The activity-based workshop, led by a theatre professional uses improvisation and free-speaking exercises as concrete tools to prepare speakers for unexpected situations that occur during online presentations, meetings and discussions. Practical techniques help participants to step out of their comfort zone and to develop their authority, focus anxiety, prepare for blackouts, technical challenges and to become more self-reliant. The training is tailored to individual participant questions and uses role-play to investigate proposed scenarios and to train coping strategies, which can be applied in virtual and non-virtual situations.

Description
The first day of the seminar begins with verbal and non-verbal communication training, connecting breathing to thinking, in order to relieve panic in stressful situations. This is followed by training with improvisation exercises to help presenters maintain their focus and composure and to cultivate quick thinking and problem solving, followed by free-speaking exercises to train quick thinking, staying focused, engaging an audience in a topic, and maintaining authority. Strategies are then discussed and practiced to deal with disruptions during the impromptu talks.

In the second session, participants will explore various challenges in meetings as well as in online Q&A sessions. Techniques are trained to handle awkward situations. Role-play situations are tailored, practiced, and discussed in the roles as presenters, meeting facilitators and Q&A moderators.

Contents in brief
- Breathing and focusing exercises for stress management
- Free-Speaking Exercises
- Improvisation Techniques for quick thinking and problem solving
- Role-play disruptions during talks, meetings, and discussions
- Tailored coaching and individual feedback

Methods
- Individual, pair and group working exercises
- Breakout room activities
- Voice and non-verbal communication coaching
- Improvisation techniques
- Role-play exercises and discussion

Prerequisites:

Prior knowledge about version control with Git is required. This can e.g. be acquired by attending the SSC’s introductory course “Version Control with Git”. This course is intended for all scientific audiences. Participants are required to bring their own laptops to work on during the course. Network access (e.g. through Eduroam) is recommended.

Summary:

Applying version control can be a game changer for a collaborative research software project. However, even in projects that already successfully use Git, there is often room for improvement of the employed Git workflows. This workshop tries to delve into collaborative workflows using Git branches and discuss their strengths. Special emphasis is given to the resolution of merge conflicts that may be required in the process of dealing with diverging branches.

Learning Objectives:

After the course participants will

- Understand git branches and typical workflows using them
- Have seen collaborative workflows on GitHub (Pull Requests, Forks etc.)
- Gained first experience in resolving merge conflicts
- Know how to use rebase to clean up a branch’s history

Lab presentations:
Lukas Balles • Jürgen Hesser • Wolfgang Huber

Science talks:

Constantin Ahlmann-Eltze (Huber lab):
ML in Single Cell and Spatial Omics for Tissue Biology and Biomedical Research

Pit Neitemeier (Balles lab):
Learnt splitting and the influence of compression ratios in end-to-end hierarchical language modeling

Marcus Buchwald (Hesser lab):
Reaching for Causal Image Generation using deep conditioning