar Rahmani, Luke Johnston, Daiva Nielsen, Tom Wright, and Fei Xu. Our host was Erica Lenton.

Workshop at GeoSim (Potsdam)

Tue, 11 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

I had never taught a Software Carpentry workshop before (though I have taught an Advanced Scientific Programming in Python many times), so when the hosts for this one asked if I would be willing to do a full-week workshop, I said they were crazy ;) They convinced me to do it, but I said in that case I could only do that if I can recycle the materials I use for our summer school. They agreed, and I managed to convince a buddy in Berlin to help me with tutoring.

Workshop at the University of Virginia

Tue, 11 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

We pulled off our day-long data analysis bootcamp with hardly a hiccup yesterday. The schedule looked something like this:

AM pt 1:	intro to AWS & intro to Unix Shell
AM pt 2:	data analysis in Unix: alignment, quantitation of RNA-seq data
PM pt 1:	intro to R
PM pt 2:	data analysis in R: QC, differential expression, etc.

An R Workshop at the University of Sydney

Tue, 04 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Last week we ran an R-based SWC bootcamp at University of Sydney. The primary target audience encompassed grad students from the Department of Psychology who had little to no experience in programming. While some had previous limited experience with programming languages (e.g. MATLAB or R), most of them had been exposed only to statistical software such as SPSS.

Num Wrongs Plus Plus

Fri, 17 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

I was teaching Git to a room of roughly 25 students on day 2 of a Software Carpentry workshop and we ran into a problem that feels like a case study on the reason it's hard to move science to safer practices.

ARCHER Software Carpentry workshop at The University of Edinburgh

Tue, 07 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

ARCHER, the UK's national supercomputing service, offers training in software development and high-performance computing to scientists and researchers across the UK. As part of our training service we are running a 2 day Software Carpentry workshop at EPCC, The University of Edinburgh, UK, on 3-4 December.

Wrapping Up in Melbourne

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Two long but useful days at Melbourne Uni have just wound down, and five dozen meteorologists and climate scientists have given us feedback on a well-run bootcamp:

Good

Bad

splitting big problems into small pieces
SQLite is easy
functions instead of loops
Python was easy
naming functions after pets
hands-on application at the same time as instructor
morning tea
dictionaries
explaining why, rather than just what
swapping variables
using our own computers
copy/paste onto Etherpad
arrays in NumPy
sticky notes
a bit of motivational speaking
location (I'm not from Melbourne, eh)
Subversion FTW!
Git + BitBucket
Python Notebook
hey, there's useful stuff online
helpers
red/green/refactor
really practical exampels of test-driven development
Greg tells stories
lot of participation
talk to other people during the breaks
regular expressions
cheap!
seeing how programmers think
realizing how much room for growth I have
scared in the first ten minutes...
the material is free
peer instruction

WiFi
didn't do any meteorological data sets
the jokes
viewing angle
installing stuff
couldn't use some advanced stuff (I'm a beginner)
coffee
running right after conference
squeezing four half days into two full days (maybe try 3?)
not enough exercises
not long enough
content could have been more focused
didn't do NetCDF files
a bit of motivational speaking
didn't see comparison of Python with R
lot of spread of material/ability
longer breaks (I'm so tired)
databases irrelevant to me
IPython/NumPy confusing
wasn't in New Zealand
not enough time on version control
wasn't in Fiji
hated SQL
Greg speaks waaaaaaaaay too fast
learned a lot about Vi
hopping
pretty intense, dude
took a long time to restart after breaks
more on plotting
lighting in the room is uneven
more about linking Python to other things
...after first ten minutes, it was OK

More News from the UK

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Two pieces of news from the UK:

The folks at Queen Mary, University of London just ran a two-day bootcamp for students in Media and Arts Technology, and will be running another such event soon.
Mike Jackson at the Software Sustainability Institute has posted some quick alternatives to bootcamps. If you'd like help with or advice on these, please get in touch.

Registration for Amsterdam Bootcamp is Open

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Registration is now open for the upcoming bootcamp for physicists at VU University in Amsterdam.

