Re: [Discuss] inverted carpentries?

Some kind of hybrid model does seem like it would be good, if it can be made viable. My experience with videos on computing and statistical topics is that some sort of guide needs to be provided to the viewer prior to watching to keep attention focused and to force at least some active processing

[Discuss] Possibly interesting video

Candace Thille will be giving a talk at the University of Michigan, and that led me to look at prior work. I found this video that looks like it might be of interest to many people on this list. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjLRGzaYLDw ___

Re: [Discuss] Git and Github lesson (follow-up)

Thanks for the great report, Dena! On Tue, Jan 9, 2018 at 7:23 PM, Strong, Dena L wrote: > Reporting in: I just taught from Steve’s version today, and it went > fantastically. I’ve never taught Git before. I really liked teaching with > this structure – the Dracula thing

Re: [Discuss] Familiar Contexts and the Difficulty of Programming Problems

Regardless of any comments I might make on the paper, I wholeheartedly agree with the summary: For example, the results of our self-reflective questions suggest that > students appreciate examples, and we have found some evidence that > straightforward examples may benefit students more than a

Re: [Discuss] an interesting three-color approach to studying

The questions could be in the form of descriptions for code writing. Short snippets, not full programs. Particularly for basic things like variable assignment, control structures, conditionals, and data structures. In some sense, that's what the interspersed exercise items in lessons are doing,

Re: [Discuss] using the DC ecology Python lesson in place of the SWC Python for SWC workshop

I will address only the last of Marianna's comment (included below): I think that the issue of 'branding' boils down to one of 'do the components of the workshop meet the criteria for both knowledge transmission and method of presentation'. Part of the issue I had with the branding discussion is

Re: [Discuss] using the DC ecology Python lesson in place of the SWC Python for SWC workshop

Jonah and all, I've seen two presentations of the R workshop, both at Software Carpentry workshops. They were a couple of years apart. Neither finished the material in the SWC lesson. Both were quite different from each other. I doubt that if an attendee from one described the workshop to an

Re: [Discuss] Serverless scientific computing (function as a service)

Peter brings up an interesting point about code quality and its role in replicability. It may that too strong a reliance on particular underlying libraries is really an indication of unstable code or unstable methods. Good numerical code should largely survive recompilation. A good example of

[Discuss] Free e-book on software development work practice

I haven't had a chance to read it closely, but there may be something of use to instructors and their workshop attendees in the free e-book that Atlassian released about making the transition from school (university) to working as a programmer. https://bitbucket.org/product/education Even if

Re: [Discuss] nano clean the window scrool in Windows (was Re: nano not found after installing gitbash (Raniere Silva))

Thank you very much Raniere! I tried it, and... + Cygwin Terminal icon on the Desktop (aka, bash) + man -- pages for nano, bash, man, make, git, rsync, even python (ver 2.7.13) + nano + git -- tested git init, add, commit clone from GitHub via https + ssh works from the

Re: [Discuss] nano clean the window scrool in Windows (was Re: nano not found after installing gitbash (Raniere Silva))

I really do not mean to be a troll, here, but it seems to me that the trend is to develop SWC/DC away from a coherently organized workshop centered around the idea of creating a pipeline that is run using scripts, invoked from a command line, and that is under version control. That is how I

Re: [Discuss] gapminderDataFiveYear

I can kind of understand the desire to have 'more current' data because it might be more appealing to students, but I also have a huge amount of sympathy/empathy for Jenny's original reply about how it would redound into people's prepared lessons. Could an 'intermediate' or 'advanced' lesson be

Re: [Discuss] Assessment in programming classes

On Wed, Dec 7, 2016 at 4:37 PM, Eric Jankowski wrote: > Basically, I worked backwards from the skills I wanted students to have and > figured out the practices and feedback they would need from me to help them > achieve this. The same principle governed my selection

Re: [Discuss] top down vs. bottom up teaching python? c.f. whole language in instructor training

