The course was a surprising adventure. I expected the course to be focused on practicing teaching. I imagined 10 weeks of exercises like the screencast white board lecture on each topic in the Software Carpentry curriculum. Students going through the course would become robots in teaching the current Software Carpentry.
But the course was very different. Instead, in readings we were introduced to theories on learning and lessons in software design and management. I was wondering why we were studying this interesting but relatively abstract material when we could be practicing teaching directly. I began to understand the intent of this approach when I read the email discussions on Software Carpentry listservs. The discussions were all about improving the curriculum and discussing what worked and didn’t work in previous boot camps. Actually, being able to follow these discussions was one of the best parts of the course. The course was preparing us to develop our own approaches to teaching the material and improving and adding to the Software Carpentry repository of teaching materials.
The readings and online meeting discussions were filled with valuable abstract knowledge on teaching and learning. The exercises introduced useful practical tools such as making concept maps to prepare lessons, designing assessment questions, teaching through slideshows, white board lectures and direct coding. Using the blog for all exercises was great as it allowed to give and receive feedback and to look at past and future participants work. I think it would have been helpful if the meeting minutes in the etherpad were copied to a blog post so they are available later and not overwritten by the next meeting.