The third week

The third week was an attempt to answer the question, "what next?" for people who already had some basic computing background and wanted to fill out their knowledge and experience base. As of last year, we have about 125 alumni - now up to 150 (!) - of the first two weeks, and I thought that some of them might be interested in getting together for ...more. I'd tried to do a third week last year but it fell apart in the face of bad organization (my fault) and too few attendees.

This year, I tried recruiting a bunch of external instructors. I wanted to find a bunch of enthusiastic and experienced trainers who could deliver bioinformatics-relevant material at a high level. So, in late March, I put out an open call on the Software Carpentry instructors mailing list:

Hi all,

see http://ivory.idyll.org/blog/2015-summer-course-NGS.html.

“””
For this third week, we are also looking for a few
instructors/lecturers; travel and lodging would be covered. Drop me
an e-mail if you are a trained Software Carpentry or Data Carpentry
instructor and are interested in coming and hanging out with us for
a week to develop materials and approaches!
“”"

If there are SWC instructors interested in trialing their own
genomics material on a captive audience, investigating
reproducibility awesomeness, or otherwise coming and hanging out to
teach and train and develop, please respond privately to this
e-mail.  The location is quite nice, and the people are great!

and... this worked! Astonishingly well! After applying stringent selection criteria (I accepted everyone who responded), and after sorting out all the travel, we ended up with eight instructors and myself. They were joined by approximately 10 students, along with our crack TA/organizing team, Amanda Charbonneau and Jessica Mizzi.

You can see the detailed schedule here, but essentially I just divvied the week up into three hour chunks and gave the instructors the following guidelines:

• please plan your presentations to be interactive, copy-paste, and cloud-based. They should be in Markdown or reST, and under a permissive CC license (I suggest CC0).
• ideally they would run on Amazon EC2. Happy to help you get that working. If they don’t work on EC2 and work on individual laptops, make sure to allow LOTS of time for installation!
• I would like to have them on the ANGUS web site, on github here: https://github.com/ngs-docs/angus. Please submit PRs! I suggest putting them under week3/. I am happy to organize/link into the schedule.
• I’m reserving about 3 hours on the schedule for each one, which (by typical software carpentry etc experience) means an even mix of talking, running things, and troubleshooting/debugging.
• finishing early and allowing time for during- and after- discussions is fine and frankly recommended :)
• please introduce yourself at your tutorial - give a brief background of you and your research and your interests.
• you can see what we taught this year, here: http://angus.readthedocs.org/en/2015/ - gives you some sense of a style that we have found works well in this kind of workshop.

At this point let me digress a bit and say this: Software Carpentry is effin' magical. I don't know of another group of people to whom I could have sent an open invitation to come present, gotten back a bunch of replies from people I didn't know and invited them without screening them in any way, sent a bunch of vague instructions like the above, and then had them all show up and give great presentations.

So, yeah, the week3 stuff went really well. Completely apart from the student learning, several different instructors independently told me that they'd learned something from every presentation.

Here is the menu:

• Ryan Williams (Iowa State) gave a tutorial on multivariate stats that started out a bit slow and then all of a sudden we were like HOLY COW HOW DID WE WAIT I DIDN'T KNOW OK THAT'S COOL. (Lisa's notes)
• Lex Nederbragt (University of Oslo) did an interactive tutorial on assembly where he demoed two teaching techniques using Google Docs - ask questions poll for answers, discuss, repoll; and collaborative graphing, where we all added points to a Google Spreadsheet based on computing we did individually. Super neat. (See Lex's blog post for more on active learning, and Lisa's notes on assembly)
• Marian Schmidt (University of Michigan) powered through into the evening with a thorough introduction to RMarkdown, Git, and RStudio. While I missed most of this due to a phone call, I got to experience the "power pose" -- a way to pump up everyone's energy level before sitting back down at RStudio. Great quote from Lex: "Wow, this R stuff is really cool!" (Lisa's notes)
• Meeta Mistry (Harvard) gave an excellent three-way comparison of DEseq 2, Limma, and edgeR for differential expression analysis on an example RNAseq data set. (I will be using this tutorial in three weeks!) (Lisa's notes)
• Asela Wijeratne (Ohio State University) gave a very well received tutorial on pathway analysis in RNAseq. Sadly I missed most of this due to a migraine (bad weather + too much caffeine + too little sleep ;( but I got many positive reviews. I'm going to have to go through this on my own. (Lisa's notes)
• Tiffany Timbers (Simon Fraser University) showed us all how to do Genome Wide Association Studies. Her tutorial was a masterclass on data munging - she had us pipe data through about 6 different programs, and I think we ended up transforming the data using R, sed, grep and cut, multiple times. There was an entertaining moment when Lex figured out that she was presenting technical questions from her own research, in effect using us as pre-reviewers for her paper ;). (Lisa's notes)
• Leigh Sheneman (Michigan State University) gave an excellent presentation on using AMIs and snapshots on Amazon Web Services, for reproducibility purposes. People were incredibly thankful to have all this explained and I got several very positive reviews afterwards. (Lisa's notes)
• Chris Hamm (University of Kentucky) talked about detecting sex-linked differential expression via dosage compensation. Two highlights of his talk: (1) we all realized how insanely into butterflies he is (see: @butterflyology); (2) he managed to produce some figures so beautiful that we spontaneously applauded. (Lisa's notes)
• I gave two tutorials, one on Docker and one on GitHub pull requests & collaborative documentation editing. People seemed to find them both interesting, although Docker confused people the most of all the topics in the workshop. (See Lisa's notes on Docker and Lisa's notes on GitHub/PRs.)

