Excellent information, and thank you Titus. By 'intermediate', I think I mean what you call 'advanced beginner'.
My emphasis would most likely be specifically on skills and concepts that would make the idea of constructing pipelines from things like bash, make, snakemake, Nipype, and R seem attainable and within grasp. That's on top of knowing all the domain-specific software. I think you're right, that the point at which further progress needs to be embedded in a domain is fairly early. That certainly seems to be common practice, too, even for the regular workshops. -- bennet On Sat, Oct 8, 2016 at 7:45 PM, C. Titus Brown <[email protected]> wrote: > 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
