Curriculum developmen

[Sam Popowich]

At Sara's prompting, this is to capture my response to Software Carpentry's algorithm for figuring out the curriculum:

"Watch ~20 coder librarians, categorize tasks, count, sort, and base curriculum on what's most common."

One of the things I've been most leery of is the tendency (among librarians and non-librarians) either to see library technology as homogeneous or to tacitly assume we're all talking about the same librarians/library staff as the participants in training/learning. The problem I have with the above algorithm is a) "coder librarians" aren't necessarily the target for training and learning (maybe they are, but there are certainly other members of library staff) and b) the kinds of work among "coder librarians" differs enormously, and also differs quite a lot from the kind of tasks non-coding (for now) librarians are doing that we think coding etc. would help with. Watching 20 members of our target consituency for a while, and figuring out what tasks they aren't using technology for that technology would help with - that to me sounds like a better algorithm. 

Just my plug for more nuance/recognition that librarianship is a large and varied animal and that we *might* not all be talking about the same thing/people/work. :)

Sam.

[JR H]

+1,000,000 Sam!

It's definitely true that a lot of people have a misconception that the field is homogeneous, which it's not, (and also highly localized) but I do think that there needs to be a unified curriculum for Software Carpentry (at least) with some sort of selection of modules (much like there is for scientists.)

One of the things that makes this model so interesting is I am sure that a biologist would have a similar response: "What I do is extremely different from a physicist," (for example,) yet there is a demonstrable curriculum that people can use to gain basic coding and computer skills.
For me, (as this is now my research,) what's important is to observe systems and tech librarians in a variety of different settings in order to figure out what they are ACTUALLY doing as well as get a solid understanding of the literature around coding, programming, and tech in libraries through spaces like code4lib, and so on.

This is super new for me as well!  It was proposed to me as a fruitful research query last week, and I am happy to collaborate and grow with you all to figure out how it will best serve the community.

[Sam Popowich]

Awesome!

Jennie Rose, was that "watch coder librarians..." a prescriptive algorithm, or is that what you're going to be doing for your research? I may have misunderstood. 

As a first step for those of us in Edmonton, I've forked the SWCarpentry curriculum for us to begin tweaking the examples for our upcoming bootcamps. We haven't started actually doing the work, but our fork is here: https://github.com/redlibrarian/bc

Sam.

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Libraries Learning Code" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to libraries-learnin...@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/libraries-learning-code.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

--

Sam Popowich
Discovery Systems Librarian
University of Alberta Library
Edmonton, Alberta
Sam.Po...@ualberta.ca
780-492-8215

[JR H]

yeah, no, coderlibrarians (new superhero name anyone?) is totally not prescriptive.

One of the interesting things about this will be to see actually understand how silo'd coding is in various parts of various libraries.  My hypothesis is that it will vary, but we'll see!

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to libraries-learning-code+unsub...@googlegroups.com.

Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/libraries-learning-code.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

[Andromeda Yelton]

(whoops, meant to send this to everyone...)

---------- Forwarded message ----------

My dream technology contractor gig, honestly, is figuring out the thing librarians don't know they need code for, and writing that code.  (Well, my OTHER dream gig, when I'm not teaching librarians to code. ;)

I agree, though, that the heterogeneity is a problem. When I teach people I always ask about their use cases, and there's this whole swath of relatively well-defined and similar-ish use cases that come out of technical services, especially cataloging...and then there's a much more variable and often more vaguely defined set from the rest of the library.  And I really want to design curriculum that is applicable EVERYwhere...but then it feels like I'm developing the pymarc version and the web version and, and, and.

If I had to pick ONE module/use case to structure a non-siloed intro around, though? CSV. Just about everyone in a library munches on spreadsheets, and the techniques of doing so are readily applicable to a wide variety of use cases. (You wanna get from there to batch-processing records? Or data visualization online? You can reuse a lot of what you learned processing csv...)

And I think Software Carpentry is right, too, when they say things like "we teach git (but REALLY we teach version control)". All library coders, regardless of use case, need to know about variables and flow control and functions.  All of them benefit from command-line tools and the idea of automating tasks and of breaking down tasks into subtasks and the value of structured data.  The point at which the needs diverge is past the first-two-days-of-code level, even though the divergence strongly informs how those two days should be spent.

Andromeda Yelton

LITA Board of Directors, Director-at-Large, 2013-2016

http://andromedayelton.com

@ThatAndromeda

--

You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Libraries Learning Code" group.

