Posted by n.chuehong on 20 August 2015 - 4:32pm

By Aleksandra Pawlik, Training Lead.

This is the last in this month's blog posts taking you around the different activities of the Institute. Today, we feature the Training team.

The training team has been travelling all over the UK and Europe to engage with learners from many different disciplines. We also report on an upcoming visit to the British Science Festival, and interesting new developments with Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry.

Supporting ELIXIR UK in training for bioinformatics

The Institute carries on its activities successfully supporting ELIXIR UK in delivering training to life science researchers. We are helping coordinate the pilot project to introduce and develop Software and Data Carpentry training within ELIXIR UK and across other international ELIXIR Nodes.

After running two hackathons and workshops hosted by ELIXIR Finland and ELIXIR Netherlands Aleksandra Pawlik, the Institute’s Training Lead, co-ran a Data Carpentry workshop hosted by ELIXIR Slovenia. The workshop for 30 attendees was delivered at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Ljubljana and the National Institute of Biology in Ljubljana. The other instructors were Aleksandra Nenadic (ELIXIR-UK Training Coordinator for Infrastructure Technology and University of Manchester) and Peter Juvan (Faculty of Medicine, University of Ljubljana, ELIXIR SI). The workshop received very positive feedback and ELIXIR Slovenia are already considering a follow-up. Peter Juvan and Živa Ramšak (who was a helper at the workshop) are planning to undergo one of the Software and Data Carpentry Instructor Training events hosted in the UK which the Institute will help run.

Aleksandra Pawlik also presented the outcomes of the ELIXIR Software and Data Carpentry Pilot Project at the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference in Dublin, Ireland. See her lightning talk “ELIXIR UK building on Data and Software Carpentry to address the challenges in computational training for life scientists”. Aleksandra was also a part of the panel “Open Source, Open Door: increasing diversity in the bioinformatics open source community”.

The partnership with ELIXIR UK allows the Institute to liaise closely with the life sciences research community and understand their needs in terms of training. We are very excited that by representing Data and Software Carpentry in the UK we are able to provide and develop high-quality training to large-scale projects such as ELIXIR. Through partnering with ELIXIR UK (which leads ELIXIR training activities) we are making an impact not only in the UK but also internationally.

British Science Festival

On 7th and 8th September we are going to run Data Visualisation and Manipulation workshops at the British Science Festival which is taking place in Bradford. Based on the Software and Data Carpentry training materials, we will be running two half-day sessions (also repeated the next day). The first session (morning) covers data visualisation using Python packages and IPython Notebook. The second session (afternoon) will introduce the attendees to manipulating structured data using SQL.

The British Science Festival is addressed at a general audience so this time rather than teaching scientists how to become more efficient in their everyday work, we will show members of the public how research can be done nowadays using computational methods.

The workshop will be run by Aleksandra Pawlik, Jane Charlesworth (Institute Fellow, University of Oxford), Anthony Harrison and Dave Jones (both independent software consultants and Software Carpentry community members). Since the workshop at the Festival is planned as a taster session rather than a full Carpentry workshop, it provides an excellent opportunity for Jane, Anthony and Dave to acquire the knowledge about the Carpentry teaching model. All three of them want to become Carpentry instructors and having this type of teaching experience should be very helpful in their further development en route to obtaining Carpentry Instructor certificates.

Workshops, workshops, workshops

Despite the summer months, Software and Data Carpentry workshops are at full speed across the UK. Giacomo Peru (Institute Project Officer and Software and Data Carpentry UK Programme Coordinator) has been helping to organise upcoming Software Carpentry workshops in:

• University of Leeds (supported by NERC)
• University of Surrey
• The University of Leeds - Advanced Research Computing

Giacomo has been also helping with an ELIXIR UK Data Carpentry workshop at Cambridge University planned for September, and Software Carpentry taster sessions at the Student Conference on Complexity Science (SCCS) organised by the Institute for Complex System Simulation, University of Southampton. Apart from that, the Institute’s Training team has been discussing coordination of several workshops in the coming months at leading UK research institutions, including the University of Southampton, University of Manchester, The Genome Analysis Centre, Environmental Research Doctoral Training Programme at the University of Oxford, Oxford eResearch Centre, Culham Centre for Fusion Energy, Natural History Museum and more.

Data and Software Carpentry strategic development

Through her membership of the Steering Committees of Data Carpentry and Software Carpentry Foundation, Aleksandra Pawlik has been working on the strategic development of these projects. The main efforts have been focused on developing partnerships with research institutions and groups in the UK.

Data Carpentry secured $750,000 in funding from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. This is an excellent news as it helps with stable and sustainable growth of Data Carpentry which enables the Institute to continue the successful partnership with this project.

Giacomo Peru has been contributing to the development of the workshop management system AMY which is currently developed by Piotr Banaszkiewicz as a part of his Google Summer of Code experience. Aleksandra Pawlik has been working on the Software Carpentry Assessment Form template automated cloning script which will be integrated into the AMY system in the future.

Instructor Training

To meet the growing demand for Software and Data Carpentry workshops across the United Kingdom the Institute is working closely with Greg Wilson (Executive Director, Software Carpentry Foundation) and Tracy Teal (Project Lead, Data Carpentry) towards running a series of Instructor Training workshops in the UK.