15 June 2018
Team @BL_DigiSchol join @thecarpentries at #CarpentryCon2018 in Dublin
Members of the Digital Scholarship team, Alex, Rossitza and Stella, attended The Carpentries community inaugural conference held on the relaxing campus of University College Dublin 29 May-1 June. The atmosphere at the event was energising thanks to the enthusiasm of the community members who volunteer to teach computational, coding and data science skills to researchers worldwide.
The theme of the event “Building Locally, Connecting Globally” permeated the rich programme of talks and interactive sessions that focused on sharing knowledge, networking and developing new content and strategies for strengthening and growing The Carpentries. A report on the conference has been published by Belinda Weaver and this blog post by Raniere Silva summarises well some of the key messages.
Our team exhibited a poster on the Digital Scholarship staff training programme that creates opportunities for staff at The British Library to develop the necessary skills and knowledge to support emerging areas of modern scholarship.
Thus, particularly relevant for us were the sessions led by Belinda Weaver and Chris Erdmann about growing the software and data skills training provision for library professionals. We engaged in a conversation with members of The Library Carpentry community about how best to review and create new curricula and resources, as well as how the needs of the broader culture heritage professionals may vary. There are opportunities to work with university departments, professional bodies and regional consortia to get library and other GLAM professionals involved with The Library Carpentry. Watch this space for our team's involvement with The Carpentries and for further updates follow The Library Carpentry blog and Twitter feed, and The Carpentry Clippings newsletter.
Below are just few highlights from the sessions we took part in:
@frameshiftlic : Diversity and inclusion go hand in hand. Much more needs to be done to increase diversity and inclusivity in the technology sector.
The Carpentries community uses GitHub to maintain training materials and good guidance was provided on how to clone and fork repositories and submit pull requests. A great teaching resource Happy Git and GitHub for the useR is being developed for Software Carpentry by Jennifer Bryan
Greg Wilson offered advice on how to keep refreshing teaching methods and content for both the learners’ and instructors’ benefit. His reading list for engaging learners includes The discussion book: 50 great ways to get people talking and Understanding how we learn: A Visual Guide
Tracy Teal talked about the funding model, operations and infrastructure of The Carpentries who have updated their website, logo, handbook and a Code of Conduct. Curriculum development, equality and inclusion, and building local capacity for training remain high priorities for the community.
Most engaging was the interactive breakout session on developing a new software carpentry lesson on High Performance Computing (HPC). The session leader Alan O’Cais used the classroom engagement platform Socrative to gather attendees’ feedback on existing lessons, appropriate content and the learner profile.
Other great sessions covered best approaches to teaching live coding at university, post workshop community development strategies, and how organisations, such as The Software Sustainability Institute and ELIXIR, have been supporting The Carpentries community initiatives.