Embedded - 465: Dinosaurs, Pirates, Spaceships

Episode Date: December 1, 2023

Yanina Bellini Saibene joined us to discuss teaching, localization, barriers to learning coding, and global communities.  Yani works on Teach Tech Together (https://teachtogether.tech/) with Greg Wilson. It is a fantastic resource if you are learning to teach. It is available in English and Spanish. She also works on The Carpentries which teaches coding and data science skills to researchers worldwide.  Yani has a site (yabellini.netlify.app) that includes the courses she has online (for free). She is also the community manager of rOpenSci and is part of R-Ladies. You can find Yani on fosstodon.org/@yabellini. Transcript

Welcome to Embedded. I am Eliseo White alongside Christopher White. This week we're going to talk about how to teach technology. Our guest is Shanina Shiini-Saibene. Hi Shanina, thank you for joining us. Thank you so much for inviting me. Could you tell us about yourself as if we met at a SciPi conference? Oh my God, yes. My name is Shani.

I'm from Argentina. I live in Argentina in South America. For the last 24 years, I was a researcher in the agricultural sector, first as a research software engineer and then as a data scientist until I get to know community of practice related with technology. Because of our ladies, that was the first one that I met. I fell in love in this way of learn and teach and organize people around technology. And I become our open site community manager. That is my currently job.

It's kind of my dream job because it brings science, software development, and community building all together. We're going to do lightning round where we ask you short questions and we want short answers. And if we're behaving ourselves, we won't ask for long explanations. And I'm warning you, some of these came from an Argentinian friend of ours. You're going to warn her about that? Well, I don't know what any of these mean. What? You want me to unwarn her? Well, I don't know what any of these mean, so... What?

You want me to unwarn her? No, go ahead. Okay. Favorite famous turtle? Turtle? Uh... I don't have idea. Okay, good. Oh, my God. Yes, I know. Manuelita. Of course. Yes, that's my favorite

turtle. Yes, there is a song, a song from Marielena Walsh. And it is about a turtle who lives in Pehuajo, which is very close where I was born. So, but yeah, you kind of lost me a little bit with that one. It's a very good one. Messi or Maradona? Oh, both of them. of them yes favorite 1980s computer 1980s computer uh the the talent do you know that one no oh yeah it was kind of the the first one that I used. That was a big keyboard with the CPU and everything there. And you put some kind of cassette there to load the program, the software. And we code in Logo with a turtle.

We go back to the beginning. Mate, with or without sugar? Without. Sorry, I was looking up the talent computer. I got lost. Do you like to complete one project or start a dozen? I need to finish, complete projects.

If I have a lot of projects on the go, it's kind of a lot of processing my brain. And the only way to release that is to finish the project. But I usually have a lot of projects going on. Favorite fictional robot? Oh, I have two small kids and we watch a lot of movies with robots. Ron, you know, the last one, there was a robot with no rules

about how he should behave. Ron is Ron. Ron is Broken or something like that. I don't know the name in English of the title. I think it's Ron's Gone Wrong or something like that. Yeah, that one. It's an amazing robot. Yes, that one.

Let me see that one. If you could teach a college course, what would you like to teach? You've been a professor. You've taught courses before. Yes, I teach a lot. And I think that I enjoy the intro to programming, to code. It is amazing to help people to realize that they can program a computer. I'm going to follow up. What's the best language for teaching these days to start for intro students? Oh, well, that is a complex answer that I'm going to give because I'm in love with the

R language programming. So I will say that one. Really? Okay. That's the statistics one, right? Yes, exactly. Yes, exactly. Yes, exactly. Do you have a tip everyone should know?

Yes. Related with projects, I would say that when you have to prioritize tasks, try always to finish first the tasks that will allow other people in your team to continue, start, or finish their work. That's very nice. Yes, people should do that. We are happy to be sponsored this week by Memfault. Memfault provides a device reliability platform for IoT monitoring, debugging, and updates. Device operation no longer needs to be a scramble as issues with fielded units pile up. Instead, Memfault gives developers a more

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It's a link you can find in our show notes. Thank you to Memfault for sponsoring this week's show. So back to, actually back to R before we go on. R is usually, I usually think of it as a statistical programming language, more than just an intro programming language. What makes it a good intro in your mind? Yeah, well, I'm teaching now on careers that has to do with data science and was kind of the last things that I did as a researcher.

