MozFest 2014 Keynote Speakers

Mozilla

MozFest logo copy
We’re excited to welcome a slate of thought-provoking keynote speakers who will discuss the state of the web today, why an open web matters more than ever, and how you can get involved in building the web of the future.
Beeban Kidron
Film Director & Co-Founder, FILMCLUB
Beeban
The Baroness Beeban Kidron has been directing films for more than 30 years and is a joint founder of FILMCLUB, a educational charity that allows children to watch and analyze internationally iconic films. Each week the charity reaches 220,000  children, in more than 7,000 clubs.
Kidron is  best known for directing Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason and  the Bafta-winning miniseries Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. She also directed To Wong Foo Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar, Antonia and Jane, as well as two documentaries on  prostitution: Hookers, Hustlers, Pimps and their Johns, and Sex, Death and the Gods, a film about “devadasi,” or Indian “sacred prostitutes.”
Her latest film, InRealLife, explores the first generation of British teenagers who are  growing up having never known a time before smartphones and social  media, whose childhoods are defined by status updates, emails and digitized friendships.
Mary Moloney
Global CEO, CoderDojo
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Mary joined the CoderDojo Foundation team in June 2014, to take up the position of Global CEO. Prior to that, she was a partner in Accenture’s strategy practice, leading engagements with international clients in the Media, High Tech, Telco & Financial Services sectors. During her 23 years with Accenture Mary held a number of lead positions within the organization & within its clients, including; Partner, Managing Director and Multiple C-Suite positions. She has also been involved at board level with number of non profit organizations and remains on the boards of the Dublin Fringe Festival and the Professional Women’s Network. Both of her 9 year old and 7 year old sons are active ninjas who participate at the Science Gallery and Sandymount Dojos near where she lives in Dublin.
@marydunph
Mark Surman
Executive Director, Mozilla Foundation
mark-surman
A community activist and technology executive of 20+ years, Mark  currently serves as the Executive Director of the Mozilla Foundation, makers of Firefox and one of the largest social enterprises in the  world. At Mozilla, he is focused on using the open technology and ethos of the web to transform fields such as education, journalism and filmmaking. Mark has overseen the development of Popcorn.js, which Wired  has called the future of online video; the Open Badges initiative,  launched by the US Secretary of Education; and the Knight Mozilla News  Technology partnership, which seeks to reinvent the future of digital  journalism.
Prior to joining Mozilla, Mark was awarded one of the first Shuttleworth  Foundation Fellowships, where he explored the application of open  principles to philanthropy. During his fellowship, he advised a Harvard  Berkman study on open source licensing in foundations, was the lead  author on the Cape Town Open Education Declaration, and organized the  first open education track at the iCommons Summit, which led to him  becoming a founding board member of Peer-to-peer University (P2PU). Mark holds a BA in the History of Community Media from the  University of Toronto.
@msurman
Mitchell Baker
Executive Chairwoman, Mozilla
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As the leader of the Mozilla Project, Mitchell Baker is responsible for organizing and motivating a massive, worldwide, collective of employees and volunteers who are breathing new life into the Internet with the Firefox Web browser, Firefox OS and other Mozilla products.
Mitchell was born and raised in Berkeley, California, receiving her BA in Asian Studies from UC Berkeley and her JD from the Boalt Hall School of Law. Mitchell has been the general manager of the Mozilla project since 1999. She served as CEO of Mozilla until January 2008, when the organization’s rapid growth encouraged her to split her responsibilities and add a CEO. Mitchell remains deeply engaged in developing product offerings that promote the mission of empowering individuals. She also guides the overall scope and direction of Mozilla’s mission.
@MitchellBaker

Get Involved:

 

Report from STEAMLabs: Looking Back on the International Astronautical Congress

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This post was written by Marianne Mader, co-founder of STEAMLabs and Planetary Science PhD Candidate at the Centre for Planetary Science and Exploration, and reflects her experience in running a pop up station as part of the International Space Education Board “International Student Zone” during the International Astronautical Congress (IAC). 

ISEB event at IAC

Walking into the Exhibit Hall of the 65th International Astronautical Congress at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, you were greeted by the who’s who of the space industry. Your eye jumped from SpaceX simulation chairs, to a model of the Canadarm, to a huge inflated model of NASA’s human space capsule. This conference brought together leaders of the space exploration community from around the world including the heads of all space agencies and companies.

At the back of the Exhibit Hall was a walled off area called the International Student Zone and on Friday, Oct. 3 there was a dull roar emitting from this space. Over the course of the day, 200 grade 6 students from across Toronto participated in an outreach event sponsored by the International Space Education Board – a group founded by NASA, the Canadian space agency, the European Space Agency, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. Every year at the International Astronautical Congress this group of space education leaders host an outreach event and this year, for the first time, local organizations helped in this task.

