Dr. Greg Wilson, founder of Software Carpentry, to speak on U-M campus Oct. 12-13

The founder of Software Carpentry, Dr. Greg Wilson, will be on the U-M campus to give two public talks. Over the past 18 years, The Software and Data Carpentry organizations have sought to improve the data analysis and computing skills of researchers around the world. The organizations’ materials are developed collaboratively under the Creative Commons-Attribution license and taught by hundreds of trained volunteer instructors. Dr. Wilson will present two talks that you are invited to attend. Both talks will be in the Clark Library presentation space on the second floor of Hatcher South:

“Software Carpentry: Lessons Learned”
1:00 pm on Wednesday, 10/12, Clark Library
Since its start in 1998, Software Carpentry has evolved from a week-long training course at the US national laboratories into aworldwide volunteer effort to improve researchers’ computing skills. This talk will explore the lessons we’ve learned along the way about applying open source software development techniques to teaching at scale, and about getting people and institutions to change the way they work.

“Not on the Shelves: What Nonexistent Books, Tools, and Courses Can Tell Us About Ourselves”
11 am on Thursday, 10/13, Clark Library
Hundreds of books about writing compilers are currently on the market, but there are only three about writing debuggers. Spreadsheets are used to do calculations more often than every other kind of tool combined, but thirty-five years after their invention, version control systems still can’t handle them. Everyone thinks we should teach children how to program, but undergraduate courses on computing education are practically nonexistent.  This talk will explore what
these gaps in our books, tools, and courses tell us about the state of computing today, and about what it could look like tomorrow.

For more information: pschloss@umich.edu