I'm still doing some analysis and some process of data and information and building some models and try to give a sense of the data. So R is a very friendly language for people who don't come from a computer science background. So the language is built for doing statistics and analysis and visualization. So it's very powerful in that sense for the people who are learning to be data scientists. And then I always say this, and some people think that I'm joking, but I'm actually very serious. I think that the best feature of R as a language is the community around the language. So you are going to get a lot of help and support from a lot of people who is very generous with what they know. Is R a compiled language like C or an interpreted language like

Python? It is an interpreter language. How do you compare it to Python? Well, Python is a more general language. You can do a lot of other things. And I think that the tidyverse, which is one of the universe package around analysis, processing and modeling, is they create a universe of functions and a way of things that brings a lot of scaffolding for people who is entering this discipline. So you know when you are learning a programming language,

but the goal or your objective is not coding source work, but doing another task, and you need a programming language for doing that, you always find yourself learning the concept of, for example, statistics and learning how to code. And those are very complex, two different things to learn at the same time. So if the programming languages is prepared

and help you to do the tasks you need to do, it's going to load the cognitive load that you need to put, the effort you need to put to learn this. So R has a lot of development in that sense. The Python, it also has, So R has a lot of development in that sense. That Python, it is still, it also has, I mean, there is Panda, there is SciPy, there is a lot of other libraries. But I think that in R, it's more friendly for beginners to learn. I would try to learn both if I'm going to be a data scientist. I actually use both,

but for beginners, R is giving me better results with my students. And if I understand you right, it's because R helps you learn statistics and doesn't make you learn programming and statistics? I would say that the programming language is built in a way that implements the process of data analysis, data wrangling, data modeling, is more easy, even if you have to code, because of the way that packages and libraries and functions and pipelines are built. Briefly met R many, many years ago, trying to do statistics.

But because I was already a programmer, it was easier for me to just learn the statistics and put them in languages I already knew. Makes me want to try it again, though. Yeah, I think we tend to dismiss, as programmers, sometimes we dismiss special purpose languages that actually are better at their jobs that are more specific than general purpose languages. Thinking about MATLAB, too. I mean, I used to enjoy doing stuff in MATLAB when I was doing signal processing and things because it was easier than... Python was very early at that time, so there weren't as many packages for stuff, but it was special purpose for doing math kind of things, and Mathematica's out there. And I do feel like sometimes programmers look down their nose at some of those other languages, and I don't think that that's a good attitude, probably. We probably should be looking at using those for some of our other tasks. But then, we're programmers, so we always reach for the programming language we're used to, right?

Yeah, I mean, this also depends on who you are teaching. I would say that, for example, for more younger, I mean, adolescents or students in elementary school or high school, probably you will start with Scratch, some kind of block language. And when they have the concept of what a while is, a for loop, a condition, a variable one, then you can go to a text programming language. So it always depends on the context. But yes, I also use R a lot in my work. So I can also give better insight and advice for my students when they have issues or problems or questions.

Because I know how to do things in R now better than in Python or C or other languages. You and I were introduced by Greg Wilson, who we had on the show a few weeks ago, a few months ago, some time ago. But when we talked to him, we didn't talk much about Teaching Tech Together. But that's a project you work on. Could you describe it? Yes, sure. Teaching Tech Together is a book that Greg wrote a time ago. It is also a workshop, a training that is based on that book. And the inception of the book is all the work that Greg did

on creating teaching material for scientists, computing skills for scientists. Then he creates Sourceware Carpentry, which today is the Carpentries, one of this community of practice that I'm part of too. I'm part of the board of directors of the Carpentries. And in all this path that Greg did of creating the material, teaching the workshop, he realized that the way you teach can do a very big difference on how people learn.

And that we as humanity knows a lot about how people learn and how to teach in an efficient way. So he also creates a training on how to teach technology. And that is the seed of the book. And I met Greg because I did a certification when he was part of our studio. Now he's a company. And there I get to know some of this strategy to teach. And I read the book and I say, this is so good that can be only in English. And I asked for permission to translate to Spanish so more people can,

were able to access to this knowledge in my language. So yeah, teaching tech together is it is a workshop and it is essentially very pragmatic and practical tools and strategy to teach well, that all these strategies are based in scientific evidence. So it's not what we think that is good or what we think that is okay to do in a classroom. This actually is based on research and papers and that you can apply in the classroom almost immediately.

