I have to say that I really learned a lot of things from this training. Surely some things will be more useful in the future than others, but the overall picture is quite positive in my opinion.
The best attribute of this teaching scheme is definitely the peer-reviewing/feedback-based system. I learned much more by reading people’s feedbacks on my own and also other’s works. Sometimes when I was reading a post or watching a video from someone else I started seeing the same mistakes that I do, but that I wouldn’t realize by myself. Therefore, I think the feedback system works both as an external and internal reflection/feedback system.
The ‘worst’ point, only sometimes, was the time between tasks. For some of the tasks, as with the video and this last round, two weeks was not enough. However, Greg has been very kind and flexible with the dates, which made things a lot easier for us. Realistically many people (including myself) do things close to their deadlines so maybe starting with 2 weeks is good so you keep the pressure a bit but you relax it when necessary.
I really like the idea of having all the training within on single blog. Moreover, the fact that we can look into past and further training rounds is really cool. It allows us to explore the diversity of ideas and methods from all sorts of participants.
The literature provided was really cool. I have to agree with Steven Koenig that ‘How Learning Works’ is way repetitive, however I considered it a very good book. I do understand this repetitiveness strategy though I found it annoying sometimes. ‘Facts and Fallacies’ was really cool; because of it’s rather informal type of writing, it allows the reader to better reflect and criticise the author’s opinion — even though he has infinite experience on the topic compared to mine =) I loved the management section as I could see it applied towards a research lab straight away, hence I chose to do the ppt presentation mostly based on it.
Now I’ll briefly break down my feedback for each of the rounds that I participated in:
Round 4.1 — mind maps
Concept maps were really cool. I started using them a couple of months before the SWC training, during a scientific writing course. It definitely helps you plan your task mentally. Based on people’s feedback, I learned that I did not provide enough information beforehand, which kind of anticipated round 4.2 — competent practitioner that would miss most of the gaps when teaching beginners.
Round 4.2 — Evaluating expertise
While I enjoyed the reading from ‘How Learning Works’ I definitely think that this was the most difficult round. Difficult because (1) what I judge expert level may not be expert to somebody else and also (2) because people often learn things differently — meaning that what you consider basic knowledge on a given topic may not be basic to someone else. It was extremely difficult to come up with questions that would tell apart common practitioners from beginners, but I am assuming that this also comes with experience as you deal with all sorts of students with varied backgrounds.
Round 4.3 — Presentation based on ‘Facts and Fallacies’
Unfortunately I wasn’t able to participate on this round even though I did upload my presentation to the blog. It was really good to get people’s feedback on this, and I appreciate that they understood the point I was trying to make in terms of how I would like to manage a research lab. Yet, now I do appreciate the fact that while it would be nice to teach people how to read nicer codes before teaching them how to write it, it is almost impossible in practice because people learn better and get way more engaged by trying to build their own solutions with software.
Round 4.4 — Videos
The best one. Seriously. It was very fun to do this! I felt a mix of awkwardness and embarrassment as I watched and listened to myself speaking — weird voice and accent. Even so, the best part of this round was the massive amount of feedbacks from everyone to everyone. It was really cool. It felt like a social media thing, people commenting and tweeting on other’s posts. Maybe you want to consider breaking it down into two rounds so 2 weeks each becomes a fair amount of time though that’s just a friendly suggestion =) Maybe implementing an extra round based on videos (e.g., by filming the last lecture for Round 4.5) would make it more constructive.
Round 4.5 — Blog posts on teaching and feedback on the training scheme
This round definitely deserves at least three weeks. Putting together a class does not only depend on ourselves but also on whoever-is-attending schedules. I was lucky enough to have a small group ready to go and willing to learn things on how to improve functions in R . I discovered that I really love teaching about programming, specially because it is getting increasingly more present in academia and people need to know how to write better code. As a suggestion for further rounds, maybe this could be filmed and posted on Vimeo, Youtube or whatever. Writing about it on the blog is a nice exercise, but seeing people’s videos and providing feedback just like on Round 4.4 would make this more fruitful.
Finally, thanks Greg for letting me be part of this training. It is not everyday that we come across people with a nice mission willing to teach others how to spread the word. I think that by having these training courses you are exponentially expanding good practice among scientists, which is the ultimate goal. Good job!