Not logged in
Talk
Contributions
Create account
Log in
Navigation
Main page
About
People
Publications
Teaching
Resources
Research Blog
Wiki Functions
Recent changes
Help
Licensing
Page
Discussion
Edit
View history
Editing
Community Data Science Workshops (Fall 2014)/Reflections
(section)
From CommunityData
Jump to:
navigation
,
search
Warning:
You are not logged in. Your IP address will be publicly visible if you make any edits. If you
log in
or
create an account
, your edits will be attributed to your username, along with other benefits.
Anti-spam check. Do
not
fill this in!
== General Feedback == * Generally, there was a sense that we should stop creating pages in the wiki by copying and pasting old stuff. This was the BPW model but it's leading to madness. We when archive an old version of a site, we can use MediaWiki to create links to the old version of the pages (we can install templates from English Wikipedia to help make this easier). * We should try to schedule the workshop not quite so close to the end of the quarter. The beginning or middle of the quarter should be better for UW students. * Mentors should post the code generated in the break-out sessions. Encourage them to capture the code created in examples and to post these afterward systematically. * There was general interest in pair programming or more team based exercised. We should consider changes along this line. * There was a need for several on-the-fly corrections of the instructions and files on the wiki during the workshop. Better planning and testing for this will be very useful. === Mentorship === Last time through, most of our observation were focused on improving the experience of attendees and we think we didn't spend as much time on helping mentors have a great experience and helping them prepare effectively. We had many new mentors this round. One general concern was the relative lack of mentor training, especially before the first sessions. We had a series of pieces of feedback on how to improve this. * Arrange a pre-CDSW mentors meeting (perhaps a day or two before to over material) and maybe at a bar or other social environment with beer and pizza. We could use this to set norms, best practices, goals, planning, etc. * Perhaps meet 15-20 minutes early before Session 0 to get to know each other and over things. * Create some easier way to distinguish mentors from students (e.g., t-shirts, buttons, paper them head to foot in sticky notes). * Send out detailed instructions and emails to mentors, or create pages in this wiki, that detail good mentoring. For example: ** How much should you help? Some. But be careful not to just give away the answer, to focus too much on elegance or technical correctness. Be careful not to overwhelm the learners. ** Explicitly encourage mentors to reach out to students and ask them how things are going by walking around to every single person to ask, “How are you doing? What are you working on? Show me what you’re doing.” === More Projects or Better Projects === Once again, we had certain afternoon project sessions that were much more effective than others. One thing we were conflicted about was whether we wanted more break-out sessions or whether we should just use the best of the break-out sessions (perhaps in two rooms). Arguments for smaller groups of the best break-out session include: * Focus on a known good thing. * Pre-canned sessions make it easier for new mentors to feel confident and be successful. Arguments against include: * Diversity of projects inspires people to do the kinds of things that people can do with this new knowledge. We should pursue other ways to encourage creativity with code. For example, we might give participants creative/flexible moments within sessions and lectures might be empowering in similar ways. We can also continue to call out participants who are doing creative things.
Summary:
Please note that all contributions to CommunityData are considered to be released under the Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported (see
CommunityData:Copyrights
for details). If you do not want your writing to be edited mercilessly and redistributed at will, then do not submit it here.
You are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a public domain or similar free resource.
Do not submit copyrighted work without permission!
To protect the wiki against automated edit spam, we kindly ask you to solve the following CAPTCHA:
Cancel
Editing help
(opens in new window)
Tools
What links here
Related changes
Special pages
Page information