And this is about teaching, not about the computer science material. I mean, the computer science material, kind of like you were talking about R, statistics is what you're doing, but you're also learning programming. But for this teaching tech together, programming is what you're doing but what yeah teaching teaching tech together has a lot of um pedagogical advice and strategies

and we focus on how you can use that to teach for, programming or how to use a software or how to use a piece of technology. So all these, for example, concepts about how your brain works, how you have a long-term memory and a short-term memory, how that works, how that can you use those concepts to become a developer and to become a better developer and how you can use it to teach someone to learn to code, to program. So we are using general concept of pedagogy, but apply it to teach technology. And how much higher is the barrier to entry for tech for non-English speakers? And that's the rest of the show.

Okay. Are you ready? I'm ready. Well, you know, English is the lingua franca for science, for open source software and for software development in general. For giving you some ideas that don't come only from my experience as a non-native English speaker. I will mention a really recent study by Amano et al. They quantify different barriers that scientists, researchers that don't speak English as a foreign language face. And for example, they found that up to 91 more times these people need to read English paper. So we are going to take 91% more time than you.

I'm going to need that time more to read a paper. We need 51% more time to write a paper in English, and our paper will be rejected 2.6 more times often than people who are native English speakers. If our papers are accepted, we are going to have to revise 12.5 more times. And if we have to do a presentation of a talk in English, we are going to need 94% more time than an English native speaker. We are going to avoid to give talks or to be in a podcast or to chat if the language is English because the way we feel is not so secure with the language.

And if we take this not only in science, if we move this barrier to software development, the Linux Foundation did also research and in the recent report of 2021, they say that one of the environment barriers for people to contribute to open source is language. That is one of the barriers. And it's not only because in content, material, comments, contribution, programming languages,

English is the one who is present and mostly with no other option as a language. But English proficiency is a metric by which performance and personality are going to be judged. So people will think how good you are as a developer related to how well you write or speak English. So I don't know if it has sense. I have

lived that like, what this shiny person should know behind this choppy English when she speaks. It is actually something that happens and can be detrimental of the community

and can impact in how you feel welcome or not or able to participate or not in different space. So the barrier, if you don't speak English, is high. Learn a second language is a lot of work. And it is expensive. It's not easy to pay for learning a second language. And when you are new and you start learning the language and you try to communicate and express your ideas,

if people aren't kind and patient, you can be discouraged to continue being part of that movement, which is a pity. We are losing a lot if we drop people because of the way they express in a second or third language. Actually, English is especially difficult because it's garbage. It is a garbage language. I mean, our spelling is awful compared to Spanish spelling. And there's many rules.

And then there's all the rules that cancel the rules. Right. All of the exceptions. And our grammar is derived from multiple other grammars that are not consistent, irregular verbs, irregular words. It's all just, yeah, it's a garbage language. Why did we choose this one? Latin makes a lot more sense. non-English-as-a-first-language developers in the world than there are English-as-a-first-language developers. I don't know what other language would have been better, but, you know, it's just history at this point. But it is unfortunate. And I think it's difficult for people to think about that,

like as a native English speaker, the things you said about the biases and, you know, things may take a little longer or people are not kind about, um, things taking longer or, or misunderstandings. I think, I think people need to be more mindful of that. Yeah. I mean, I, um, um, for, for giving you an example, um, as a research, I, I, I should write more in English than I did at the time. I get some rejection and in the comment was kind, you should go back to elementary school because my English was so bad. So that kind of comment is really stick with you because you already know that you don't handle the language in the way you should do because it's not your first language.

You also understand the rule of the games. I also think that we can change those rules if we work together. But I also have very kind and nice people helping me. In 2017, when I met our ladies, I didn't speak in English. And now I'm here with you chatting. And I know that I'm making a lot of mistakes when I express myself. And some of my ideas, I need kind of more go working around to say the same that perhaps I use three or four words in Spanish. Because I have to think about a little more.

