I’m pleased to announce that this Friday, 12 Sept, will be the first offering of a new twice-monthly event hosted by the Mozilla Science Lab: Instructor Hangouts.

There is a growing number of fantastic workshop-oriented software and data education programs out there to spool learners up on the ideas and skills we’d like to share. In our Instructor Hangouts, instructors from all these initiatives will be invited to share ideas, discuss skills and strategies, and most importantly, get to know one another.  By being part of a diverse but federated community, we all stand to learn from each other’s experience.

Happening twice every other Friday, at 9 AM and 9 PM PDT, I’ll be inviting instructors from Software Carpentry, Ladies Learning Code, rOpenSci, PyLadies, the School of Data, Code4Lib and more to spend an hour welcoming new instructors to our ranks, discussing lessons learned from recent workshops, and diving deep on all matters of instruction.

I’d like to extend a special invitation to all our new or soon-to-graduate instructors to attend and meet the rest of the community.  Are there topics you would like discussed that might help you get ready for your first workshop? Let us know, and we’ll be happy to try and shed some light.

If you’re an instructor who would like to lead a discussion on ideas from a recent workshop, or an in-depth conversation about a topic of interest to the group this Friday or at any time in the future, get ahold of me at bill@mozillafoundation.org, and we’ll put you on the schedule.

After welcoming our new instructors, this week will proceed with a meta session, where we’ll discuss your ideas on how to make this hangout as productive and interesting for instructors as possible.  Please add your ideas about this or any other relevant topic to one of the etherpads linked below, and join in the google hangout on Friday!

Google Hangout: https://plus.google.com/hangouts/_/event/clivbhfv3r3q1d6vf4fuhsu5oco

Etherpad: https://etherpad.mozilla.org/instructorHangout-sept12