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to libraries-learnin...@googlegroups.com.

[Sara Allain]

Jennie, one thing that springs to mind when you mention observing tech and systems librarians is that there are a lot of library workers who do deal with code/tech but don't have those titles, or even anything in their job descriptions that might suggest such an interest. I'm the Special Collections Librarian but spend most of my day working with data; we also have a handful of liaisons in my institution who want to learn tech things, as well as several library technicians who would seriously benefit (i.e. we have a reference tech who collects our instruction statistics - think of all she could do if she knew some R!). And don't even get me started on how archivists could benefit. I know that "tech and systems librarians" is more of an idea than anything else, but it's worth noting that we should be as inclusive as possible. All of this applies not just tech & systems librarians; not just to librarians; not just to people with "librar*" in their job title. Let's GLAM it up!

Which is why I LOVE Andromeda's proposal for teaching library workers how to handle CSV files. I can't tell you how many hours that would have saved me over the past three years.

A second important thing I believe in is mobilizing library workers to analyse software, esp. open source alternatives. This is maybe more of a soft skill, but there's such a wealth of open source alternatives out there that it's a real shame budgets are being spent on proprietary software - and in the end, it probably comes down to lack of knowledge 50% of the time. For example, a digital curation workshop on Unix using ImageMagick as the sample software would BLOW PEOPLE'S MINDS. Goodbye, expensive Photoshop license!

Sara

[JR H]

Hey all--

I'm starting to develop a resource list of everything that I can possibly find.  I'm having trouble accessing some proprietary Lib Science databases (booo) but will be able to gain access soon to continue searching.  Until then, anyone who wants to can add here: https://librarianistas.etherpad.mozilla.org/librarians-and-coding

[JR H]

Hi!  So unfortunately, there's a bug in the etherpad that's making it impossible for me to unlock the pad.  The password is libraries-code.

[JR H]

Scratch that, sorry: library-code

(never setting an etherpad password again)

[Sarah Simpkin]

Hi folks,

Andromeda has tweeted about this article by Dhavide Aruliah about teaching the Software Carpentry program to a room of library people at Pycon. I highly recommend taking a peek. I was in the audience for this session and thought the instructors did a great job.

I thought Jessica's on-the-fly session to standardize a list of dates was an ideal project to work on collaboratively. I've programmed before, but not in Python, and enjoyed listening to her thought process as we built the script as a big group. There were also lots of great questions from the audience (And lots of troubleshooting and helping one another -- this was a group that seemed to feel comfortable searching for help.)

Very curious to hear other peoples' impressions of the event (or similar). Have you taken or taught a tech-related workshop that involved programming or command line tasks? What worked?

[Greg Wilson]

Hi folks,
As a follow-up, we're running a two-day sprint on July 22-23 at eight sites around the world to hack on content (and a few other things) - see http://etherpad.mozilla.org/swc-sprint-2014 for details.  If anyone would like to add a couple of topics to that Etherpad, get something rough in place beforehand, and push it through in July, that would be great.  And if anyone wants to beta test content, we're teaching a bootcamp for librarians on July 15-16 in Toronto, and I'd welcome a chance to chat for a bit next week about what we should include.  Would noon Eastern time on Wednesday work for everyone?
cheers,
Greg

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Libraries Learning Code" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to libraries-learnin...@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/libraries-learning-code.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

-- 
Greg Wilson
Software Carpentry   http://www.software-carpentry.org/
Mozilla Science Lab  http://mozillascience.org/
@swcarpentry  |  @swcannounces  |  @mozillascience 

[Sara Allain]

Hey Greg! I'd love to chat next week about curriculum, but unfortunately I'm tied up in meetings until 1pm. I can post an announcement via this group if you want to solicit more participation?

[Greg Wilson]

Hi everyone,
It seems like there's interest in a conference call about planning
workshop curriculum, so how about we plan to hook up at noon Eastern
time on Wednesday, June 4 (next week). I've created an Etherpad at
https://etherpad.mozilla.org/librarians-leading-code for the call, and
I'll post the number and password on Wednesday morning. (It's a 1-800
number, and you can connect to it using Skype and other VoIP clients
from pretty much anywhere.) If you have ideas about what you think we
could and should teach librarians in two days, please add them to the
Etherpad.
I'm looking forward to meeting you all,
Thanks,
Greg