[R-sig-teaching] Teaching with R website

[Robert W. Hayden]

I think such a website would be a real asset.  It would be most useful
if it either were restricted to intro. stats. OR organized so that
materials for real beginners were easy to extract from all the
materials for programmers and Ph.D. statisticians.  As a relative
beginner myself, I find the usual resources useless.  In self defense,
I created materials for my own beginning students:

  http://courses.statistics.com/software/R/Rhome.htm

Likewise, 13000 data sets would not be of much help unless there were
some way to find the one you need.  For example, recently I was
teaching transformations of a single variable and found several nice
sets of data.  Unfortunately, logs seemed to be the best
transformation in every case!-(  I needed examples where square roots
for example worked better.  There are already a bazillion data sets
out there for R but they are scattered among dozens of packages with
cryptic names to ensure that no one can find them.  

I think John's idea has great potential but must be inplemented in a
manner much less off-putting than 99% of the existing R materials.
You would almost think that R was a secret society whose main goal was
to fend off new users;-)

Forwarded message:
> From: jverzani <jverzani at gmail.com>
> 
> I was at the USCOTS conference in Ohio and found myself attending a
> demonstration on the statcrunch software, which I hadn't seen until then. As far
> as it goes the software is fine, but what was very interesting to me was the
> statcrunch.com website. As described there, this is set up to allow easy sharing
> of data sets, code and reports along with surveys etc. There were an enormous
> number of data sets (13000, reports etc. that were posted by instructors and
> students). The site is so successful a publisher now runs it.
> 
> I currently put such files on my personal web site for my students to download.
> I have also enjoyed using materials from many other websites, such as those
> discussed in a recent thread. However, I think it might be extremely beneficial
> from a student perspective to have an one spot where they can find the work of
> many people oriented around teaching and learning R. Some site with good search
> abilities, some well chosen organization and a relatively modern look.
> 
> I know there are a bunch of interesting web sites for R beyond the main one:
> CRANtastic, the R-Wiki, the graph gallery, ... but none seem oriented towards
> the exchange of data and techniques that are used to teach with R.
> 
> Does anyone else think such a resource might be useful to the point where it was
> actually used? Are there other ideas where a common place for such information
> is value added?
> 
> If this seems like a good idea, does anyone know if there is some off-the-shelf
> content management system that is well suited towards such?
> 
> --John
> 
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------->  First-time AP Stats. teacher?  Help is on the way! See

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