A research project that aims to use technology both in the research process and as an intervention to improve people's lives.

January 2017 - Current

The platform, funded by the Department of Science and Technology and administrated through DIRISA, will develop suitable curricula and pedagogic interventions to advance the training of postgraduate students in interdisciplinary research fields.

December 2016 - Current

Continuous collaborative meetups to build genomics capacity at NWU.

October 2015 - Current

Description

Date

This NWU Research Conversation Session focussed on the topic of Research Software Engineers (RSE) – what this is, who they are, and how to join the international community of RSEs.

19 May 2017

A 2.5-day workshop where 28 new instructors were trained and joined by 14 instructors from the 2015/2016 cohorts to share experiences and lessons learned about workshops, teaching, learning and more.

30 April - 2 May 2017

An NWU Research Conversation Session during which Michelle Willmers and Thomas King  shared their experience in terms of opportunities that are arising as more research datasets are becoming available in digital format, how to share data legally, ethically, and responsibly, and what the positive impact of data sharing is for researchers and research projects.

20 April 2017

An NWU Research Conversation Session during which Drs Bianca Kramer and Jeroen Bosman (both from Utrecht University) shared results from their international survey about the use of various digital tools throughout the research life cycle.

24 March 2017

Several research groups have collected large data sets over time - often partially in hard copy and partially digitised. The datasets could be of national importance but may not be preserved with re-use and discoverability in mind. In this 2-hour conversation we introduced researchers to national initiatives looking at Data Preservation and also discuss new initiatives at the NWU.

1 March 2017

Many researchers are still uncomfortable with terminology such as Digital Humanities, Digital Scholarship, and eResearch. In this half-day workshop we aimed to define these concepts, provide some context in terms of the history and origin, as well as the future and how researchers can adopt new methodologies and practices in their own work.

27 January 2017

Half-day workshops for NWU research support staff (re-branded as research enablers) to discuss the changing landscape of research support and the changing role of research support staff - from service provider to collaborator and project partner.

13 January 2017

11 May 2017

A Python-based workshop that was ran as part of the bigger capacity building initiative where 3 of our new instructors taught for the first time.

16 - 18 November 2016

Co-hosted the first South African based OpenCon Satellite event with a focus on Open Data and capacity building initiatives to support open science practices amongst researchers and postgraduate students.

14 November 2016

Workshop hosted at UniVen, Limpopo aimed at researchers and postgraduate students with limited prior experience in research computing. Participants were mostly from Environmental Sciences.

31 October - 2 November 2016

Collaborated with NWU Libraries, Research Support Office, Technology Transfer & Innovation Support Office, and IT to develop a comprehensive programme for International Open Access Week 2016 that was broadcasted to all three NWU campuses.

24 - 28 October 2016

Introduction to commandline tools for genomics data analysis for students/researchers with limited prior exposure to research computing. The workshop was run on Amazon EC2 cloud instances.

26 - 29 September 2016

Teaching basic skills in better use of Excel for research, OpenRefine for cleaning data, and a brief introduction to reproducible research with Python to postgraduate students and researchers from North-West University.

29 August - 2 September 2016

A modern data skills workshop mostly for librarians and archivists. We also ran a half-day lesson sprint to explore the possibility of using lesson templates from Software Carpentry and GitHub to collaboratively develop lessons to be taught by librarians.

25 & 26 August 2016

Teaching Software Carpentry Python, git/GitHub, and automation on the command line lessons to researchers/postgraduate students.

22 & 23 August 2016

2-week foundational training course for postgraduate students and researchers specifically from Low and Middle Income Countries to learn about Open Science, Research Data Management, and Data Science skills. The workshop was run at ICTP in Trieste, Italy.

1 - 12 August 2016

1.5 day workshop for researchers, IT staff, librarians, and staff from the research support office at NWU to talk about a roadmap for NWU Research Data Management.

23 & 24 June 2016

A 3-day workshop ran before the Historical Association of South Africa's annual conference teaching mainly historians, but also other humanities researchers skills to support digital research (Python, Omeka, XML, Google Fusion Tables, text mining)

20 - 22 June 2016

2-day sprint to work on various projects related to open science, open data, and open educational resources. A write-up of the outcomes from one of the projects ran during this workshop is available here.

2 & 3 June 2016

2.5-day train-the-trainer event to build computational instructor capacity in Africa.

17 - 20 April 2016

A virtual event with participation from >20 institutions in South Africa and speakers from the US, UK, and France talking about research software and data skills, and research data science training for researchers, IT staff, and librarians. An output of the workshop was a guide for runnning large virtual events in SA using Vidyo supported by TENET.

11 April 2016

Two parallel workshops (respectively focusing on R and Python) teaching researchers and postgraduate students basic computational skills.

5 & 6 November 2015

Teaching Software Carpentry Python, git/GitHub, and automation on the command line lessons to researchers/postgraduate students.

3 & 4 October 2015

Teaching the Software Carpentry lessons on R, command line, and version control to participants of the Indibano.

6 & 7 September 2015

Two parallel workshops (respectively focusing on R and Python) teaching researchers and postgraduate students basic computational skills.

16 & 17 July 2015

An online instructor training event organised by Software Carpentry with participation at two other sites in the UK and US.

8 & 9 June 2015

Teaching the Software Carpentry lessons on R and version control to researchers and postgraduate students from SU Departments of Genetics, Microbiology, and other Life Sciences. Our lead instructor was from Cambridge University and participated virtually via Google Hangouts over the two days.

14 & 15 May 2015