Introducing SWC to Iwasaki Lab

by Joel Nitta (@joel_nitta)

2020-11-17 1PM, Iwasaki Lab (@zoom)

Presenters: Joel Nitta, Masami Yamaguchi

Format:

• Joel presented from slides (about 20 min)
• Masami explained her experience with Carpentries at Griffith University (without slides, about 15 min)
• We followed that with Q&A. All together, it was a little over an hour.

About 19 participants (if I remember correctly), including lab PI and assitant professor. Other participants were graduate students (mostly), postdocs, or staff.

Things that went well

• I think we got across the concept and some of the details of Carpentries workshops well. People had a reasonable idea of what a carpentries workshop is when we were done (but not necessarily why… see below)

• At the end Masami asked participants to give a sign if they were interested, and we got responses "yes" from ca. 7-10 people. We really hope they follow up!

• The format of Joel presenting general info first, then following up with details from Masami based on her personal experience seemed to work well. Team teaching = good!

• There was a question about additional lessons. Joel explained community-developed lessons. That was a good chance to show how well-organized Carpentries is, and the resources it has to offer.

Things that could be improved

• (nothing we can do about this, but…) nearly all people had their cameras off so it was very hard to "read the room" and judge if our message was getting across

• It is hard to convince (Japanese) people of the benefits of the Carpentries approach! Interactive, group learning just isn't done very much here so it is hard to sell its effectiveness

• Iwasaki-sensei still asked "what is in it for the university?" after the presentation. It is hard to sell why Carpentries is needed, even after emphasizing the community aspect during the presentation.

• It might have helped if Masami had some slides… there was a bit of awkwardness since everyone's camera was off and we had no slides to look at (but there should be no pressure to make slides! It was still great to hear about Masami's first-hand experiences).

Other random thoughts

I considered showing a video clip to try and convey the interactive nature of a Carpentries workshop, but decided against it because I don't think it is suitably impressive enough (happy to be proven wrong!)

We confirmed that no Carpentries-like workshop currently exists in Japan. The closest thing is 情報解析講習会ビデオ. As mentioned in Slack though, it is non-interactive. The tough thing is convincing people that the Carpentries approach could help people learn more effectively.

There are also some courses for people who want to use super computers e.g., 京大化研. No videos for these, so don't know how interactive they are.

The software computing skill level of most members of Iwasaki Lab is quite high, so they probably aren't interested in running a workshop for the lab itself… it's not clear if they're interested in a running a workshop for Todai generally either though. Iwasaki-sensei said something along the lines of "in that case we would just have a class". I think the problem here is that the target audience isn't well defined. It would be great to have them as instructors/helpers/translators though.

On the other hand, Joel's previous postdoc institution, the Botany Department at the National Museum of Nature and Science could definitely benefit from a workshop! (even if they don't know it yet