Ivan's message makes a really important point. It touches on the main reason I have become a bit of a SWC black sheep, and withdrawn from participating in further boot camps. I feel that the two-day sessions are too ambitious and over-promise, leading to less of a long-term behavioral change than they might achieve.
Part of this probably stems from the fact that my target audience is the novice and a lot of SWC material would benefit the intermediate student more. The issue is not fine points of how many exercises to include in a lesson. To me, the goal of a two-day session should be to show people what an alternative workflow looks like, get them set up to operate in this environment on their day-to-day machine, and position them to learn more about the key tools in a way that fosters good practices. You can't make someone a competent programmer from scratch in two days, but you can point then in the right direction, show them why they might want to walk along that path, and give them a preview of some pitfalls and sights they might see along the way. Thus motivated and with the process demystified, they can learn using the infinitude of resources, including to a large extent the SWC lessons. As a tangent, this is why I am also skeptical of virtual environments and cloud-based solutions. These make the instructors' lives easier, but three months later those students are going to open a spreadsheet to work on their new dataset and not launch a VM or try to work on AWS. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.software-carpentry.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss_lists.software-carpentry.org
