Monthly Archives: December 2011

Rethinking Software Carpentry

I’ve spent some time in the last two weeks thinking about what I’ve learned from Software Carpentry, and how to move it forward. I think a lot of the ideas apply to online learning in general; I hope you find them useful.

  1. What I’ve Learned So Far
  2. Organizing Instruction and Study to Improve Student Learning
  3. What Success Looks Like Five Years Out
  4. Fork, Merge, and Share
  5. Some Responses to Some Comments
  6. The Fire Last Time
  7. Settings Our Sights a Little Bit Lower

What I’ve Learned So Far About Online Teaching

I just posted 1500 words plus footnotes on the Software Carpentry site summarizing what I’ve learned so far about online teaching. The takeaways are:

  1. Online teaching isn’t as effective as in-person teaching.
  2. Today’s tools suck.
  3. If content is king, then community is queen, pope, emperor, and president-for-life.
  4. If you don’t know how to tell if you succeeded, you’re going to fail.
  5. If you don’t take the time to explore what other people have done, you deserve to fail.

I’d welcome comments…

PowerPoint + Visio, but in Javascript?

I’ve been complaining for a couple of years now about not being able to use HTML + Javascript as a replacement for PowerPoint. Yes, it’s easy to put images and text beside one another in S5 or one of its many descendents, but I want to be able to draw on top of my text, just like I do on a whiteboard:

I can do put text and figures together in HTML5′s canvas element, but (a) laying out the text is more difficult than it is in plain old HTML, and (b) as soon as someone resizes their browser, the textual and diagrammatic parts of my page won’t line up any longer. Putting my text and drawing in separate layers seems like a step in the right direction; my question is, is there something out there that’ll give me Visio-style anchoring as well? I.e., can I give an element in one layer a reference to something in another, then ask someone’s Javascript library to lay out the referring element afresh whenever the referred-to element is redisplayed? It would be a nice complement to Tangle…

How to Teach Webcraft and Programming to Free-Range Students

I will be running a P2PU course starting in January on teaching free-range learners how to program and build stuff on the web. The blurb is below; anyone who wants to can sign up to follow along or take part (we expect it will require 3-4 hours/week from mid-January to some time in April). I’m not an expert on these subjects by any means, but I’ve learned a few things from running Software Carpentry that I think are worth sharing, and hope that this course will give me a chance to learn more.  (Note that I’m primarily interested in how to teach adults outside traditional classroom settings, so that will be the course’s initial focus, but its long-term direction will depend on the interests of participants.)

How to Teach Webcraft and Programming to Free-Range Students

What do we know about how novices learn webcraft and programming, why do we believe it, and how can we apply that knowledge to free-range learners?

Right now, people all over the world are learning how to write programs and create web sites, but or every one who is doing it in a classroom there are a dozen free-range learners. This group will focus on how we, as mentors, can best help them. Topics will include:

  • What does research tell us about how people learn?
  • Why are the demographics of programming so unbalanced?
  • What best practices in instructional design are relevant to free-range learners?
  • What skills do people need in order to bake their own web?
  • How are grassroots groups trying to teach these things now?
  • What’s working and what isn’t?