+1 to Neil’s point tl;dr – Sometimes, host organizers misrepresent the content of a workshop. Intentional or not, this miscommunication puts the instructors in an awkward situation.
At one recent workshop, the host had advertised the workshop as an R workshop to participants. However, the host had requested a Software Carpentry workshop that included R as well as git, Bash, and SQL. We had a few participants who voiced their displeasure at covering anything other than R. One particular participant confronted me during a break about SQL. This learner already knew SQL and assumed everyone else did as well. When it became obvious that the individual would not be satisfied, I politely reminded them that we were covering the material requested by the host and that any further questions might be best addressed to the host. I do not believe this learner ever did talk to the host. From: Discuss [mailto:discuss-boun...@lists.software-carpentry.org] On Behalf Of Neil Chue Hong (SSI) Sent: Tuesday, April 12, 2016 1:07 PM To: Davide Del Vento <davide.del.ve...@gmail.com>; Maneesha Sane <manee...@software-carpentry.org> Cc: Software Carpentry Discussion <discuss@lists.software-carpentry.org> Subject: Re: [Discuss] Outreach misconception about Data and Software Carpentry as piece of software instead of skills I've seen some similar misconceptions, in all cases because someone not directly from the "carpentry community" has tried to explain SWC/DC to someone else (which I've then overheard). These included: - Software Carpentry is very expensive, costing thousands of dollars - Software Carpentry only teaches in Python - Software Carpentry is trying to turn everyone into software engineers - Software Carpentry is only for developers (I guess this is a matter of interpretation) - Software Carpentry hasn't been updated recently (this was in relation to the person thinking it was online lessons only) So nothing particularly problematic, but perhaps we should think about ensuring our mission and vision are broadcast as clearly as possible. Cheers Neil On Tue, 12 Apr 2016 at 18:41, Davide Del Vento <davide.del.ve...@gmail.com<mailto:davide.del.ve...@gmail.com>> wrote: I've seen many people confused about what the differences between SWC and DC are, specifically, people doing any kind of data analysis thinking that they should go into DC, even folks who were already very skilled and needed instead a SWC python-advanced class (if we had it). I've seen people who *really* didn't care about spreadsheets and SQL (but cared about data analysis) going into DC and get frustrated. I've seen people who went to SWC (python-beginner) but really needed a pyton-intermediate. I'm not sure how carefully they read the descriptions, if they were native speakers or not, and what the source of the confusion was. It might simply be that they did not read anything and they assumed "software" carpentry = something for "software engineers", while "data carpentry" = something for "scientists who deal with data". I could be the one to blame, since I was the organizer, however I tried to be very un-specific and use the official material, see the last instances that I ran: https://sea.ucar.edu/event/software-carpentry-2 https://sea.ucar.edu/event/data-carpentry or https://sea.ucar.edu/event/software-carpentry-1 for a less recent one. Feel free to ask more specific questions (maybe offlist) and hope this helps improving :-) On Tue, Apr 12, 2016 at 11:02 AM, Maneesha Sane <manee...@software-carpentry.org<mailto:manee...@software-carpentry.org>> wrote: I'm usually the first point of contact for general public inquiries about SWC & DC and don't think I've seen anything like this. If this is just one person I don't want to put too much effort into fixing things - we will always have a random person here or there that is confused. I think we're pretty clear that our lessons include R, Python, Shell, Git, etc. If anyone else has seen a pattern of misconceptions about what SWC or DC is please let us know so we can think about how we may need to adjust our message. Maneesha Sane Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry Program Coordinator https://software-carpentry.org/ http://www.datacarpentry.org/ On 04/12/2016 08:54 AM, Raniere Silva wrote: Hi, this week I was negotianting a workshop and the person that I was talking to really believe that Data and Software Carpentry are two softwares and the workshops are about the softwares itself. That person probably spent a lot of time looking at Data and Software Carpentry website (based the email that I received) so I want to know if you already experience an similar situation because if this is a common misconception we need to improve our website. 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