3 ISEB outreach event

STEAMLabs co-founder and Planetary Scientist Marianne Mader was the local point of contact and worked with NASA to plan a pop-up event. Seven organizations including STEAMLabs, Mad Science, TDSB, Kids Learning Code, BYTE, the Centre for Planetary Science at Western University, and Story Planet, volunteered to host stations and trained 60 graduate students from around the world in how to run their open-ended, hands-on activities. Kids were given passports and encouraged to visit whatever stations they chose.

Near the entrance to the outreach event, students could try a space simulation chair from the Marc Garneau Collegiate Institute and experiments designed by Mad Science demonstrating some challenges of living and working in space. Kids could learn how to be a meteorite hunter and make impact craters at the CPSX station. MakerKids invited the students to participate in an asteroid capture mission. Kids created their own spacecraft that was mounted on pre-built remote controlled bases and then they steered their spaceship to try and capture an asteroid (simulated by chocolate chip cookies). The kids enjoyed ‘mining’ their asteroids for chocolate chip resources! With Kids Learning Code, grade 6 students used 3D printers to design spacecrafts and aliens using Mesh Mixer 3D software. Kids became directors of their own 5 second claymation movies under the direction of BYTE (Black Youth in Tech Education) and created original comics about alien crash landings with Story Planet.

Mad Science space glove box

“Can I have your autograph?” became a common phrase heard from the kids. Awesome. In the eyes of these students the STEM leaders were elevated to the status of rockstars! How amazing is it for kids to value scientists as celebrities? The space agency education heads, TDSB teachers and STEM coaches joined in on the fun – everyone learning through play!

After the event, Donald G. James, NASA’s Associate Administrator for Education thanked all the educators and graduate students for the event and for teaching STEM. He remembers all of his primary school teachers, and their passion and enthusiasm was a big part of why he got interested in science and space! He presented a certificate to each organization to show NASA’s appreciation.

This event could not have been possible without the Hive members’ collective experience participating in previous Mozilla Hive Network pop-up events and the connections made between organizations. This model is an effective outreach approach that can be used in many settings – events, conferences or even in schools!

MakerKids 1 asteroid capture mission

Thanks to Joe Romano, TDSB Teaching & Learning Coach & Digital Lead Learner Mentor, for coordinating the school selection and to the following schools for participating: Wexford Public School, H.A. Halbert Junior Public School, St. Margaret’s Public School, Humber Summit Middle School, Parkdale Public School, and Rawlinson Community School.

Check out #ISEB_outreach on twitter for more pics!!

Burlington Public Library: The Intersection of Digital Literacy and a Community of Making

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Burlington Public Library recently joined as an official member of the Hive Toronto network. This post was written by the Burlington Public Library team to share why BPL joined the community, specifically around the opportunities BPL hopes to work towards by leveraging the connections, knowledge and existing resources within the Hive community.

Burlington Public Library had a few challenges:

  1. We wanted to find a way to provide teens with programs that would develop their digital literacy and other making skills – but couldn’t figure out the best way.
  2. We had the traditional library problem of teens not thinking of the library as a space where these kinds of activities happen.
  3. We were hearing from teens that they were desperate for meaningful volunteer opportunities to fulfill their required volunteer hours.

BPL now has a plan. We’re going to have teens come to the library to learn some of these skills AND get volunteer hours for doing it. Here’s a small example of how it’s going to work.

On Saturday, September 6th, Karen Smith from Mozilla came to BPL to introduce a small group of teens to Webmaker’s collection of tools: Thimble, X-Ray Goggles, and Parapara. The teens then got volunteer hours for coming to the session. Why? Because they committed themselves to showing other teens how to use these services and committed to participate in our DIY+Maker Expo in October to show the larger public how to use them. They’ll get volunteer hours for doing that as well.

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Mozilla’s Parapara Tool: click on the image to the full activity kit and learn how to run your own workshop with this tool.

We’re hoping that these kinds of volunteer opportunities will enable us to spread our ability to provide youth with some of the skills that they need. The goal is for youth to both learn and give back. By asking them to share their new skills with others, we know that it will help solidify what they’ve learned and will also build their social skills. We’re also hoping that it will lead to them co-designing some of the opportunities they’d like to see happen. Will this plan work? We think so – so stay tuned!

Featured Image credit: “HTML” by en:User:Dreftymac – en:Image:HTML.svg. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons – http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HTML.svg#mediaviewer/File:HTML.svg

Get involved with Web Literacy Map v2.0!