But you are really kind and we are enjoying this conversation. So there is a lot of people that when they are aware of this barrier or how we feel, they are going to do the extra work so we can communicate and enjoy. And they are going to, a lot of them help me to improve my pronunciation, how I speak, my vocabulary. So I think that is a work in the community, between people, and there is a lot of people that are willing to do that work. I don't think we can solve this only with individual effort. We can

expect that people who are not native English speakers are the ones who learn the second language, the ones to do the translation, the ones to have the heavy lifting of everything. We need to do this as a community, as the science community, the developers community, the technical community, and work on that as a goal to try to download the barrier in different ways so we can actually be part. Why bother? Why not enjoy a Spanish-speaking community for R and statistics and uh computer science

i mean like i said english isn't that great i now i think that i understand uh your question the thing is we have our community i mean i'm one of the co-founders of LatinAr, which is the Latin American conference about the language in industry and research. And our conference is trilingual. We have workshops and talks and papers in English, Portuguese, and Spanish. So Latin America speak Spanish and Portuguese mostly,

and English is because we can be isolated of the rest of the world. So why not be isolated? Because we like it or not, the global north or the countries in the north of the world are the ones who have the power and the money. So for some of the developments, we need to do it together. We can do it alone. We can do it in isolation. And we need also the different point of view. We already know also by science that diverse group of people, we develop a better solution. So when I complain that sometimes in technical solutions, this industry or this company, they are not taking into account my voice,

I'm not going to do the same with the rest of the world. I will not going to let people out because at some point they left me out. No, we need to build something better. And that means that all the voices should be in the table of decisions. We should listen to each other. And I say this also not only as a Latin American person who doesn't speak English, but I say this also as a woman. We know that some products, technological products, don't take into account some facts that women need

in the design of this, of elderly people. So how you can make some cell phone app with so small phone? Come on, people, we are all going to be elder and we are going to need glasses and we are not going to see those tiny phones. So there is a lot of things that if we do in a diverse group of people, we for sure are going to have a better outcome, a better product, a better software, a better application. And that is why we should try to do things together.

What about using technology as a way to do it? I mean, why don't we just Google Translate everything? Yeah. GPT and Google Translate together. Oh, great. It's a very good question. It's a terrible question. No, no, it's a very good one.

Because, you know, right now, this technology on translation, automatic translation, are still in development. And they're not still so good. So I use it, the automatic, or we use it in several of our translation projects as a first draft of the translation of a text. But then we review by human beings.

We try to have always two reviewers because first it is the grammar or some of the language. So, for example, if you take a phrase in English that have adjectives and you translate to Spanish, the translation will use the words in the same order and in Spanish we use the adjective the other way around. So you are going to have the words in a different position

in the phrase. And the software still doesn't know how to do that. The other thing that they can do is to they usually assume masculine gender mark for everything as the default. And we try to avoid to use, we call that sexist language, which is to think that the masculine is the default. So we try to avoid, for example, gender mark, and that means that sometimes you need to rewrite the text.

And the other thing is something that we call localization, which is not a literal translation, but you are going to adapt the text to be faithful to the original, but in a way that is closer or understandable for the people who is your audience. So, for example, in programming, when in some texts they use some songs or poems or analogies, probably are not meaningful if they are writing in Europe or in the US. They are not meaningful for us. So we try to find something that means the same,

but it has sense for people in Latin America or Argentina. That is something that still the technology can do in an automatic way. For example, we often, when we're using examples, use the functions foo and bar, which come from F-U-B-A-R, which is fouled up beyond all recall, which is an army term. But in the end, we end up using these functions foo and bar, and some people remember where they come from.

Do you have functions that are like that, that are just here's function names? Yeah, well, I never understand. I have sense of those. So it is a very good example. example, first as a teaching principle, I would say that we should try to avoid things that have kind of not much relationship with what we are teaching. So we should try to use, for example, for the functions or for the variables, names that are meaningful of what we are trying to teach. That sounds like so shocking. Yeah, that is not a good idea.

Because it has to do with the cognitive load, you know. If you are using the name of a variable that, I don't know, you are working with weather, for example. And if you call temperature, people already know what that is. So you don't have to explain. And that law, the cognitive law, they have to use to learn what you are teaching. But if you use food, what is that? What is this function going to do? I have to start guessing.

