On Apr 1, 2015, at 10:46 AM, Steve Haddock <[email protected]> wrote:
> 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 I have become a bit of a SWC black sheep, and withdrawn from participating 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. Absolutely agree - this is one of the motivating reasons behind Data Carpentry, I believe. > 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. I think for the audiences you and I target, this is a pretty legitimate approach (or, at least, that’s what I try to do as much as possible), but there are many other audiences :) My only major point of disagreement with what you say is that the two day workshops are incredibly important because most students won’t sign up for longer training, and very few funding opportunities to support such things (on the faculty side) exist. I think it’s an achievable target to run lots of 2-day workshops in part as a way of drumming support for larger things. But SWC can’t and shouldn’t exist in isolation. best, —titus _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.software-carpentry.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss_lists.software-carpentry.org
