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Carpentry Clippings, 18 March 2020
Hello everyone. What an elaborate fortnight it has been around the world since our last newsletter. COVID-19 is prevalent, and we hope you are safe wherever you are. Our Acting Executive Director, Dr. Kari L. Jordan, recently published a blog post with recommendations for staying healthy during the COVID-19 outbreak. We encourage you to have a read, and more importantly, follow government directives around movement and convening for the sake of your health, and that of others in this time.
Community News
An Update on Carpentries Workshops
In the last two weeks, we have had over two dozen workshops cancelled or postponed due to mandates to migrate classes online or suspend public gatherings. Demand for our workshops is still high. While our workshops are designed for in-person facilitation we have heard from you that remote delivery is a viable option that you would like to try.
At this time, we are unable to formally support remote centrally-organised workshops. However, community members are working in this collaborative google doc to offer tips for teaching and learning online, and we would love to hear from you! If you are planning to host/teach a remote self-organised workshop, please complete the workshop request form. We would also like to receive feedback on lessons learned from running Carpentries workshops, so please send an email to team@carpentries.org.
Carpentries Maintainers
Interested in becoming a lesson maintainer for The Carpentries? On 1 April 2020, we will open Carpentries Maintainer applications and announce information sessions for learning about the role of lesson Maintainer. Look out for updates here in our newsletter and on The Carpentries socials.
CarpentryCon 2020
CarpentryCon2020 is scheduled to take place 29 June to 1July 2020 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (USA). We are closely monitoring the ongoing and evolving global Coronavirus (COVID-19) situation, and will issue an update on 1 April 2020 to specify if we will hold CarpentryCon virtually this year.
Community Discussions
If you have taught a Carpentries workshop recently, or attended instructor training, our community discussions are designed to help you share your experiences and discuss any questions and ideas you may have around resources used in Instructor Training and lessons taught in Carpentries workshops. If you haven’t taught a Carpentries workshop or gone through Instructor Training recently but would like to sit in for the calls, we highly recommend that too! There is so much to learn from our community members, and you will likely find room to chime in. Sign up for a Carpentries Discussion Session today!
What you may have missed on the blog and mailing lists
Omar Khan is Our New Communications Manager!
We are delighted to introduce Omar Khan, who joins The Carpentries Core Team this week as our new Communications Manager. Here’s a blog post introducing Omar. Join us in welcoming him, and feel free to reach out to him with any questions and ideas around communications in The Carpentries.
Zhian Kamvar is Our New Lesson Infrastructure Technology Developer!
Zhian Kamvar also joins us as our new Lesson Infrastructure Technology Developer, and we are very excited to have him on The Carpentries Core Team. You can follow him on Twitter, and read this blog post to learn more about him and his role on our team. Welcome Zhian!
Video on Running Remote Carpentries Workshops
Jason Bell, Senior Research Technologies Officer at CQUniversity, recently gave a presentation on “Virtual Software Carpentry Workshops - key learnings to make it a success” in a webinar organised by Australian Research Data Commons. You can watch the video here and join in on discussions about remote teaching of Carpentries workshops here on TopicBox.
Geospatial-Python Lesson Contributors Needed!
The Carpentries Incubator program is designed to provide a single point of entry for Carpentries community members to share lesson materials and discuss ideas for new lessons. Having worked extensively on their Introduction to Geospatial Raster and Vector Data with Python lesson, Ryan Avery and Kunal Marwaha taught the new Carpentries Incubator lesson at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in February 2020 and wrote about their experience and feedback from the workshop in this blog post. Once you read the post, consider contributing to the lesson repository. Some episodes are still incomplete, descriptions and instructions need copy-editing, and challenges could be enhanced by including Bonus challenges (for learners with prior Python programming experience).
Tips and Hacks for Remote Teaching and Learning
The Carpentries community has extensive experience in teaching and learning online, and we are keen on drawing from all these experiences and writing a collaborative blog post on the subject to share with other communities that are now in this situation and wondering where to begin. Share any tips and resources under this issue in our Carpentries Conversations repository.
Tweet of the Week
Community Job Postings
The Master of Data Science program and Department of Statistics at the University of British Columbia is hiring Postdoctoral Teaching & Learning Fellows to build and bring industry standard Data Science Education to graduate and undergraduate students. More details available in Tiffany Timbers’ post on TopicBox.
Digital agriculture group at University of Arizona’s Data Science Institute is hiring a software engineer to help scientists leverage big data to improve agriculture, and a scientific programmer proficient in RStats to predict and analyse crop and plant growth with ecological models.
Illinois Natural History Survey is looking for a community manager and a Scientific Specialist. These two positions will help support the development of an open source tool for biodiversity informatics.
Offcuts
RStudio’s Webinars on Teaching Online on Short Notice
If you planned to teach your class or deliver your workshop in person, and now you have to do it online, RStudio has two webinars scheduled to help you get started — the first will be run by Greg Wilson on Thursday, 19 March at 4pm EDT / 8pm UTC and the second will be run by Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel on Tuesday, 24 March at 4pm EDT / 8pm UTC.
Csv,conf,v5 Will Be Held Virtually in May 2020
csvconf.com will now be held online between 13 - 14 May 2020. Check their website for an update on speakers. Information on remote participation in this virtual conference will also be shared soon on their website.
Research Bazaar Sydney Postponed to 2021
In our last newsletter, we shared an update asking community members to register for Research Bazaar (ResBaz) 2020 in Sydney. Due to COVID-19, ResBaz Sydney 2020 has been postponed to 2021. Please fill this form if you would like to be contacted about helping, teaching or instructing at ResBaz 2021.
Toolshed (Posts from our Past)
The Carpentries Core Values guide our approach to interactions and collaborative work with one another and all the ways we navigate The Carpentries spaces. This blog post explains how The Carpentries Core Team worked with our global community to articulate our core values.
Other places to connect
Have something you’d like to have included? Send it to newsletter@carpentries.org.
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