I have to start guessing, is this meaningful or is this just a random name? So that is kind of the first thought. Then, because we don't speak English and the programming languages are usually in English, we tend to use the variable names and the function names that we create in Spanish. And then the programming languages is in English. So I'm probably going to create a function and the name is going to be in Spanish. I don't know if I have to calculate temperatures anomaly,

I will use the name anomalías de temperatura. And that is going to be the name of the function. And it's also going to be really different for the students to realize that that is something that they can create. And then the things that are in English are the language per se, and they have to use it, and they can change those keywords, for example. That is, if you want to, one advantage for us when we teach, because we don't have to mix language. I'm thinking having the keywords be opaque like that, like they weren't part of your own spoken language, would that make it better or worse? Probably harder.

Like what? what is a for loop. Those words have some meaning for you in English. The same as a while or an until. But if I don't know English, it doesn't have any meaning for me. So I need to learn what that means. So it's not that we are, we have to learn a language, a programming language,

as we learn a spoken language. Of language, a programming language, as we learn a spoken language. Of course, the programming language is so more, it has really few more words or keywords. But yeah, I actually, my first approach to English has to do with learning to code. I had to learn C. That was kind of my first more professional programming languages. The first one was logo for playing when I was a kid. Then basic, then C. And I get to know that those words come from English because I didn't know that my parents don't speak English. I don't have English in school. So how I should know that the keywords come from a spoken language?

I didn't know that. So for me, when I had the first time that I had an English class, that was in high school, actually, I was like, oh, that word can, I know that work because I know how to code this. But it was the other way around. It was kind of funny. That's fascinating. Yes.

Yes, I always dream with a future that we have the, for example, if we speak about Python, we have the English Python, the Spanish Python, the Chinese Python. And in some way, we can write in our language more close to a native language and compilers will solve the rest of the things in between. So the programming language is most close to our spoken language.

But yeah, I think that technologically we can do it, but I don't know if that is going to happen at some point. But why not? That seems a lot easier than generic translation, because if it's just keywords... There aren't that many keywords. There aren't that many keywords. It shouldn't be that hard to do, but I wonder if it's just a lack of... But then you get into libraries, and then the problem explodes into...

Okay, function names. Function names. I mean, printf isn't an English word either, but it at least is made up of an English word. It's for file? Print a file? Yeah, but print is kind of... We call... Yeah, but print is kind of, we call, yeah, we can, yeah, file is not a word that you will in some way realize that is something that it means in Spanish. Yeah.

Let me think about other functions like freed, F-R-E-A-D, freeadd free ad f read i think it's f read yes yes it is every yeah abbreviations are make everything worse i-o-c-t-l what is that so yes yes it is interesting but um i guess that um what happened with the thing is until you don't chat with someone like me that is facing this kind of challenge, if you want to, when you learn to code, when you teach to code, when you have to write or read about programming is kind of, code writing in, I don't know if it's Russian or Chinese or Japanese or something like that and say, well, that is how it looks for me, even if it is in English. You don't understand anything. So, yeah. And I do translate some Chinese data sheets or some Japanese origami instructions and... Using a computer. Oh, yes. Google translate these, not me translate these.

I just wanted to know if you suddenly learned a bunch of languages. And the results are usually barely comprehensible. Okay, okay. Now, I mean, the technology has done an advance, a huge advance, and it is useful. I mean, my dad can put their phone in a piece of news in English and it's going to have a translation that will allow him to understand what the news say. And they also sometimes try to read the things that I wrote in English and they don't know English.

So that is very useful. When you are talking about books or teaching materials, you need the best quality that you can have. And for that, automatic translation is not good enough. When you are a native speaker and you read an automatic translation, you can say that that is automatic. And if you're going to find that, as I say again, in a book or in a paper or in a teaching material, yeah, it's kind of not nice because you realize that this still needs work. You are not giving me the same quality content that you are giving to the English

speaker. So if you are going to do it, if you are going to take that stake and that effort, do it well, do it with equality. You mentioned localization, and we've been talking about pedagogy and teaching. And when you're teaching someone, it is often better to put it in terms they understand. Like temperature anomalies is something people understand. It reduces the cognitive load. And in my book, I definitely try to make things funny as well as trying to appeal to the person just to keep them reading. But those are the hardest things to translate. I mean, you can translate them, but then you need to go back to the localization, which is to say the words strung together don't make sense as if they were written in the local vernacular dialect language. Or worse, it's something idiomatic.

Right. Yes. And idiomatic is nice because people like to learn things like that. They get used to it. It feels good to be part of the in-group. But then that makes it so much worse to try to translate and localize. learn things like that, they get used to it. It feels good to be part of the in-group, but then that makes it so much worse to try to translate and localize. Yes, yes. Localization is key for, so the text is more close to the people you are focused on.