UBC Went Well

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Ted Hart and Ethan White just wrapped up a bootcamp at the University of British Columbia, and by all accounts it went very well:

Good

Bad

learn terminal
explanations are clear
SQLite is awesome
learn some Python
following along on screen
enthusiasm
content was relevant
practical software
SQLite is very helpful in data management
Etherpad
SQLite
SQLite: could use it tomorrow
like lots of problems with partners
iPython & SQLite
liked different levels as beginner so could get help
Etherpad ++ for collaborative note taking
current & up to date
Git
helpers and red light green light
pace was good
great intro to lots of methods (handled volume of info well)
free and open source software
good overview of things to improve workflow
collaborative notetaking and chating and small problems
Git from the command line (Linux guy)
Git & SQL, can use and share now
hands on problems well balanced with learning
good job balancing info and level variation

better examples of why Python is cool
disecting existing code
want to be inspired by an example of something cool
but not far enough to implement (longer)
cool projects
cheat sheets
brief one line explanation of everything before class & tailored workshops to specific disciplines
too hard to keep up
installation is much more difficult than R
fewer things so that we can actually use it
new to programming more exercises
not as clear how to use shell so less useful
shell: examples of why we should care, e.g., working across files
need to know more about iPython
lot of information, too much at times (fun stuff was at end)
didn't get to interconnecting the pieces (collaborative Git project) [group repo to play with]
group by OS or other similar interests
would have like to use Git from terminal
where are things coming from and going to
iPython notebook disconnected from scripting workflow
wanted SQL to R/Python (would have come back for another)
more time to integrate everything
why Python: spend a few minutes explaining why we chose it and what the alternatives are
expected it to be more advanced and focused on integration (more info)
"here's what you're going to learn" at beginning
not far enough in Python to know where to go next
some of the one and one help would have been good to share with the group
more difficult problems more collaboratively

Macquarie Went Well

Fri, 08 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Last week's bootcamp at Macquarie University went well: I fumbled the introduction to Python on Friday morning (which I haven't done in a long time), but with a bit of help from Eli Bressert and great crew of helpers, we got the afternoon back on track. Here's the usual good vs. bad feedback:

Good

Bad

Understanding the syntax of Python
The stories
The flow of material
Cygwin
Linking programming to thinking
Understanding size of manageable tasks
Version control
Sticky notes
Embedding provenance in files
Database concepts
Learning good work habits
Coding with loops
Free!
Let people make mistakes and then correcting
Interactive nature of the learning experience
I got to show my work to real human beings!

Installation
The stories
Python introduction (Greg screwed up)
Some programs don't work on some people's computers
Air conditioning
Struggling to switch between languages
Bit more practice with coding
Python in Cygwin sucks
"You should only work eight hours a day" — yeah, right
Not enough on databases
Couldn't see the screen
Discovering R isn't as good as I thought it was
Not having enough examples

A Short Report from Tuebingen

Sun, 03 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Luis Figueira has posted a short summary of last week's bootcamp at the Max Planck Institute in Tuebingen, Germany. Judging by the number of people who have contacted us since to ask about volunteering at the next one, it appears to have gone very well.

A Bootcamp at Mozilla

Wed, 30 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

We ran a two-day bootcamp at Mozilla's office in Toronto last week for people from local research hospitals. It seemed to go well: only 28 of the 37 who'd registered showed up, but with a couple of exceptions because of scheduling conflicts, everyone who showed up on day 1 came back on day 2. Many thanks to Dhavide Aruliah, Yele Bonilla, Mike Conley, Gabriel Devenyi, Fan Dong, and Blake Winton for helping out.

Teaching R at UBC

Wed, 30 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

This January we ran a second R-based bootcamp at the University of British Columbia over three days. It was taught by myself, Rick White, Bernhard Konrad, Davor Cubric and Jenny Bryan. The first day was a week before the last two days, and covered a basic introduction to R. The last two days was an advanced R workshop / Software Carpentry. We covered the following topics:

University of Chicago in January

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

This last Saturday and Sunday, Katy Huff and I had the pleasure of organizing a Software Carpentry workshop at the University of Chicago. We had 77 people attend in total and by the end of the day on Sunday we remained 45+ strong. (Frankly, who doesn't want to listen to me rant about documentation at 4 pm on a Sunday afternoon?!) This weekend was unique in that we had a host of first time instructors:

Montreal in January

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

This weekend was the first time I had instructed at a SWC bootcamp, and I'd only observed one other (Greg Wilson in Halifax in July 2012). By the new standards for instructors Greg's trying to put in place I would probably not even qualify, but hey, we're in a growth phase right now; we take a few chances, eh? I felt my inexperience acutely, but despite that I think I can say that the bootcamp went well, thanks to a great group of attendees and helpers and my co-instructor, Jessica McKellar. The site organizers were Alex Demarsh and Rolina van Gaalen, and the other helpers were Greg Ward, Julia Evans and Jonathan Villemaire-Krajden.

