Hi Bennet, I would agree that indeterminacy of workshops exists because SWC has learned that not all lessons fit all disciplines or experience levels. A quick example is that version control is a tough concept unless learners have done at least some coding and have either lost a lot of work or broken a piece of code and want desperately to go back to a previous copy that they can't find. So for a particular level of learner a workshop may exclude git or it may not. I think this analogy applies to most tools.
But I think there are things that we can be sure learners have heard in a workshop. Again, those common things will not be a particular tool(s), but should be the concepts of automating tasks, reproducibility and sustainable software & data. I don't have experience teaching successive workshops (beginner, intermediate, advanced) to the same audience. Perhaps others have more to say about the challenge of designing intermediate workshops. You could look to some of the semester-based SWC courses. Cam >>> Bennet Fauber <[email protected]> 10/01/16 1:54 PM >>> The last post I read to this list had something in it again about how 1) the lessons had more than could be covered but 2) that was good because then if the participants seemed to know something, there were additional topics from which to choose. That seems to me to make the outcome of workshops indeterminate. If some workshops cover topics A, B, C, and D, but others cover B, D, E, and F, what does that do to the perception of 'what an SWC workshop' really is? Does that have ramifications when, for example, someone with a budget is evaluating whether to pay for a workshop or not? Does that limit the possibility that SWC might create a set of Intermediate workshops that are explicitly designed to follow on from the basic workshops that are in the current lineup? Should the lessons be trimmed to essential/required material that _all_ SWC branded lessons must cover, in the same way the topics currently are, and then there is a separate library of add-on topics? Should the current collection of topics be kept within the lessons, but some are starred as _required_ material that can't be skipped? Yes, I know that the skill level of participants is widely variable, between workshops and within the same workshop. I wonder whether we are considering where we should start, and try to build workshops on the fly from there, or whether we are aiming to bring everyone in a workshop up to some minimum level of competence? In trying to design an intermediate workshop, or a workshop that is basic for its topic but would want to use skills or techniques from another basic workshop, I would be more comfortable, I think, if I were more certain what might have been covered by the other workshops. It would also make me more comfortable saying to someone: If you took an SWC workshop on <blah>, that should be sufficient training to start this topic. Is this my own idiosyncracy, and others are comfortable with what I'm calling the indeterminacy? -- bennet _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.software-carpentry.org/listinfo/discuss
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