Hi all,
What I love about the current workflow and methodology of the Carpentries'
lessons:
- Anybody can contribute - not only members, invited members, or
steering committee members, or some other designated group of people (if
you can use the tech of course)
- People get recognition (one can point someone - e.g. employer - to the
Github repository to show you have contributed)
- The lessons are published which gives more formal recognition -
Citation via DOI and it gets added to the ORCID (BIG bonus)
- ORCID is something that is pushed at national level by our National
Research Foundation, which means people are slowly starting to understand
what it is and it is becoming easier to explain that a contribution to a
lesson can be added to one's ORCID which will look good for an
employer in
future.
- Once one is actually familiar with the lesson infrastructure, it is
really possible to adapt this workflow for ANYTHING else (be it a Sunday
School lesson or teaching kids at school, or anything else).
- Everything is available through tools that doesn't need an
institutional/personal license (additional costs)
Context is given below if you want to read something longer:
This is such a relevant discussion for something I'm working on right now.
We are running a capacity development programme with rural campuses in
South Africa. The programme includes Carpentry workshops among other things
(blended learning topics - not my expertise - and general network
maintenance and IT related training - not my expertise).
There are loads of resources available in more affluent universities,
specifically, more experienced (in modern research/teaching & learning
practices) and often higher qualified staff to provide support for
academics and students (I've specifically been looking at recent job
adverts on the list and electronic signatures to see which positions people
on the list are filling). Most of the rural (and not so rural) universities
just simply do not have the type of staff and even students which makes up
a large percentage of our international Carpentry community. Often our
learners, which includes staff members, have never heard of Open Science,
Open licenses, reproducible research, let alone R or Python or OpenRefine.
Many of our learners don't even use Google Drive at all let alone in the
way we're used to using it for collaborative writing in the sense that is
discussed here.
We are hoping to develop a suite of "enabler's" lessons that are accessible
to any student or staff member at these (and other universities) which can
be made available through libraries, research office, and/or IT when they
don't have their own training materials and don't have human resources
(time and/skill set) to develop these BUT with the hope that over time we
can train the relevant staff/students at these universities to
contribute/maintain these lessons or even take them and customise to suit
their needs.
One of the topics we want to include in this enabler's curriculum for
example, is a lesson on best practices for online meetings. Most of our
community members do not participate in online meetings for work. They
still think that one needs an IT staff member and a dedicated virtual
meeting room to be able to access webinars, online meetings, etc. To show
what one would be capable of putting together, using openly licensed
templates such as the Carpentries' and a workflow that is tried and trusted
(whilst still evolving and not without its problems), I put together this:
https://tenet-rccpii.github.io/video-conferencing-best-practices/. Don't
judge the content as I put it together to show what is possible in a few
minutes without concept maps and Blooms taxonomy in mind ;-). Branding
should probably also be removed.
But in putting it all together and then wanting to explain this to a novice
to the Carpentry community and to the tools we teach and use, I realised
again how long it will take to get a large body of people to adopt the
workflow and technology that underpins the lessons. If ever... It's
incredibly difficult to explain to novices because there is so much expert
blindspot and actually so many concepts that needs to be covered.
Even Github remains a MASSIVE problem - maybe not because of Github alone,
but also because of the complex file structure that makes a lesson and the
terminology associated with building the lesson website (includes, assets,
etc). Disclaimer, although I can use git somewhat, I never do anything on
the git CLI anymore in terms of lessons and websites on Github.
I also think that as the Carpentries community matures, the infrastructure
is getting harder to use for novices. When I ran my first Software
Carpentry workshop, all I had to do to create a workshop website, was to
change the header in the index.html file and some of the contents lower
down in this file in the top level of the website repo. Now I have to
change the index file, understand what includes mean, find the relevant
folder, change schedule, who, etc. It's great, because it means the
infrastructure is getting more robust and built according to best
practices, BUT it's less accessible for novices... The same is happening
with lesson infrastructure.
I'd be very interested in any other workflows people can point out, but for
now I really appreciate the templates and lesson infrastructure, because
even though it is getting less accessible for novices, it provides amazing
resources that are extensible in wonderful ways if you do know how to use
the tech underlying it. It really saves so much time in order to put
something professional looking, and well structured out. For now, I'll
believe that eventually we will be able to grow larger communities who can
learn the skills required to make use of these tremendous resources that
are built by our community and the Carpentries staff members. Even if it
will take some time.
Thanks!
Anelda
On Tue, Oct 9, 2018 at 1:27 AM Rémi Rampin <[email protected]> wrote:
> 2018-10-08 14:11 EDT, Dav Clark via discuss <[email protected]
>> I would love to have a workflow that mimics something like the GitHub /
>> Bitbucket pull request workflow. BUT, I think wrapping your head around
>> git + web services as a collaborative document production workflow is HARD
>> (bordering on pathology).
>>
>
> GitHub has a decent online editor, making most small changes a breeze. As
> long as maintainers can catch and fix markup/branching mistakes, I feel
> like the contributor doesn't need to "deal" with any of Jekyll's or Git's
> unfriendliness. GitHub has a "preview" tab that shows both a rendered
> version of the markdown, and red/green highlights for your changes.
>
> However I can see how it gets trickier for the initial development of
> lessons, where changes have a bigger scale (and adding pages or links is
> not that friendly).
>
> But I am not sure what concretely can be improved in that area. I don't
> feel like things like wikis are that much more friendly, yet again I am a
> software developer who uses GIt 7 hours per day, so I am very interested in
> hearing about specific pain-points (and GitHub might be
> <https://blog.github.com/2018-09-18-introducing-experiments-an-ongoing-research-effort-from-github/>
> as well? GitLab's web IDE
> <https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/web_ide/> is also really good).
>
> --
> Rémi
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