Computer Friday is a new regular event at FAIR: Every Friday at 1400, all FAIR members and guests are invited to join for a workshop and/or lecture that is intended to develop functional literacy with both specific and general purpose computer technologies. The specific lectures and workshops will introduce and teach infrastructure and software technologies of use in our research practice, such as version control, survey software, frameworks for programming experiments, software to control disclosure of personal data and such. The general purpose technologies we will cover over a longer time horizon will be general programming skills, databases, maybe network concepts.

The content and ambitions will develop as we go along, and suggestions for topics are very welcome. I will, however, curate the content to ensure that we cover a broad and balanced set of concepts over time.

Format

Each meeting will most likely start with an introduction by me or an expert depending on topic and availability. My hope is that most sessions will end in an open practice session in which we can experiment an make use of the new concepts and technologies. People should bring their laptops with network connections, and each week’s program will state whether people should try to install anything ahead of the meetings (for which IT support might be necessary).

We start at 1400 in FAIR-1. The aim is that the formal teaching/lecture part should be less than an hour, and there should then be some guided practice following this. The end point of the meeting we leave a bit open, so that those with the most interest in experimenting with the newly introduced topic can stay on.

Participation

The plan is not to start a cult. People should feel free to join for the meetings that they find useful. A program for the meeting of the week will be posted to my website statsokonomen.no on Wednesdays. When I see how things develop, I’ll try to also sketch a program for the semester.