Mozilla

TL;DR: Mozilla is working with the community to update the Web Literacy Map to v2.0. You can read more about the project below, or jump straight in and take the survey or join the community calls.
 
Mozilla Festival

Introduction

Mozilla defines web literacy as the skills and competencies needed for reading, writing and participating on the web. To chart these skills and competencies, we worked alongside a community of stakeholders in 2013 to create the Web Literacy Map. You can read more about why Mozilla cares about web literacy in this Webmaker Whitepaper.
The Web Literacy Map underpins the work we do with Webmaker and, in particular, the Webmaker resources section. As the web develops and evolves, we have committed to keeping the Web Literacy Map up-to-date. That’s why we’ve begun work on a version 2.0 of the Web Literacy Map.
To date, we’ve interviewed 38 stakeholders on what they believe the Web Literacy Map is doing well, and how it could be improved. We boiled down their feedback to 21 emerging themes for Web Literacy Map v2.0 and some ideas for how Webmaker could be improved.
 
Mozilla Festival London 2012

Community survey

From the 21 emerging themes mentioned above, we identified five proposals that would help shape further discussion about the Web Literacy Map. These are:

  1. I believe the Web Literacy Map should explicitly reference the Mozilla manifesto.
  2. I believe the three strands should be renamed ‘Reading’, ‘Writing’ and ‘Participating’.
  3. I believe the Web Literacy Map should look more like a ‘map’.
  4. I believe that concepts such as ‘Mobile’, ‘Identity’, and ‘Protecting’ should be represented as cross-cutting themes in the Web Literacy Map.
  5. I believe a ‘remix’ button should allow me to remix the Web Literacy Map for my community and context.

We’ve added these to a survey* which is available in the following languages:

The survey will close on November 1st. If you’d like to translate the survey into another language, please join one of the teams (or create your own!) on Transifex.
*Note: you can email your responses directly if you’d rather not sign into a Google account.
 
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Community calls

Today, we’re kicking off a series of seven Web Literacy Map v2.0 community calls. These will be at 3pm UTC:

There is a calendar that you can subscribe to here.
If you can’t make the calls, please do leave notes for discussion on the agenda for an upcoming call using the links above. Alternatively, get involved in the Web Literacy Map discussion area of the #TeachTheWeb forum.
 
Mozilla Maemo Danish Weekend 2009

Conclusion

We’re hoping to have the text of an updated Web Literacy Map finished by Q1 2015. The graphical elements and the reorganization of webmaker.org that it may entail will take longer. We’d be very interested in hearing how you plan to use it in your context.
You can keep up-to-date with everything to do with Web Literacy Map v2.0 by bookmarking this page on the Mozilla wiki.
Finally, there will be a few sessions at the Mozilla Festival next week about the Web Literacy Map. Look out for them, and get involved!

<p align="right".Images: mozillaeu, REV-, Paul Clarke, and William Quiviger

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

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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.

Reading List

Fiona Tweedie‘s guest blog on the Python Natural Language Toolkit.

Rise of the Rest: The Growing Impact of Non-Elite Journals

Don’t miss F1000‘s Weekly Open Science Roundup

Interesting conversation starter from Damien Irving on what tools are getting used for open science out in the wild.

 

 

 

 

MozFest 2014 kicks off in one week!

Mozilla

MozFest logo copy

It’s Almost Time!

MozFest — Mozilla’s annual hands-on festival dedicated to forging the future of the open, global web — is about to begin.
This year’s festival, which takes place in London from October 24 – 26, will be packed with passionate technologists and creators eager to share their skills and hack on innovative digital solutions for the web’s most pressing issues.

The Web Is Vulnerable

It’s no secret that the web as a free and open public resource is under threat. Governments and corporations are vying for control, leaving web users across the globe struggling to protect not only their own personal online security, but the integrity of the Internet as a whole. As billions more people come online in the next decade thanks to affordable mobile technologies, is their web going to be open or closed? Decentralized or controlled? Will they be passive consumers or empowered creators? More and more people are realizing we need to step in and save the web, but that’s only going to happen if more of us are fighting.

Together We Are Strong

The good news is that hundreds of thousands of people, organizations and communities around the world are eager to help with this mission. MozFest is about imagining how we can work together. How can citizens of the web in communities around the world be empowered to take action? MozFest participants will tackle these challenges not just by talking about them, but by building new ways to teach and engage everyone in making the web together.

