Carpentry Clippings, 19 December 2017
Highlights from the Software and Data Carpentry Community Calendar
Community News
Calling All Geospatial and Social Scientists
Data Carpentry will release new curricula for working with Geospatial and Social Sciences data during 2018. A call to action for people who would like to be involved has been posted. There are many ways to contribute, ranging from helping edit existing lesson drafts and running pilot workshops, to serving as a Maintainer for the completed lessons. Data Carpentry is also setting up Curriculum Advisory Committees for both sets of lessons. Read more.
Green Sticky Party
Our Happy Holidays Green Sticky Party calls on 14 December highlighted some great wins for 2017, both personal ones and wins for the wider community. Both calls also discussed people's biggest (Carpentry-related) fears for 2018. Read more.
Community Service Award Winner 2017
The Carpentries are happy to honor Anelda van der Walt as our 2017 Community Service Award winner. Starting from scratch, Anelda planted the tiny seed that has now become the phenomenal growth of Software and Data Carpentry in South Africa and beyond. Congratulations Anelda! Read more.
US Research Software Engineer Survey
Are you a Research Software Engineer in the United States? Do you work professionally in software in a research environment, at least partly writing code for other people? Your job title might be research programmer, facilitator, postdoctoral researcher, or research assistant. If so, please fill out this short survey, being run by the UK Software Sustainability Institute with the idea of understanding and helping to organize the US RSE community. Please share the survey link: http://bit.ly/US-RSE-2017-survey.
Newsletter Schedule for 2018
The first Carpentry Clippings for 2018 will appear on 9 January. This will be a mini-newsletter to introduce our new Steering Committee and welcome in the new year as the merged Carpentries. Our regular two-weekly newsletter schedule will resume from 16 January. Happy Holidays to all - we look forward to seeing you again in 2018!
Subcommittee Activity
CarpentryCon Update
The website for CarpentryCon 2018 is now live. The site is still in the development phase, and includes the format and themes of the conference and information about sponsorship, including a form through which potential sponsors can express interest. It also provides a sign-up link for people who want to stay up-to-date via email with CarpentryCon-related news and announcements. As soon as they are finalised, details of the program and registration will be posted on the website.
Poster Competition for CarpentryCon
We are running a competition to design a promotional poster for CarpentryCon 2018. The winner will gain some great swag and win a free registration to CarpentryCon. Competition entries close at 5pm UTC on 31 January, 2018. So start designing! We will announce the winner on 10 February, 2018.
Mentoring Groups
Mentoring groups have outlined specific goals to develop confidence in teaching, local community building, and contributing to lessons. In the mid-program feedback survey, participants requested a Slack channel for mentoring groups to network with each other. That has now been set up. If you are not already a member of our Slack channel, please join, then email Kari to be added to the mentoring groups private channel. Kari is revisiting the mentoring groups timeline as mid-program feedback indicated the proposed date for the mentoring showcase (10 January) might be too early. Community members are welcome to contribute further resources to the Mentoring resources repository. Resources related to community building, lesson maintenance, organizing workshops, and teaching workshops are welcomed via pull request.
Assessment Update
The Assessment Network, established to collaborate and share resources on assessment within the open source/research computing community, met in November. The meeting discussed our organization’s focus on assessment and our contribution to the global effort in defining, understanding, and shaping the rising field of data science. Read the summary.
What you may have missed on the blog and mailing lists
Greg Wilson posted about the ‘familiar contexts’ paper (listed below) which sparked some comment. Cam Macdonell posted links about fonts that dyslexic people find easier to read, while Olav Vahtras posted about teaching programming to secondary school students. The issue of whether or not to touch people’s devices also got another run.
Papers & manuscripts from the community
- ‘Familiar contexts and the difficulty of programming problems’, Michelle Craig, Jacqueline Smith, and Andrew Petersen. Koli Calling '17: Proceedings of the 17th Koli Calling Conference on Computing Education Research, pp 123-127, Koli, Finland, November 16 - 19, 2017. DOI:10.1145/3141880.3141898.
- Excel vs R: A Brief Introduction to R, with examples using dplyr and ggplot by Jesse Sadler.
- Net Neutrality Essential for Access to Knowledge by Jan Gerlach, Wikimedia.
Other places to connect
If you can't get enough Software and Data Carpentry, here are some other places to connect with our community.
Have something you’d like to have included in our next newsletter? Please send items to newsletter@software-carpentry.org
|
