On Mon, Oct 03, 2016 at 07:13:32PM -0400, Bennet Fauber wrote: > I wanted to toss the idea out to the general population to see if > anyone else was thinking about intermediate workshops and thus might > care about having a reliable set of topics in precursors, or who might > have experienced people who were disappointed in the workshops because > they either lagged or sped and might think this could help reduce > their numbers.
[ ... ] > P.S. Which intermediate topics are you thinking about/working on? > I've thought a couple of times about putting something together that > does the equivalent of a full day of shell, and half days of make, and > git, with some kind of pipeline/workflow that does something > comprehensible as the product at the end. That wouldn't be SWC, but I > think most of the core concepts would be covered, and I think it would > be useful to quite a large scientific audience. I will have to take > an extended vacation to get it done, though. Hi Bennett, we've done a bunch of experiments here at Davis; see https://dib-training.readthedocs.io/en/pub/#past-workshops Inasmuch as I can reach any conclusions I would say that (a) few people mind "wasting" half a day on a topic, if they show up and it's too beginner; we have had people leave at the coffee break but that's ok; (b) in general most people are not ready for advanced topics anyway, and they tend to overestimate their skills by default; (c) those that don't overestimate their skills don't show up to the training and just go through the material on their own, so intermediate workshops were horribly undersubscribed; and as a result I've resolved to focus on beginner and advanced beginner materials in generic workshops, and then introduce the rest of the stuff as part of domain-specific workshops. The one exception to this is my repeatability workshop, https://2016-oslo-repeatability.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ for which people got more out of it if they had a basic background knowledge of git and shell and the like. But I don't have much experience teaching it to a diverse array of audiences. cheers, --titus _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.software-carpentry.org/listinfo/discuss