Hacking Practical Solutions

MozFest is where people who love the open web collaborate to envision how it can do more, and do better. The motto of the festival is Less Yack, More Hack which results in a focus on identifying current challenges and developing practical solutions. This year, MozFest will feature 11 themed tracks:

  • The Mobile Web
  • Policy & Advocacy
  • Community Building
  • Build and Teach the Web
  • Open Web With Things
  • Source Code for Journalism
  • Science and the Web
  • Art and Culture of the Web
  • Open Badges Lab
  • Hive Learning Networks
  • Musicians and Music Creators on the Open Web

Scores of individual sessions will be held as part of each track. Here’s just a taste of the sessions participants will be hacking:

  • How the next 1 billion internet users will bring their online ideas to life
  • Helping 10 million young people become digitally literate
  • Design your first mobile app
  • Hacking the gender gap
  • Using badges to support the delivery of the new computing curriculum
  • User privacy and security on the web
  • Let’s build an unbreakable internet
  • Making open web a part of the curriculum
  • I was born with the web – 25 under 25
  • How to get into the correct amount of trouble online

Our aim this year is to showcase and develop best practices for community leadership. Join us in discovering how distributed organizing and sharing skills through teaching and learning can build a web filled with opportunity for all!

Get Involved:

 

Instructor Hangouts Roundup, Oct. 16

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2 responses

An interesting thread emerged at yesterday’s Instructor Hangouts – we began by watching an example of excellent instruction from a recent Software Carpentry workshop, for which I only had my perpetual criticism: get the students to do more stuff! Give them challenge exercises, ask them questions to see if they understand – the instructor did a great job and gave plenty of exercises, but I often find more is better for students eager to get their hands dirty.

After that, we discussed ideas on how to adapt a lesson on the fly to your learners’ needs  – if you find your learners don’t understand something, how do you pivot to accommodate them? When do you start cutting material, and when do you just move on? Watch this space for a deeper dive there coming soon.

On the surface, these two things don’t seem so connected. But consider: Software Carpentry instructor training goes through constructing insightful multiple choice questions for quickly assessing student comprehension in great detail; we also teach instructors about constructing concept maps, using reverse instructional design, and understanding the power of peer instruction – all of which can be leveraged as vehicles for creating adaptive lessons, responsive to learner needs. But as discussion around the video pointed out, it’s easy to call out opportunities for exercises and questions after the fact – but using those tools and techniques in situ is neither obvious nor easy.

I’m guilty of the same. I have been through instructor training a number of times, and still sometimes find myself robotically marching through lessons, top to bottom without enough feedback or adjustment to my learners – I don’t think that’s the right thing to do, and I’m making a point of avoiding it in future, but there’s a gap between theory and practice that’s nontrivial to bridge.

So – how do we as instructors cross the activation barrier and make these pedagogical ideas we’re trained in work in practice? One thing we discussed yesterday, was injecting more questions and pointers on where to give students exercises or multiple choice questions; this way, the practice that we learn in instructor training will be reflected in the texts from which we actually teach. As is, lessons written as long texts read like lectures, and I think that leads to them getting delivered like lectures. A couple things that might not be too tough:

  • Inserting exercises throughout the lesson text to reinforce ideas as the lesson proceeds, rather than in a block at the end.
  • Inventories of concepts and misconceptions to build multiple choice questions off of, and good points to inject the resulting MCQs.

Are there other things we can do to promote frequent, reinforcing exercises and formative questioning of our students? How often do you use MCQs, peer instruction or other techniques in your workshops? Let us know in the comments or on the forum, and I hope you’ll join us for the next Instructor Hangouts!

Q&A with Maker State

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Every year we get the opportunity to connect with many great organizations who are spreading web literacy around the world at all times of the year. MakerState, hands-on makerspaces in New York City, is a perfect example. We had a chance to sit down with the founder of MakerState, Stephen Gilman to talk about what they’ve done in the past few months and the upcoming events they have planned for continuous making.
makerspace kids smaller

What is your organization and what do you do?

MakerState empowers kids ages 5-18 with science, technology, engineering, arts, and math (STEAM) passion and skill through makerspaces in robot engineering, fashion/wearable electronics, video game design, paper circuits, 3D prototyping and printing, comic book creation, and moviemaking. MakerState hosts makerspaces nationwide in schools and after-school programs as well as community workshops, pop up makerspaces, and summer camps.

What are the events you hosted or ran this year?

We hosted over 30 makerspaces this year in schools and community centers in New York, New Orleans, San Francisco, Boston, New Haven…and hopefully coming to your town soon!

Why did you choose to get involved with Maker Party?