So we do localization. For example, when we translate teaching together, we take some analogies and some examples. There was an example with some cities in Canada that has no sense for us. So we use a similar example with some cities of Brazil. That means exactly the same and has a lot of sense that we understand. And then we also change or replace some idioms.

So there is some phrases, some things that you say that, for example, there is this phrase of beards of feathers flock together. Okay. If you translate that literally to Spanish, it doesn't mean anything. But we have a similar phrase that is, they rise and the wind pile up. That is how we say that.

And it has a lot of sense in Spanish when you say it in Spanish. So we changed the birds of feathers for this other one, and it means a lot of sense in Spanish when you say it in Spanish so we changed the birds of feathers for this other one and it means the same and people will understand that is a lot of work because you need people

who understand the meaning of these idioms of these phrases of these things that come from the culture that are not a thing of the language per se but it's more a linguistical and cultural knowledge. And yeah, it is really hard, but it's going to make the material more appealing or more close to the people that you want to reach with that. And about the humor, it is always tricky even in your language. I only use humor when I talk about myself.

I use that a lot because humor can be, you don't know how that can affect the people who are listening to you or reading to you. So I know that if I make jokes about myself, first, I'm going to have an infinite source of material. And second, it is about me. Any group, any people or any geography or any circumstances that perhaps can be tricky for the people who are for my students. So that is the only way that I use humor. I try to be very careful with that. It works amazing when it works, but it's tricky. Are there ways that English speakers can be more aware or make things easier for non-English speakers?

And as a corollary to and that is not only English speaker. That is, I mean, I'm a white Latin American woman, cisgender, heterosexual. So I have a lot of privilege. I'm educated. I can speak other languages. So I, analyzing this position that I have, I feel that I have an ethical and moral obligation to help those ones that have that privilege. So English speakers have a privilege because English is the lingua franca in almost everything. So how you can help?

First, be aware of that, knowing that perhaps that person you are communicating, talking about, I have this funny accent, thinking a lot before to answer, or is shy when trying to communicate, is speaking in another language. So that is a lot of work to try to communicate in that way. The second aspect is if you are in an organization, for example, you are organizing a conference, try to provide content in another language than English. Accept abstract in other languages than English.

Do the review, do the feedback. Allow to have workshop in other languages. Try to have the communications. I'm not saying that it's easy. I'm not saying that it's without cost, but it can be done. If we in Latin America run a completely volunteer conference in three languages, it can be done with a lot of work, but it can be done.

So be kind, be kind, be patient. Understand that the other person is trying to communicate in words that are not familiar for them. They're trying to sort and build the thought and trying to communicate with you. If you can, if you're patient, you're going to help a lot. And probably you are going to enjoy and learn a lot too. Our show does transcripts and we do we have reviewers they get automatically transcripted via some AI and then we have a primary transcription person who does a great job and then we have a secondary person who goes through and makes sure that the technology is is good that used to be me but

now Renee does it and I am so thankful. And one of the things with the transcripts that we decided was worth it was to have it be keyed to the times, so you can read and listen at the same time. When I found out that that was very helpful for folks learning technical English. Yes, I will say that if you, for example, this is a very good example. I listened to several of the episodes of the podcast and have the transcript helped me a lot, but will help also the people who are hearing, they have some issues there too.

When you try to do things more accessible, you usually help a lot of people. Not only, for example, the one that the English is a second language. And I would say to have the transcript, we allow me to go to Google Translate and have a translation by my own. That probably will be good enough for me to take the main ideas of the podcast. So for teaching materials, for example, going back to some of the topics that you invite me, when you generate a slide, it's usually very good to have speaker notes, to have alternative text in images. It's going to be very useful if you can share the teaching material before the class, so people who don't speak the language or have some accessibility

need will be able to go through the material before and be better prepared for that class with question they are going to be able to looking for the words and the terms they don't know or they will be ready to ask you for that to share the things with a license that allow derivative work is also very good for For example, I would not be able to translate teaching together if Greg didn't share this material with a license that allowed me to do translation. Even when I ask for permission, we of course contact the author in the first term. The fact that the

license allows to do this is what gives us the opportunity to have now the book in Spanish too. So all these little details are very good to the English speaker, native, that really little things that you can do to help to access the material or to translate the materials to another language for people access easily. But translation, as you've said, it isn't just a matter of swapping the words. There's more to it. There's the localization part. And if you are localizing into many different languages, there's the internationalization part, which is getting all that ready.

