Using a Notebook to Maintain a Learning Diary / Log Of the Whole Workshop

[psychemedia]

One of the discussions the introduction-RR-Jupyter curriculum development team had related to encouraging workshop participants to create a couple of notebooks for use throughout the whole workshop:

• a learning diary, where there could record howto's and snippets of useful information, or notes, from the whole event;
• one or more ad hoc scribble pad notebooks for trying things out quickly.

The learning diary could be bootstrapped from the notebook developed by participants through exercises practised through the intro activity?

[ahofmann4]

This is a good idea! We were thinking in the automation module of making a preformatted notebook with required cells for students to type code and follow demonstrations. I saw this done in the software carpentry intro to Python workshop I did, and I thought it was nice to follow along in a notebook! Maybe each module can decide if they want to make a formatted student notebook, or just encourage taking notes in the notebooks.

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On Jan 12, 2017 7:00 AM, "Tony Hirst" ***@***.***> wrote: One of the discussions the *introduction-RR-Jupyter* curriculum development team had related to encouraging workshop participants to create a couple of notebooks for use throughout the whole workshop: - a *learning diary*, where there could record *howto's* and snippets of useful information, or notes, from the whole event; - one or more *ad hoc* *scribble pad* notebooks for trying things out quickly. The learning diary could be bootstrapped from the notebook developed by participants through exercises practised through the intro activity <#21> ? — You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#22>, or mute the thread <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AGGHmAz6oNmrHFiFd-nojQOhDbQ9hwYZks5rRkAVgaJpZM4Lh2FE> .

[psychemedia]

We've used formatted notebooks in open online courses as well as taught/distance ed course. eg from open course https://github.com/psychemedia/learntocode.

One issue we noticed is you need to take care in seeding example code otherwise learners just run cells blindly as they move down the notebook. You need to put in broken/incomplete code cells or empty code cells to try to encourage folk to explore a bit with their own code.

[nerdcommander]

I like this idea a lot and use JNs as an "ad hoc scribble pad" a lot. Will suggest and demonstrate to my class this semester.
The Data Exploration notebooks have a few places (and should have a bunch more) where participants write code in a structured way, but I like the idea of a learning diary/scratch pad a lot.