I think almost all code that is interesting is, in some sense, derived from both existing code and written code, so maybe we should rephrase the discussion? Perhaps something like, "We need to encourage participants to learn how to dissect existing code and understand how it is constructed and

Re: [Discuss] top down vs. bottom up teaching python? c.f. whole language in instructor training

Gerard, It may be that it is easier for instructors to be enthusiastic about one kind or another? If that is true, then lesson structure is a tool that can be used to create material about which more or different instructors can be enthusiastic; and that is a worthy goal, no? -- bennet On Mon,

Re: [Discuss] top down vs. bottom up teaching python?

This agrees with my experience, also. I would only add that workshops that operate this way seem to engage student interest and participation better, and I think that it prepares the participants to think more analytically and _construct_ the material in their own minds rather than _receive_ the

Re: [Discuss] Prerequisites and outcomes

April, Thanks for your thoughtful reply. I'll restate for two cases. I'll try to be clearer and more succinct. If I assume that all SWC shell lessons will cover loops when I start planning my lesson, I may end up in a bad place if not all Shell lessons will have covered it and I count on it.

[Discuss] Prerequisites and outcomes

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

Re: [Discuss] Teaching Git with Github Desktop

> Git command line interface isn't friendly to new users This is different from 'broken'. Broken implies that it does not do what it claims it will. > because "git checkout" do too much for the same command > depending of what arguments the user pass. > Why do we can't have "git undo" that ony

Re: [Discuss] Excel errors.... (Tiffany Timbers)

In the end, data entry is simply subject to errors. No matter what tool is used, some method of QA needs to be employed to check the original against the entered data. I don't know that anyone has improved on 'double entry', where two people enter the same data, and the two results are compared

Re: [Discuss] outstanding pull request

As far as I can tell, https://github.com/swcarpentry/git-novice/pull/266 is noncontroversial and is just waiting for someone to merge. Please correct me if I am wrong. Last comments were: iglpdc added this to the Version 5.4 milestone 10 days ago iglpdc self-assigned this 10 days ago On

Re: [Discuss] Word and PowerPoint "all wrong"?

Why not put 'Excel' and 'PowerPoint' into the same category as 'just'? If you never, ever mention it, then whatever you're teaching will stand on its own merit. It's up to you to present some compelling merits. If you don't like the taste, stop chewing it.

Re: [Discuss] Discrepancy between .md and .html in swcarpentry/git-novice

Raniere, So, Jekyll does not process the files at https://github.com/swcarpentry/git-novice ? On Sat, Apr 23, 2016 at 5:09 AM, Raniere Silva wrote: > Hi Bennet, > >> Maybe I'm looking in the wrong place or something, but I think that >> the .md file at >> >>

[Discuss] Discrepancy between .md and .html in swcarpentry/git-novice

Maybe I'm looking in the wrong place or something, but I think that the .md file at https://github.com/swcarpentry/git-novice/blob/gh-pages/07-github.md should have the same text and such as the rendered files at http://swcarpentry.github.io/git-novice/07-github.html But I see on the former,

Re: [Discuss] Managing Github schizophrenia...

Tim, Nice refinement. Thank you! -- bennet On Tue, Apr 19, 2016 at 4:35 PM, Timothy Rice wrote: > Hey Bennet, > >> Host carpenter-git >> HostName github.com >> IdentityFile /Users/bennet/.ssh/carpenterbennet >> Host just-git >> HostName github.com >>

[Discuss] Lesson contribution requirements

I installed Pandoc and the requirements as listed in the requirements.txt file from the r-novice-gapminder lesson, but I get an error about a missing function in CommonMark. I ran $ pip install -r requirements.txt using a freshly downloaded Anaconda2 (and again with Anaconda3, just in case),

[Discuss] Fwd: Tutorials at SC'16

There will be many variations depending on the cluster and its scheduler, etc. I've been teaching a 3-4 hour workshop that introduces people to batch computhing using the Torque PBS system and the Moab scheduler for the last several years. I don't have a nice web site, but I have a 'script' --

Re: [Discuss] Tutorials at SC'16

What would people think of proposing a workshop at SC that talks not about HPC itself, but about the SWC way of designing workshops and what constitutes good practices for teaching? That obviously becomes a plug for SWC and instructor training. This material could be excerpted from the

Re: [Discuss] Any tips for learning R and Python?