Yeah, the internationalization, the concept of that is more related to the technology. for example for a software or for an application to be able to support different languages and different localization without the need to touch the base code of the application of the software. So for example, we can have a a webpage that can have multilingual content. So, you can have your webpage in English, in Spanish, in Portuguese, on the different language that you want to. The infrastructure and the technology that allow you to have that multilingual language in your website is what we call internationalization. So that means that you can create a web page and without the need to touch the code base of your website,

you can also have the web page in English, in Spanish, in Portuguese, in Japanese. So you only need to touch the content and not what is taking that content and giving the look and feel and publish on the web or the search and shine that you have in the web page and all those kinds of things. So internationalization has to do with that. And translation is one aspect of localization. And you had a couple of questions for us.

Let me see. Yes. Let's ask the one to Chris first. Yeah, because we were speaking about teaching and teaching technology and education, I would like to know Chris, if you can think about a lesson, a class, a course that you take that was really good, which one was, and I would like to know why you like so much. Wow, I have to think back.

It's been a while since I've been in school. On the computer science side, the courses I liked most were hands-on more than kind of textbook stuff. So our main intro CS course was called CS60 and that was somewhat hands-on but i did not enjoy it because it was very it's very exercise and textbook based um i enjoyed operating systems because that was more kind of that we had a open-ended project we could do at the end um and in networking we did too um at least she's making faces at me you didn't go to either one of those classes i went to both of them you were excused from both of them no no i was not excused from either of them. Later than that, in grad school where I took physics, the classes I enjoyed most were the ones where the instructor was excited.

Yes. I think that's kind of a through line through all the courses I enjoyed was if the instructor was excited and you could tell that they enjoyed the material or found interest in it or something about it resonated with them. Those were the ones I had the most fun with. in a monotone, not very interested, and the exercises were difficult, and the back and forth, like the Q&A with the instructor was either not very helpful, or they weren't, you know, not digging into what you were really asking. Those were the ones that I had trouble with. So it really comes down to the quality of the instructor and whether they at least could make you believe they were having a good time teaching it. They were good enough actors. No, no, I agree. I think that students can feel when you are excited about the topic, when you care. And usually people who enjoy what they're teaching, they take the time to prepare the lesson, the class, and the exercise.

And you can realize that and you can enjoy that as a student. Thank you so much for that answer. I really enjoyed it. Thank you for sharing that. Alicia, for you, I have a question for you. So I know that you also teach. So I would like to hear a reflection on your teaching. I do drive some of my, I drive some of the folks at class crazy

because every time we run the class, I update things. I can't not. There's always something I could be doing better. I do use a lot of humor. It's not all about myself, but it's also not about other people. I have a whole section about chickens. Because chickens are funny.

That's interesting. A chicken pushes a button, which leads to an interrupt, which leads to an interrupt service routine, which leads to this and this and this and this. And it's all because the chicken pushed the button. And I don't know why I find that hilarious, but I do. And the students seem to enjoy the animals. I guess I like the animals in it. And imagery. I like having good images,

which I'm not sure how well they translate. Yeah, that can be tricky, yes. Yes. Because, yes, if that brings some memory that has to do with some cultural things that are not so worldwide. It's perhaps, for example, you show me, I will look at you with thought

and my eyes a little closed and trying to say, oh, what is she trying to tell me with this? So yeah, that is, it has to do always, again, as we say at the beginning, with the context on who your audience is, who are your students, if they are beginners, if they're experts, if they're competent practitioners, and who are you teaching about this concept of learner personas, thinking about who are teaching and then using that, you build your teaching material. So in your case, it has sense for your students.