The Art of Cold Calling

Sat, 05 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

An updated version of this post is now available.

A few people have asked how we go about approaching potential workshop hosts. The short answer is, however we can; the longer answer is, we collect names any way we can—from journal articles, watching who follows us on Twitter, just bumping into people—and send emails like the one below to people who are publishing there. A few things to note:

New Year's Schedule for Software Carpentry

Tue, 27 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

I'm teaching a cut-down version of Software Carpentry at the IASSE in two and a half weeks. I'll have students half days for the weeks of January 16 and 23, and full days for the week of February 6. That's only 20 lectures (rather than 26), so the question is, what to cut? The answer has wider implications, since this will be the version of the course I take to the AAAS workshop.

Executive Version of Software Carpentry Course

Thu, 08 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

I'll be teaching a shortened version of the Software Carpentry course at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Software Engineering in Toronto early next year. For more information, or if you are interested in taking part, please see the IASSE's web site. The dates are:

January 16-20: one lecture per day, plus practical, with a quiz on Friday.
January 23-27: ditto.
February 6-10: two lectures and practical per day, with a short final exam on Friday afternoon.

I've got a lot to do between now and then...

Workshop at AAAS '06

Fri, 04 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

As I've mentioned before, I'm running a workshop on "Essential Software Skills for Research Scientists" at the Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on Friday, February 17, in St Louis. I'm hoping to use the workshop to convince scientists, administrators, and policy makers that the things covered in the Software Carpentry course are essential to good science. If you know someone who ought to attend, please let them know, or pass them my contact information.

Software Carpentry at the AAAS

Wed, 21 Sep 2005 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

I just received word that I'll be running a workshop on the aims, benefits, and curriculum of the Software Carpentry course at the Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in St Louis on Friday, February 17. The AAAS AM is the biggest gathering of scientists in the world; I'm pretty excited.

Meanwhile, Michael Hoffman is teaching a short course on Python at the European Bioinformatics Institute in Cambridge, England, based on the course notes. 24 people are now enrolled in the course at the University of Toronto, 47 are auditing locally, and 21 others are sitting in from other locations. (These number don't include the students enrolled in the course at Indiana University, or the study group at CalTech.) Oh, and 38 students have already submitted Exercise 1, even though it isn't due until 5:00 Friday ;-).

Day 9

Tue, 20 Sep 2005 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Week two of Software Carpentry, and things are starting to settle down. There are now 93 (!) people signed up for the course:

	U of T	Elsewhere
Auditing	18	21
Enrolled	25
Unknown	29

Of those actually at the University of Toronto (as opposed to the
local hospitals—a few radiologists are sitting in) the breakdown
is:

16	Computer Science
14	Physics
9	Civil Engineering
	Mechanical and Industrial Engineering
5	Biochemistry
	Institute for Aerospace Studies
2	Institute of Medical Science
	Mathematics
1	Astronomy
	Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering
	Botany
	Geology
	Medical Biophysics
	Zoology
	Non-degree student

This week's lecture went much more smoothly than last week's, in part because we were in a larger room, with seating for everyone, and in part because the content was an introduction to Python, which I've given more times than I can count. There were still some glitches in the slides, though: a few things were out of order, and I really do need to choose more concrete examples. 33 students have completed the first exercise, which is already more than I'd expected—I'm feeling uncharacteristically optimistic right now ;-)

Software Carpentry: First Meeting

Wed, 14 Sep 2005 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

The Toronto edition of the Software Carpentry course met for the first time on Monday. 51 people crammed into a room with seating for 34 (and no air conditioning, on an unseasonably warm day): medical biophysicists, computer scientists, civil engineers, and even a couple of faculty members.

I was pleased with the turnout, but less pleased with my lectures. I don't think my introduction to the shell made sense to anyone who didn't already know the content—it was far too long, and as Andy Lumsdaine (who's teaching from these same notes at Indiana) said, this stuff really does need to be interactive.

Software Carpentry at Indiana University

Mon, 22 Aug 2005 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Andy Lumsdaine is offering the Software Carpentry course at Indiana University starting on August 29, under the heading B649 Software Tools and Practices.