[R-sig-teaching] purpose of list

[Mark Daniel Ward]

Dear Hadley,
    Yes, yes, I make lots and lots of mistakes too.  I do everything 
"live", in front of the students.  (I think that it makes them happy to 
see the professor making some mistakes, because they see that everyone 
makes mistakes from time to time!)
    After the lecture is over, while I am adding lots of comments, I 
also take the time to correct any mistakes that I made.  This process 
took a LOT of time the first time that I did it, but I think that it was 
worthwhile.  I'm weighing whether to do it again this fall.....  and I 
think that I will.  It should be easier the second time around.
Mark



hadley wickham wrote:
> I used to do before I became depressed by the huge number of mistakes
> I made!  Now I tend to come up with the commented R code first, then
> build the lecture around that.  I'll still do some live exploratory
> programming, but all the important stuff will be available online.
>
> Hadley
>
> On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 12:58 PM, Mark Daniel Ward<mdw at purdue.edu> wrote:
>   
>> I'll follow-up on Hadley's comment by noting that I always post the complete
>> R transcript of our class session, so that the students can download it and
>> use it.  I also add lots and lots of comments to the file (after class is
>> over), so that they can remember what we did in class.  They seem to like
>> this feature of my class.
>> Mark
>>
>>
>>
>> hadley wickham wrote:
>>     
>>>> As a casual observation I am now in my third year of teaching basic
>>>> statistics to biology/ecology students with a mix of Minitab and R.
>>>> Outside the formal teaching, I have used R with selected students for
>>>> 6 or 7 years (students who want to work at home, students with
>>>> Macs/Linux at home, and my personal dissertation students).
>>>>
>>>>  In the first year I use Minitab and in the second year I use R.
>>>> Classes are around 30 students in first year and 20 in second year.
>>>>
>>>> In all three years, unprompted by me, I have had between five and
>>>> seven students come to me after the R sessions asking why we hadn't
>>>> used R in first year. They find the command line more direct and
>>>> immediate than Mintab, which, it seems, they had found confusing. This
>>>> year I asked the whole  2nd year class to vote on whether they would
>>>> have preferred R to Mintab in 1st year. Everyone voted for R.
>>>>
>>>>         
>>> This matches my experience in a course which I taught both Excel and
>>> R.  Most students preferred R because it was much harder to follow
>>> what I was doing in the GUI - where exactly was I clicking, was it a
>>> right or left click, etc.  With R you see everything I type and it's
>>> very easier to reproduce.  It's also much faster and easier to produce
>>> a page of commented R code that allows students to reproduce all the
>>> important steps, compared to recording a screencast to show the steps
>>> in Excel.
>>>
>>> Hadley
>>>
>>>
>>>       
>
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>
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