Supporting continued learning after the workshops

[tracykteal]

Learns come to workshops and have a good experience and start to learn skills and are often excited to learn more or continue practicing. They're therefore looking for opportunities or resources for learning after the workshops. Instructors, hosts and partners are also looking to support continued learning and help build communities of practice?

What are people doing to help support continued learning after the workshops?

[chendaniely]

I typically link to Hadley Wickham's Tidy Data Paper and dplyr vignette

Other things I link to is Project Euler and Learn Git Branching

[elliewix]

I provide support in a number of ways, both personally and professionally.

I've been the co-organizer of our local Python User's Group for nearly 3 years now. Given that we're a smaller college town, we function mostly as a support group for python users but also as a meetup for the scientific programming crowd. The org is a subgroup of our local makerspace, so we share space (off campus) and other resources with them. We meet every week on saturday afternoons for two hours. The majority of people who come in are students, usually leaning toward the grad school crowd. This usually means people are working on a combination of homework or their own research project. Usually 5-8 people, with regulars and newcomers.

One thing I always try to recommend to the grad students are class options, mostly because it means they have 'official' time to work on things and they aren't trying to pack in extra things on top of research/work/coursework. Our School of Information Sciences has several good (and grad level) courses to choose from and are open to grad students from other departments.

I also offer weekly drop in consultation hours, dubbed Data Help Desk, run out of our Scholarly Commons. Beneficial for several reasons: having a set consultation block for those "do you have some time to chat about.." questions, it's protected time on my calendar, consistent time for regulars to know when to expect me, and easy for state during those hallway consultations that come up. This is also very low cost to run, other than the sign holder that I nicked from the admin office supply closet. I can just keep working on my laptop if no one comes in. My metrics for spring 2016's hours were about 3-4 people a month visiting, which is I think fair for a new service. While small, these interactions have been very impactful, usually providing support to relaunch stalled dissertation projects.

I also offer, as an actual line item in my job, workshops on data management/documentation/sharing/workflows/etc. that I can advertise these services to. I always encouage people to explore how they can be connected to their local libraries and subject liaison librarians to make themselves known as potential helpers/collaborators.

I've also been pondering having one or both set up as a Mozilla Science Lab Study Group, just as a way to advertise more and have flashier brand recognition.