Dear all, I have used Slack in small and medium-size teaching activities (~100 participants). There are two additional issues to report: (i) once somebody is on the Slack forum, but not online, Slack will send an email containing messages they miss. This is generally useful for a teamwork situation, but not ideal for those that have taken a SWC course in the past, and don’t want to be bothered by discussion of people taking the course now. Of course this notification behaviour can be switched off, but it is one more step. This would happen if the same Slack forum would be used again and again (to keep track of Alumni, say).
(ii) Slack has introduced some kind of throttling of adding new users: they will only invite new users to a Slack forum if at least 50% of the previous invitations have accepted. I ran into this at about 40 or 50 participants. This was not the case in June 2015, but had been introduced before June 2016. It could be a practical problem for some SWC courses. Best wishes, Hans > On 3 Aug 2016, at 12:08, Jan Kim <[email protected]> wrote: > > Dear All, > > providing a persistent alumni forum is a very worthwhile idea, but I would > argue to separate it from the concerns addressed by the in-workshop use > of etherpad. > > As discussed in the context of Github a while ago, it's not entirely > desirable to ask participants to create yet another account -- so while > it's ok to ask everyone to connect to the workshop's etherpad and choose > a moniker and a colour, I think asking people to create a Slack account > has disadvantages. They're likely to spend the first coffee break getting > familiar with the new thing, and it may continue to be a distraction even > during lessons, and after the workshop, they'll be left with that yet > another account, which of course is the whole point for those who want > to stay in touch more permanently, but it may be a burden / debt to those > who don't. > > Best regards, Jan > > > On Wed, Aug 03, 2016 at 10:42:42AM +0000, Hetherington, James wrote: >> I???d be keen to use Slack if this were made efficient. >> >> This would be especially good if it could be used to create a persistent >> forum of course alumni. >> >> >> -- >> >> Dr James Hetherington >> Head of Research Software Development >> Research IT Services >> >> And >> >> Honorary Lecturer >> Department of Computer Science >> >> University College London >> >> Tel: 07946868834 >> Site: http://bit.ly/ucl-rsd >> Twitter: @uclrcsoftdev @jamespjh >> Skype: ucgajhe >> >> >> From: Discuss <[email protected]> on behalf of >> Ted Hart <[email protected]> >> Date: Tuesday, 2 August 2016 at 18:19 >> To: Software Carpentry Discussion <[email protected]> >> Subject: [Discuss] Preferred communication tool used during teaching >> >> Hi all, >> >> I'm curious what people are using these days for communication during >> teaching. I know historically folks have used etherpad, but recently I've >> seen some workshops go to Slack. In light of this, I've decided to set-up a >> slack space for an upcoming workshop. So given the ubiquity of Slack in the >> zeitgeist (and likely also in the workplace) what are other peoples >> thoughts are using it during teaching as opposed to the traditional etherpad. >> >> I think if there were wider adoption, which I'm not necessarily advocating >> for, it seems that it could be folded into a more formal part of the >> workshop set-up process in two ways. >> >> 1). A procedure for setting up official SWC slack channels as opposed to the >> current ad-hoc method. Obviously these logs could be useful for text mining >> student questions / feedback etc (if we aren't already doing that with >> etherpads) >> >> 2). Given Slacks API for bots, it could be useful to maintain an official >> SWC bot to address common use cases (Although I'm drawing a blank on any >> specifics at the moment). >> >> Overall though I just wanted to take the temperature of the other >> instructors. I appreciate your thoughts. >> >> T > >> _______________________________________________ >> Discuss mailing list >> [email protected] >> http://lists.software-carpentry.org/listinfo/discuss > > > -- > +- Jan T. Kim -------------------------------------------------------+ > | email: [email protected] | > | WWW: http://www.jtkim.dreamhosters.com/ | > *-----=< hierarchical systems are for files, not for humans >=-----* > _______________________________________________ > Discuss mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.software-carpentry.org/listinfo/discuss Prof Hans Fangohr Director EPSRC CDT in Next Generation Computational Modelling Head of Computational Modelling Group University of Southampton phone: 023 80598345 email: [email protected] www: http://www.soton.ac.uk/~fangohr blog: http://www.soton.ac.uk/~fangohr/blog @ProfCompMod: https://twitter.com/profcompmod _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.software-carpentry.org/listinfo/discuss
