On Fri, Sep 19, 2014 at 07:53:29PM -0700, W. Trevor King wrote: > On Fri, Sep 19, 2014 at 05:02:41PM -0700, Bill Mills wrote: > > An interesting question is coming into focus here - are we trying to > > teach best practices *within a toolset* (so we fork and teach excel > > and VBA separately from R), or are we doing advocacy to funnel our > > students towards the tools that most promote best practice (so we > > continue to teach both and contrast the two)?
Software Carpentry has _always_ been about teaching best practices using a particular toolset, and I still agree strongly with that approach (even though we've expanded to ungodly languages like R ;). To do otherwise is to dilute the materials and make something that is already quite hard into something that is nearly impossible - organizing a practical teaching community is hard enough as it is without spreading ourselves even thinner. > I think it's not a question of advocacy as much as a question of > advertising. The student likely would not have been angry (or signed > up at all) if the pitch for the workshop read: Maybe. Haters gonna hate. There are always people that don't respect the instructors enough to give them the benefit of the doubt; I've only had one or two incidents like this over the years (but, note, I'm a self-confident and well-practiced white professor, so people tend not to yell at me) and I do my best to head them off at the pass by stressing an accepting and non- proselytizing attitude up front, but at some point mutual respect needs to be where we *start*, and that requires the students as well. Do we have lots of evidence that this is a systemic Software Carpentry problem, or are we tackling problems simply for the sake of problem solving? best, --titus -- C. Titus Brown, [email protected] _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.software-carpentry.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss_lists.software-carpentry.org
