Modelling of information flows in the Software Carpentry environment

Abstract

Introduction. The level and speed of development of modern information technologies, the aspiration of modern society to informational unification necessitate the creation and implementation of a new model of the educational and scientific community interaction to ensure free, operational and effective access to the information resources being required for the purpose of implementing innovative means of studying and utilizing information processing tools.

Key goals. The educational and scientific community is looking for new approaches that can ensure the necessary level of education efficiency under the condition of severe limitations of resources, where time is the first of them. Therefore, an urgent problem today is the formulation of the principles of construction, modelling, and systematization of the properties of the information environment as an interactive educational and scientific platform. In this work we consider the problem using the Software Carpentry as an example.

Methods and Materials. To solve the formulated problem, we have conducted an analysis of the paradigms of informational educational environments, classifying the most widespread and available in the Ukrainian educational and research community such as Coursera, edX, Prometheus, Udemy. Another interesting direction to consider is the so-called microlearning. At the same time, the use of the above types of educational online resources for the purposes of organizing and conducting scientific research, as well as selecting and implementing new tools for processing information about objects of scientific research is difficult or impossible.

Results. The ideology of Software Carpentry is considered as one of the most successful implementations in this direction. The authors are participating in the project implemented by University of St. Andrews (Scotland) on translation the «Python programming language» course from English to Ukrainian as volunteers.

Conclusion. We propose generalized set-theoretical model of such an information environment for educational and research community interaction.