By Greg Wilson / 2014-02-09
Peer instruction is a teaching technique originally developed by Eric Mazur and colleagues in the early 1990s. Study after study has shown that peer instructions works better than conventional lecturing, but to the best of my knowledge, no online learning platform directly supports peer instruction. I'd like to fix that, and I hope some of our readers would like to help.
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By Greg Wilson / 2014-02-09
We had the wrap-up meetings for Round 7 of instructor training this past Thursday. The full summary is on the training blog, but the key points are:
- We need to include a lesson early in the course on the structure of the materials in our repository, and how to configure things for a workshop. We'll do a trial run on Thursday, February 20, in the usual time slots (10:00, 14:00, and 19:00 Eastern); please have a look at the Etherpad for connection details on the day.
- People want a chance to watch more experienced teachers in action. One possibility would be to set up something like SmarterCookie or Edthena, where teachers upload videos of themselves in action so that other people can comment on what they do and how they do it. We will think about ways and means and see what we can set up in the next couple of weeks.
Our thanks once again to everyone who stayed with us through what turned out to be a longer-than-usual run of the course: I look forward to teaching with you all some day soon.
Finally, there are still seats available for the live three-day version of the instructor training course, which will run in Toronto on April 28-30, 2014. If you'd like to learn more about teaching in general, and teaching programming in specific, please sign up.
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By Greg Wilson / 2014-02-05
Setup and configuration is often the biggest challenge bootcamp participants face, particularly on Windows. Our installation instructions are pretty good, but to make them better, Justin Kitzes has started building a wiki page on GitHub to keep track of what's gone wrong and what fixes have worked. Many thanks to Justin for getting the ball rolling—contributions would be very welcome.
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By Greg Wilson / 2014-01-30
We are pleased to announce that we will be running workshops simultaneously at the data science centers at UC Berkeley, New York University, and the University of Washington on March 17-18, 2014. These workshops will introduce participants to the skills they should master before they tackle anything with "cloud" or "peta" in its name, including task automation, version control, modular programming, and structured data management. Novice and intermediate learners alike are welcome; for more information on topics and other details, please mail us or check out the registration pages for the three sites:
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By Greg Wilson / 2014-01-28
We're very pleased to announce that registration is now open for our second workshop for Women In Science and Engineering, which will be held at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory on April 14-15, 2014. We have a stellar roster of instructors and room for over 100 learners, so please sign up early and pass the word on to your friends and colleagues.
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Software Carpentry is a project of the Mozilla Science Lab
