Mozilla Science Lab Week in Review, Oct. 13 – 19

Shoutouts

A big thank you this week to Fiona Tweedie of the University of Melbourne for her blog post introducing her session on teaching the Python Natural Language Toolkit in the Humanities and Social Sciences, in preparation for her session on the same at MozFest next weekend!

Also many thanks to Damien Irving for his fantastic teaching videos that we reviewed in Instructor Hangouts this week – these are great examples of teaching from the Research Bazaar in Melbourne, and I highly recommend them for those interesting in seeing Software Carpentry teaching in action.

Thanks to the National Cancer Institute for hosting Kaitlin Thaney to speak on open science at their regular speaker series; you can see the entire series including Kaitlin’s talk on their YouTube channel.

And as always, many thanks to all our contributors on the Collaborate program and on the forum – your pull requests and posts are what makes this whole adventure come to life, so if you had a minute to jump in this week, thanks!

In & Around the Lab

This week at the lab, the Science Lab’s director Kaitlin Thaney spoke at the National Cancer Institute Center for Biomedical Informatics and Information Technology Speaker Series. Kaitlin spoke on how we can better work together to advance the mission of more open, collaborative, web-enabled science, and how, together, we can influence the culture of science by demonstrating new and open ways to conduct research on the web. See Kaitlin’s talk and the whole speaker series in NCI‘s YouTube channel.

Instructor Hangouts had its third session this week, where we discussed how to bring theory into practice more when teaching software workshops; as instructors, we study some of the best pedagogy available to us, but putting it into practice can still be a challenge. How can we make these ideas work in the wild, and use them to build flexible lessons that adapt to our students’ needs live and in situ? Let us know your stories and ideas in the comments or on the forum!

Also this week, Abby Cabunoc launched the landing page and schedule for our Science and the Web track at MozFest! We have three fantastic streams lined up: a sprint for hacking on all kinds of projects from citizen science to open science curriculum; a share and help stream for exchanging ideas with people from other fields and getting feedback and help on your projects from technical experts; and a skills teaching track, where you can brush up your skills with tools like Git and GitHub or the IPython notebook (and many more), learn new strategies for wrangling messy data, or discuss how we can make future open science educational offerings even better.

Next Week’s Forecast

Next week is MozFest! The whole Science Lab team will be on site at Ravensbourne College, London, UK for our annual festival where passionate thinkers and inventors come together to learn from one another and engage in a conversation about how the web can do more, and do better. See the Science and the Web landing page on our site for session descriptions and times – we hope you’ll all join us there!

Also next week, Bill Mills will be coteaching Software Carpentry Instructor Training with Greg Wilson in at The Genome Analysis Centre. You can check out Bill’s train-the-trainers lesson plans as they develop (still pretty rough, more to come in the coming months) in their repo or on their GitHub page.