What’s happening next week
Greg Wilson will be doing a walk-through of the GitHub repository for our lesson materials, this Thursday, February 20th, at 10am, 2 pm, and 7pm, all Eastern time. Everyone is welcome, specially those planning to teach a workshop in the near future. Connection details will be posted on the teaching Etherpad.
Workshops
Four workshops happened this week:
- Damien Irving taught a workshop at the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, at the University of Tasmania in Hobart, Australia. The workshop was part of the 2014 National Conference of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society.
- Trevor Bekolay, Bonny Biswas, Abby Cabunoc, and Greg Wilson taught a workshop at the Mozilla campus in Toronto.
- Daniel Falster, Rich FitzJohn, and Diego Barneche taught a R-based workshop at the University of South Wales in Australia, specifically aimed to researchers in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.
- Finally, Emily Jane McTavish, Jonah Duckles, and Genevieve Smith taught a workshop at the University of Missouri-Kansas City over the weekend. The workshop was R-based and the students were mostly working on Economics.
Lesson Development
There was quite an activity in our lesson repository: 14 pull requests were merged, 9 issues were closed, and 10 issues were opened. In addition to the merges, we had 48 commits made by Greg Wilson, Bernhard Konrad, Raniere Silva, Denis Haine, Kwasi Kwakwa, and AnneTheAgile.
Other news
Greg Wilson wrote on the blog about peer instruction, a flipped classroom teaching method in which students discuss together on questions posed by the instructor. Peer instruction is hard to implement in online learning, due to the lack of appropriate software. If you are interested in hacking an online peer instruction tool, contact Greg.
Karthik Ram made a call on the blog for people interested in contributing to the rOpenSci Hackathon, to be held in San Francisco at the end of March. R developers can apply for an invitation to attend, but everybody is welcome to propose ideas to hack on through their GitHub repo.
Remember that we are running our biggest event ever at PyCon 2014 in Montreal next April. In addition to our usual curriculum, there will be two special classes by Prof. Titus Brown on bioinformatics, and by Prof. Ramnath Vaidyanathan on R for Python programmers. Consider joining the PyCon pool of instructors and helpers, and spread the word among your Canadian and East Coast friends. See all the details here.
Please send bootcamp reports, questions, suggestions for quotes, and other updates to igonzalez@mailaps.org.