Matt et al:
Perhaps this is the crux of the problem. We no longer have installation
instructions outside of the workshop pages. More experienced instructors may
know to check the workshop template on GitHub. However, for newer instructors,
potential workshop hosts, and drive-by site visitors, there’s no clear
directions.
Thinking about the problem from the perspective of a novice learner, their
first instinct will be to check the website. After coming up short, some people
will become frustrated and abandon the search. Here’s where an expert might say
“Why didn’t you just* google for {program needed}?” Because the novice learner
lacks the mental models of an expert, they may not know what search terms to
use. The Shell lessons suffer from this problem more than most:
· Nowhere on the lesson landing page
(http://swcarpentry.github.io/shell-novice/) do we mention the term “Bash”
· The “Introducing the Shell” page
(http://swcarpentry.github.io/shell-novice/00-intro.html) does not use the term
“Bash” until the seventh paragraph
· The intro page does not directly tell a novice learner that the
standard Git for Windows installation includes Bash.
· The intro page does mention that the Bash shell is the default shell
on many modern UNIX implementations. A novice learner may not know that Mac OS
now uses a UNIX engine and uses Bash for its command line terminal. They also
may not know how to access the terminal.
· If a Linux user doesn’t know about the Unix command line, I really
want to ask them how they got Linux on their machine in the first place.
For these reasons, I suggest that we should add installation instructions to
either the lesson pages or as a separate “lesson”. Before Greg (or anyone else)
says it, yes, I know “Pull requests are always welcome”. Let me ask the
community - Would you rather have:
A separate install “lesson” and links from the other lessons to that install
page
-OR-
Installation information within each separate lesson?
John Moreau
* http://swcarpentry.github.io/instructor-training/05-expertise.html
From: Discuss [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf
Of Matt Davis
Sent: Wednesday, February 17, 2016 5:05 PM
To: Markus Mueller <[email protected]>;
[email protected]
Subject: Re: [Discuss] installation instructions
Hi Markus,
Our workshop webpages have software installation instructions. We used to have
those on software-carpentry.org<http://software-carpentry.org>, but I couldn't
find them so here's the website of an upcoming workshop:
https://joshwaterfall.github.io/2016-02-16-NIH/
Best,
Matt
On Wed, Feb 17, 2016 at 2:53 PM Markus Mueller
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Dear listers,
I am a new instructor (or soon to be one) and started having a closer look at
the software carpentry lesson material. I first had a look at the instructor
guide (http://swcarpentry.github.io/shell-novice/instructors.html) and only
found some general tips and hints about which tools to use and how to install
them (my interested would here apparently be how to get a unix shell to run on
windows).
I apologize if I missed something, but otherwise would be glad if somebody
could point me to the installation guidelines (that the page above somehow
hints at).
Cheers,
Markus
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