Meeting of the Software Carpentry Instructors Study Group
Round 4.3/4.4
May 8/9, 2013
Agenda
- How “science-y” did you think this research was?
- Would you approve it if it was sent to you for peer review?
- What did you read that you didn’t believe?
- What (if anything) are you going to change in your own working practice?
- What (if anything) are you going to teach?
- How should the picture superiority effect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picture_superiority_effect) affect your slides?
- See Making Software for more (and more recent) research
Next Round
We are moving our next meeting up a day to accommodate our Australian friends (or having a third meeting—we’ll figure it out next week). To prepare:
- Look at past videos
- Read Chen’s pattern language of screencasting and Mayer on reducing cognitive load
- You may find other papers on the reading list interesting as well…
- Record two short videos of yourself teaching something
- One giving a lecture at a whiteboard
- One a screencast (record your desktop while you do something, explaining as you go)
- Each one < 3 minutes each (hard limit, no exceptions)
- Post to YouTube/Vimeo and add links to this blog post
Notes from discussion
- Code review:
- Setup projector, grade code never seen, and do review in front of audience
- let them see “how” you do the review.
- Will that enocurage them to do more reviews themeselves?
- Teach to read before you write?
- No! If you want to learn, you need to be committed.
- Students more attentive when doing a task that is useful to them
- Presentations
- more effective when you combine text with images
- lots of text = redundant information
- reduce cognitive load
- more text needed when it’s standalone
- having only images on a slide makes me present better, since I have nothing to read off of, and thus need to know what I’m saying
- Feedback
- video: great medium for getting feedbacking about teaching technique
- YouTube used to solocit feedback (musicians, and teachers)
- emphasis on “how you teach” not “what you teach”
Video Links
- Jens von der Linden: screencast, white board
- Steven Koenig: GIMP: Histogram equalisation (screencast), PNG & optipng (whiteboard)
- Jory Schossau: List Comprehensions screencast tutorial
- Amanda Whitlock: Updated Lotka-Volterra model
- John Blischak: screencast-list comprehensions; whiteboard-two-daughter problem
- Randy Olson: screencast-error handling in Python; whiteboard-writing reliable scientific code
- Diego Barneche: whiteboard-intro to knitr; screencast-generating a knitr report
- Rich FitzJohn: whiteboard-functions and scope
- Daniel Falster: Organizing your files around projects whiteboard
- Julia Gustavsen: whiteboard -basic local version control (and yes I am 34secs over time. ); screencast- git local commit.
- Will Trimble: whiteboard sequence data accession number archipelego
- April Wright: screencast on symbolic links , board on qrsh
- Bogdan Vera — Screencast, Rotation and Translating the Coordinate System in Processing Whiteboard: UML Class Diagrams