One might also want to include in the dark matter things like Canopy, Spyder, Wing IDE, etc. On Sun, Apr 3, 2016 at 1:54 PM, Greg Wilson wrote: > Python 2 is still more widely used than Python 3, but the sort of people who > blog, tweet, and give talks at

Re: [Discuss] Phrases to avoid when teaching

My first programming language was TeX. ;-) I try to steer people to asking a better question, in ways alluded to in many of the responses. I often end up replying with "Best for what?" If the questioner is asking about best to learn programming?, then there probably isn't a best language.

Re: [Discuss] RajLab: From reproducibility to over-reproducibility

Greg, Quite a bit of the discussion since I started this reply seems to hinge on git being useful because of github and cloudiness. I'm going to go back to your original two questions and ignore the cloud, if I may? For your question 1, I might comment that LD50 isn't usually given all at once,

Re: [Discuss] RajLab: From reproducibility to over-reproducibility

Should we not mistake the tool for the task? A hammer and a screwdriver are different tools for different tasks, but if a screwdriver with a 2" shaft and one with a 4" shaft will both tighten and loosen the same screw, who's to say that one is the 'right' one to use? As Greg's pointed out, we

Re: [Discuss] installation instructions

I think that separting the installation instructions is good idea. That might make them easier for people trying to use the published material but who are not attending a specific workshop. In the spirit of writing functions and calling them from larger scripts, wouldn't we want to write a

Re: [Discuss] Timings for MATLAB novice inflammation

Somewhat tangential, does anyone have any material that covers manipulating strings, and dealing with many input files with Matlab? The existing material looks very good (and thanks for it), but I have one target audience where the biggest challenge is not writing new functions but instead using

[Discuss] Online ShellChecker

I don't know if this is common knowledge, but there is something called ShellCheck now that will detect (at least some) problems with shell scripts. Some of you who teach the introductory shell workshops might find this useful. http://www.shellcheck.net/ -- bennet

Re: [Discuss] further reading

Is this to be a layered list? That is, some things for when people are getting started, but others that lead on from there? Some things that are more at second (or maybe third) level rather than really introductory I have found useful recently are Python for Data Analysis, McKinney Python Data

Re: [Discuss] feedback wanted on "good enough" practices

+1 On Tue, Nov 17, 2015 at 12:56 PM, Shreyas Cholia wrote: > Perhaps this is an example of "good enough". :) > > Since either form ("data is/are") seems to be acceptable in computing, we > can probably just say that either form is good enough for us. Given that SWC > serves a

[Discuss] Multiple employment opportunities at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

pass along to anyone you think might be interested. -- Bennet Fauber Scientific Software Specialist Advanced Research Computing -- Technology Services University of Michigan Ann Arbor, MI 48104-2210 -- Data Science Consultant/Database Engineer http://umjobs.org/job_detail/118252

Re: [Discuss] How to enable people to use our novice unix material on their own?

It seems odd to me, as an outsider, to be downloading things from a pull request instead of a repo. If it's still a pull request, it isn't done, is it? If it is, then why is it still a request instead of pulled? For beginners looking for a shell lesson, I am not sure that expecting them to know

Re: [Discuss] Post bootcamp survey for instructors

Re Greg's recent Blog post, is it worth considering a question at least about which topic was best received? As a self-evaluation, I take a minute or two after every workshop to review and note where I thought I did the best presentation and why, and where I was weakest and why. Sometimes it's