Throughout all of this, the instructors and students were very engaged. It was kind of hilarious to have 1:1 ratio of instructors and students, when we were also using the sticky system -- no sooner would a pink sticky go up (indicating trouble) then would three different instructors converge on the pink sticky and work to solve the problem. Amazing to watch.

For me (and many instructors), the third week was also awesome in a different way. I had seen most of the subject material before, so while the details were interesting, I don't know that they would have held my attention in all cases. But, not only were the materials interesting, the instructors were awesome and each had their own bag of tricks. Most of them weren't something that I could write down, apart from the technical stuff mentioned above, but everyone had their own style and energy and approach for holding the attention of the audience, and it was a privilege to experience so many teaching styles.

Here's the feedback:

and here are Lisa's notes on the whole week.

Why did we all do the third week?

A week is ... a lot of time. Why did everyone show up and what did people get out of it? I have a few thoughts.

• We selected students who already had a reasonably strong exposure (alumni from previous workshops, or people with significant practical experience). This meant that we had 10x less in the way of problems with software installs and copy/paste/typing issues (which is what dominates the first week of the two-week course). This led in turn to a much faster pace, which I think was fun for everyone involved.
• Researchers are hungry for advanced materials. I had a lot of trouble figuring out how to pitch this, which is one reason why the 3rd week in 2014 failed, and why I worked extra hard this year to bring in students; people weren't willing to put in a week on the vague hope that it would be interesting: they wanted specifics. If and when we do this again, though, the pitch is easy: "Come learn the cutting edge of bioinformatics practice."
• Everyone was a great teacher - energetic, engaged, passionate. That's actually kind of rare in workshops :).
• Software Carpentry instructors rarely get a chance to learn en masse from other Software Carpentry instructors.
• Socializing and networking. The NGS workshop has always had a significant component of hanging out, because, well, that's fun. It's also productive for careers. This socializing is aided by things like trips to breweries, a lot of volleyball (with no expectations of expertise), a beautiful environment, and lots of downtime for relaxation and interaction. similar to Gordon Conferences.)
• Everyone likes to know what they know, especially if they learned it in isolation. Comments from the students, in particular, tended to mention that they had seen lots of this stuff, but hadn't necessarily put it all together or filled in the gaps in their knowledge. Finding out that you actually do know a lot is great; rounding it out with experience and more information is even better.
• Material development was an explicit goal of mine. We got a lot of good (open) material out of this, and I'm already planning on reusing a bunch of it!

Having run this once, I honestly don't anticipate a problem in "selling" it going forward.

Are you going to run it again?

tl;dr? Probably, but probably some other time/place.

This was an awesome experience for everyone I talked to.

But it was also three weeks, and the people who really stuck it out the entire time had our brains turned into mush by it. So I think we probably won't run three weeks again.

But there's really no reason to tie the third week to the first two-week workshop. So maybe we can do that elsewhere and elsewhen.

It cost (I estimate) $2500 for me to run. If I ran it "cold" (not tied to the two-week workshop) it would probably be about $5000. I have enough money to do that again, perhaps even a few times. (Most of the costs are in instructor travel/room/board.)

We could probably run a bunch on more specific topics like "RNAseq", "environmental metagenomics", etc, although I'd want to keep many of the technical things (Amazon, Docker, workflows, reproducibility, etc.) as those were well received.

This sounded great! How are you going to scale it so I can come?

I don't want to scale it up much. I think it would actually be a huge mistake to scale this beyond ~30-40 people, total. Good learning at this level (and maybe at any level) simply doesn't happen with mass teaching, or with low instructor-student ratios.

I'd love to see other people run things like this, though. I think the answer to scaling is "run more" not "run bigger", and it seems to be easy to sucker Software Carpentry instructors into advanced teaching in nice places.

With that in mind, I have an offer: if you want to run something like this in the area of data-intensive biology, let's chat. I have money and organizational capacity, and if you can supply a remote location with decent lodging and good weather, maybe we can work something out. There are a few strong requirements on my side (keep it cheap for students; all materials posted CC0 or CC-BY; you host, we run; we need tech advanced biology students; and probably a few more things to ensure a good experience for all concerned) but I'd love to see how far we can take this.

--titus