4 - 18 March, 2016: Instructor Trainee Mentoring, Debriefing vs Lesson Sessions, Version Control, Big Data in Biology Summer School, New Lessons

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

##Instructor Training

• How can we help instructor trainees complete their training? Belinda Weaver is working hard to support new instructors in Australia. Do you have any other ideas?
• Several opportunities are now available for new and experienced instructors to join the conversations about workshops. Should we be combining various sessions to better integrate new and old instructors and give more options for participation?
• You can also read about the abovementioned discussions in the latest summary of instructor debriefing rounds 4 and 5.

##Conversations

• Over the last few weeks a very interesting discussion took place on our discuss mailing list about version control beyond git and svn. The conversation was prompted by an initial post by Arjun Raj. Arjun summarised his view on the discussion in a follow-up post titled: From over-reproducibility to a reproducibility wish-list.

##New

• A new Data Carpentry Genomics lesson and Defensive Programming with Python lesson were discussed during round 4 & 5 of instructor training debriefing. Please read their post and visit the repos for more information. There are also many other cool tools and tips for new and experienced instructors in this post.

##Events

• The 3rd Annual Big Data in Biology Summer School will take place at the University of Texas at Austin from 23-26 May 2016. 11 courses will be scheduled over four half-days each and include topics such as basic computational skills, Genomics, and Proteomics.

##Other

• The DataOne Webinar with Greg Wilson titled Research Computing Skills for Scientists: Lessons, Challenges, and Opportunities from Software Carpentry is now available online.
• What is the difference between commercial and scientific software? Please share your thoughts.
• Byron Smith built on the Software Carpentry Make lessons to develop a Make tutorial for Titus Brown’s week-long Bioinformatics Workshop at UC Davis’s Bodega Marine Laboratory in February, 2016.
• Aleksandra Pawlik recently spoke about Supporting Research Software Community Through Training at the eResearch New Zealand conference. The talk focused on the development of Software and Data Carpentry in the UK.
• 15 workshops were run over the past 15 days. For more information about past workshops, please visit our website
• Upcoming Workhshops
  • March: University of Oklahoma, Brock University, University of Connecticut, Imperial College London, University of Florida Informatics Institute, University of Miami, UNIC Gif-sur-Yvette, University of Washington - Seattle
  • April: University of Texas at Arlington, UNC Chapel Hill, Online, University of California, Santa Barbara, North-West University
  • May: Bancroft Building, University of Toronto, CSDMS Annual Meeting, Online, Colorado Special Libraries Association @ CU Boulder, National Institutes of Health
  • June: University of Cincinnati
  • July: R workshop - The University of Queensland