We are a community of makers and educators  who believe that all learning can happen through building, creating, hacking, inventing…through making. We are committed to bringing as many maker-learning experiences as possible to kids and Maker Party is a perfect partner for us in that effort. Whether we’re doing pop up makerspaces with Maker Party or ongoing school-based makerspaces throughout the year, we’re excited to be Maker Party hosts.

What is the most exciting thing about running events?

Our favorite moment in the makerspace is when a young person, maybe five, six, seven years old, finds a maker project that they really love and becomes completely immersed in it. They are creating and building and learning science, engineering, design, or programming at the same time. But it’s the total immersion and joy that is so captivating to observe. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has called that moment the “flow state”—we call it the maker state.

Why is it important for youth and adults to make things with technology?

We see technology as the tools and media humans use to create art, new products, and to interact with others. Tech is how people literally live their lives. Tech can also save lives and bring us joy and allow us to pursue common dreams. There is a darker side to tech too: polluting, disintegrating, even destroying life. We teach kids the power of tech and tool-making so that they understand how to create new technology and benefit from it. Ultimately, it’s about moving young people from passive consumption of tech to become the pro-active, socially responsible creators of it. We’re convinced that this generation of kids we’re working with will create safe forms of energy, life-saving medical treatments, and new forms of media that draw humanity together for peace and productivity. If we can engage kids at a young enough age and build skills, confidence and passions around tech, they will blow our minds with the new world they create.

What is the feedback you usually get from people who attend or teach at your events?

It’s so fun to observe parents as they watch their kids in the makerspace. I like to step back from the kids sometimes and stand beside their parents as they marvel at what their kids are building. The universal reaction: I can’t believe how much she loves this project. I’m so impressed with what my son has built. I wish their whole school experience could be like this. We agree!

Why is it important for people and organizations to get involved with Maker Party and teaching the web?

Maker Party gives kids and communities an opportunity to explore hands on creativity with technology, often for the first time. This experience is invaluable for young people—often it is life changing. It’s the moment a young girl realizes she can become an engineer and build her world. The moment an inner city student realizes the total joy of science and the rewarding life he can live in pursuit of new ideas and new solutions to human challenges. Maker Party offers these life-changing moments to young people and we are proud to be a part of the movement.

How can people get in touch with your organization?

To start a STEM-mastery makerspace in your school or host a summer camp, contact MakerState at info@maker-state.com.

MozFest: Science and the Web Sessions and Schedule

Mozilla

MozFest is almost upon us, so Abby has created a landing page for the Science and the Web track! There you’ll find summaries of each session, contact info for all the session leads, and links to the etherpads for each session to ask questions, exchange information and find out more details. We have three streams planned for you:

Sprints – we’ve got four sprint sessions planned for the weekend; each one is an intense 3-hour sprint on topics from citizen science projects to curriculum development. There’s something for everybody interested in open science, so check out the schedule and come get your hands dirty!

Share & Help – Participate in interdisciplinary discussions about how open science can learn from different fields and practices, or come ask an expert for advice, technical help or review ideas at our Office Hours station.

Training – Interested in open science but need to tool up some skills first? Jump into one of our training sessions on Git & GitHub, the IPython notebook, wrangling messy data and more!

I’m really impressed & excited for the diverse spectrum of activities, discussions and people that are going to be joining forces in the Science and the Web track this year – as always, I hope you’ll join us there!

Text analysis with the Python Natural Language Toolkit

Mozilla

The following is a guest post from Fiona Tweedie of the University of Melbourne, and host for one of our upcoming MozFest sessions on Text as Data in the Humanities and Social Sciences. You can follow her on Twitter at @FCTweedie.

The increased availability of digital texts means that text mining techniques are now relevant to more researchers than ever. The ability to analyze huge bodies of text quickly and efficiently has expanded the possibilities of text-based research. But humanities and social science researchers often lack the tools to make the most of these new data sources. A little Software Carpentry, however, has the potential to expand the research they are able to do and increase their ability to share and reproduce that research. To address this need, we’re developing course materials to introduce the Python Natural Language Toolkit and help historians, anthropologists, sociologists and political scientists (to name a few) analyze text. In our MozFest workshop, we’ll be testing out some new training materials for the first time and we’re especially looking for help from:

  • Humanities and social science people – would you find this training useful?
  • Python users – are the concepts introduced in a way that makes sense?
  • Linguists – are we explaining enough linguistic theory to ensure that the results are sound?
  • Anyone else with an interest in text mining and a willingness to play-test new training materials

The existing course materials can be accessed at: https://github.com/resbaz/lessons/tree/master/nltk

Please bring a laptop, ideally with access to IPython notebooks. See http://ipython.org/install.html to access.