A Self-Recorded Workshop

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Among the many great lessons contained in Greg Wilson's recent post on building better teachers, perhaps one of the most important was that in order to improve our collective teaching standards, we really need to see each other in action:

The teachers described lessons they gave and things students said, but they did not see the practices. When it came to observing actual lessons—watching each other teach—they simply had no opportunity... They had, he realized, no jugyokenkyu.

With this in mind, I went ahead and recorded a Software Carpentry workshop that we hosted at the University of Melbourne last month. I wanted to try a recording method that could be used by anyone, anywhere (i.e. no elaborate technological dependencies like lecture capture technology or a fancy external microphone), so I simply downloaded a 30-day free trial of Camtasia and set it to record a screencast, video and audio while I was teaching. The recording quality was even better than I expected, so feel free to check it out (and post feedback, which is the whole point of the exercise!) at the Research Bazaar YouTube channel. In particular, there has been a lot of interest in my Git session, which took less than one hour.