So it's a good strategy to use. I have a section where I have built, it's about memory maps, which are, I don't know if you've had to deal with them. They're an embedded thing, but they're an embedded tool that is complicated and scary from the outside and incredibly useful if you can get over the fear and confusion. And I made this treasure map that describes all of the pieces you would find in a map file. And one of the difficulties is map files are all different, so I can't just say this is what happens. I have to say you have to go out and look for all these pieces, like you would in a treasure map, which is a very, I don't know whether that's a North American sort of thing, that we like treasure maps,

and that it makes things fun when you're searching. If you have a treasure map, but if you're just searching for technology things, it's tedious and hard and boring. But if you have a treasure map, suddenly it's fun again. I don't know if that would translate. Yes, we do. Everyone's got pirates. Treasure hunt. Yes, exactly. Yes. D got pirates. Yes, exactly.

Yes, dinosaur, pirates, spaceship. I think that is something that we all enjoy. I have a dinosaur section too, but I don't have a spaceship. That's a good idea. Wow. Okay, thank you. Thank you for sharing this. So getting back to your career, you have several courses online.

Could you tell us about those? Oh, yeah. Yeah, I usually, well, I teach at several universities and I also teach a lot in my community of practice. So I do workshops at our open site. I also for our ladies and for the carpentries, always related with computational skills for software development, for reproducible science or for open science. Also related with agricultural sector because I did for 24 years. It was my career. And I teach those for free or for charge.

Depends mostly who is calling me to teach. In my country, universities are public, so you can go to the university without paying. And that is why someone like me, with my origins, can actually have a degree. I usually teach for free for the universities in my country because it's a way to give back the education that I get. But if a bank or insurance company or something like that come to me, I usually go into charge. But one of the things that I do is to publish openly all my materials. So in my webpage, you are going to find all my workshops there for free. You can reuse it. The only thing that I ask is to give me the credit if you use some of the lesson and you're going to find these slides and you're going to find

the exercise and the script that I use or everything is there because I believe that we can build over the work of other people. And it doesn't have any sense to spend your time creating something that someone else already did and is working. So if that can be useful for other people, I'm going to be more than happy that they use it. And you have some in English, like developing software together using Git. Yes. Which is a three-hour course. And then you have some that are in Spanish, Cuestión de Datos.

Yes, that is the data management databases, essentially. And that's a semester-long course. Yes, exactly. That was developed for one of my courses in one of the universities. It is focused on how to use databases for doing data science. So it's not a general database administration or management, but with the focus on doing analysis and preparing the modeling

and that kind of work or task. Yeah, one of the most, one of the workshops that people ask me a lot has to do with go from using a spreadsheet to use programming languages, which is R, of course. So that one is in Spanish and English. And yeah, we teach people who are working on Excel or Google Sheet how to move or migrate from there to use R to create reports and automatize some of the tasks they have to do.

That is a three-hour workshop, and it's one of the most, one that people ask me the most. And you just put them online for free? Yes. Yes. You know, Alicia, I have a very good life, and I have a very good job, and I have more than I need, actually. So I can give a little bit back. And if those teaching materials are useful for other people, yeah, why not? I can do it. I understand that other people can't. And I also know that education can be expensive and hard. So if I can help a little bit, why not do it? I can, so why not? Shanina, it has been really good to talk to you.

Do you have any thoughts you'd like to leave us with? Yes, I will say for anyone who perhaps has some background like me, like Latin American, not English speaker, that we usually get into this category of underrepresented groups. I always say that first, know that we can be as good as anyone in the world. And the second is take the opportunities and apply for things. Apply for that scholarship.

Apply for that job. Apply for because the scholarship that you are not going to get or the job you are not going to get is the one that you don't apply. If you are going, probably sometimes you are going to get rejection, but let the other people say no. Don't be you the one to say no to the opportunity. And if you get a rejection, don't worry, you are going to learn and at some point you are going to get the yes. Watch me. I didn't speak English seven years ago and now I'm here chatting with you and sharing with you the things that I know. So we can do it. You can do it. Such great advice. Our guest has been Shanina

Saibene, Community Manager of Our Open Sci. I will put links in the show notes to her website with its courses and to our SAI, as well as our ladies, the Carpentries and Teach Tech Together. I will probably link the English version, but the Spanish one is right there. Thanks, Janina. Thanks to you. Thank you to Christopher for producing and co-hosting. And thank you for listening. You can always contact us at show at embedded.fm or hit the contact link on Embedded FM. And now a quote to leave you with from Cesar Aira, the literary conference. Each person possesses a mind with powers that are, whether great or small, always unique.

Powers that belong to them alone. This renders them capable of carrying out a feat, whether grandiose or banal, that only they could have carried out.