Hi Leo, My understanding of the SWC requirement is simply that a programming language is taught, so some lesson swapping is okay.
Personally, I think of a SWC workshop as conveying best practices in programming/computing, via the tools that are being taught. For me, that means if I used a DC programming lesson in a SWC workshop I would frame it as "writing clean and reproducible code to analyze data" versus (in a DC workshop) "this is a tool to do reproducible and scalable data analysis." So it's less about which lesson I teach, as how it's framed and that it covers certain core ideas (name your variables properly, use functions to organize your code, etc. -- most of which are in both SWC and DC lessons). That's a subtle distinction (and people are probably more interested in being able to analyze their data than write clean code!) but to me, is what's important for a workshop to be branded SWC. That's not an official stance though -- it's my two cents. This is good feedback for thinking about the Software/Data Carpentry organizations moving forward, as April alluded to. One thing that's come up in our future SWC lesson organization is exactly this issue, of what our stance is on lesson-swapping. I'm happy to take comments privately if anyone wants to share more of their thoughts on this and doesn't want to add to this thread. Cheers, Christina On Tue, Oct 17, 2017 at 3:35 PM, Azalee Bostroem <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi Leo, > > Here is a link to what is required to call a workshop SWC: > https://software-carpentry.org/faq/#core-topics > The SWC requirements are more about topic taught by a SWC certified > instructor than specific lesson and do cover version control, automation > (shell), and Python/R. > > Azalee > > > > On Oct 17, 2017, at 12:54 PM, Leo Browning <[email protected]> > wrote: > > Hi April, > thank you for pointing out that the core requirements for SWC are simply > "structured > programming in R or Python" on the website. > I had always assumed that SWC requirements were more like the DC ones in > that you had to cover SWC Git/mercurial, shell and python/R. perhaps I was > just mistaken, but no one has ever corrected me when I have talked about > this. > Cheers > L > > Leo Browning > PhD Candidate with the MacDiarmid Institute > School of Chemical and Physical Sciences, > Victoria University of Wellington > > > > On 18 October 2017 at 03:57, April Wright <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Hi Leo- >> >> I've been at workshops where the instructors have run some of the first >> DC Python lessons in conjunction with the SWC lessons, or have run the >> first couple DC and using the SWC lessons for more advanced lessons. I know >> I should keep better track of how people are using the DC Python lessons >> (as a maintainer of those lessons), but little substitutions are tricky to >> find and track. I'm not sure about wholesale swapping. I'd love to hear >> from people who are doing swapping of lesson sessions - how did it go, what >> did you do, were all your needs met - if those folks want to file issues on >> the DC Python repo. >> >> To the real question: Can you do that and call it SWC? I don't know the >> answer to that. This discussion came up a bit in some of the merger docs as >> something that needs clarification. DC has the requirement that 3 lessons >> in a lesson group be taught to be a DC workshop, SWC says "structured >> programming in R or Python". To me, teaching the DC lesson would meet that >> requirement. We go over all the things that SWC lessons typically get to >> (iteration, storing data in variables, multiple files), but the tools are >> different and the context is different. A lot of SWC workshops don't get >> all the way to debugging or command line programs, but these two lessons >> could be run after the DC lessons. Hopefully someone else can weigh in and >> we can clarify this going forward. >> >> --a >> >> >> On Mon, Oct 16, 2017 at 10:00 PM, Leo Browning <[email protected]> >> wrote: >> >>> Hi all, >>> >>> I'm new to the mailing list, so please let me know if there is anything >>> I should change about the way I am posting. >>> >>> I would like to table the idea of using DC's python for ecology module >>> in place of SWC's Python module in a SWC workshop. From what I understand >>> the only reason not to is that the curriculum for SWC is fixed. >>> >>> I have found the DC Python lesson to be more relevant and applicable to >>> learners, giving them the tools that they need to be able to work with >>> data, rather than spending a large amount of time on general programming >>> concepts that they would pick up along the way as the SWC Python lesson >>> does. >>> >>> We are considering dropping the SWC branding and running the most >>> applicable lessons, but i am reluctant to do so as I view the SWC pedagogy >>> as excellent in general. Rather, I would like to hear from the community as >>> to why there is this restriction, to better inform our decision regarding >>> workshop content. >>> >>> Regards >>> >>> Leo Browning >>> PhD Candidate with the MacDiarmid Institute >>> School of Chemical and Physical Sciences, >>> Victoria University of Wellington >>> >>> >>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> Discuss mailing list >>> [email protected] >>> http://lists.software-carpentry.org/listinfo/discuss >>> >> >> > _______________________________________________ > Discuss mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.software-carpentry.org/listinfo/discuss > > > > _______________________________________________ > Discuss mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.software-carpentry.org/listinfo/discuss > -- Christina Koch - Research Computing Facilitator, University of Wisconsin - Madison <http://www.wisc.edu/>, Center for High Throughput Computing <http://chtc.cs.wisc.edu/> Wisconsin Institute for Discovery <http://wid.wisc.edu/>; Advanced Computing Initiative <http://aci.wisc.edu/>; ACI-REF <https://aciref.org/> email: [email protected] // phone: (608) 316 - 4041 // calendar: tinyurl.com/ChristinaCHTC
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