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Instructions for mentors
Note that these are technical instructions for using this github repository to track mentoring requests.
If you're looking for guidance and tips for how to mentor effectively, join the club... you might take a look at Shane's Mentoring an MU Session. Not everything is applicable here, but it has some good general advice.
If not, check with Greg about getting access.
Do you have access to the study hall Google calendar?
If not, send [email protected] an email and we'll set you up.
Once you're in the issue tracker, set up a personal tag for yourself. This is used to identify which requests you are responding to to other mentors. Obviously, choose a unique color and tag name.
Students request mentoring sessions via this repository's Issue tracker. When you are available for mentoring, check this queue for Open issues that haven't been tagged -- these are new requests that need responding to, or requests that have been responded to but for whatever reason need someone else to sign up as a mentor.
The student may not give many details about what s/he wants to work on. Before setting up a mentoring session, it's best to find out some basic information (email, availability for meeting in the next 2 weeks, description of what they want to work on), and to look at some code examples from the student.
Add your personal tag to the issue, and correspond with the student via a comments thread on the issue. When you feel that you have enough information to prepare for a mentoring session with the student, and you find a mutually-agreeable time to meet, add the scheduled tag to the issue.
Next, go to the study hall Google calendar and add the appointment to the calendar. The purpose of this calendar is to ensure that there aren't conflicts between sessions on the same IRC channel (#mendicant-study-hall-1, #mendicant-study-hall-2, etc). If there's no other mentoring sessions scheduled at that time, title the appointment "study hall 1 (#{your_name})" . If there are other sessions scheduled, choose the next available channel (i.e. "study hall 2", "study hall 3").
Remember before your session starts to alert mendibot to tag it appropriately. The command is !start_discussion Mentoring session 1-Apr-2011 #{your_name}. It doesn't matter too much what you name the session but it may help identify it later by including your name and the date. And when you finish the session, remember to !end_discussion. To be completely safe, you could !end_discussion before you start, in case someone before you forgot to stop when they finished.
A nice way to do this might be to add a final comment that links to the transcript and also to a feedback survey. Something like this:
Good luck with your project, _____. You can reference the logs from our session here. Feel free to sign up for another mentoring session in the future! PS. If you'd like, you can give us some feedback on this survey to help us improve our sessions. Thanks!
and then click Comment and Close.
2. Then add a one-sentence description of the session to the Mentoring sessions index page under your name.
The title of your page should be in the format #{date}: #{description}. And you can link that to the logged IRC chat on universityweb. So for instance:
1-Apr-2011: Working with blocks and procs
(The link URL should be listed under Discussions at the top when you view the study hall logs on universityweb, or you can just type it in: the address is like http://school.mendicantuniversity.org/chat/messages?channel=%23mendicant-study-hall-1&topic=Mentoring+session+1-Apr-2011+ericgj&full_log=true. Note the full_log=true param is needed esp. if you had a long session.)
If you feel the session was a good one and worth publicizing, when you have time write up a brief summary of it and create a new page on the wiki, named the same as your one-sentence description. You can then change the link on the Mentoring sessions index page to point to your wiki page instead. (Make sure then to include the IRC chat log within your summary).
One tip for linking to your report on the wiki: you can easily do it by putting the name of the page in double square brackets. (See the github wiki pages help.)
Once you've put up the report, then you can tag the (now closed) issue as reported.
You don't need to do a report of every session, but at least take the time to put up the one-sentence description and link to the IRC chat log.
If you think you don't have the experience to help the student, or you can't find a mutually agreeable time to meet, let the student know and just remove your tag from the issue -- that will signal that another mentor should pick it up. If there's another mentor you think could help, you could shoot them an email and suggest they work with the student.