[R-sig-teaching] Convincing other colleagues to use R in the classroom

Albyn Jones jones at reed.edu
Fri Jan 18 17:03:13 CET 2013 

My experience has been that young faculty come in knowing about, and
often using R.  Graduate programs in many disciplines (Poli Sci, 
Linguistics,
Biology,...) are exposing their students to R.  Older faculty are 
loathe
to drop the software that they know well, and around which have 
developed
course materials.  I expect that retirements will lead to change :-)

albyn

On 2013-01-18 7:44, Paula Grafton Young wrote:
> Re: the post from bob at statland.org: As one of those people who uses R 
> in
> introductory statistics courses, I hope that this list does not go 
> away. I
> agree that most of the posts I see are off-topic but the ones that 
> are
> on-topic have been helpful to me in the classroom. Perhaps a name 
> change
> would be in order to avoid the confusion relayed by the previous post
> on reading
> large data sets--maybe R-sig-ClassroomTeaching or something like that 
> to
> make it clearer.
>
> I do actually have a question that I hope is relevant. I chose to 
> adopt R
> for all the reasons most people adopt it--open source, accurate,
> extensible, platform independent. I thought that I would be able to 
> convince
> my colleagues in other departments to at least consider using R (with
> something like RKWard or another GUI). I have failed miserably in
> doing so. I've
> offered workshops, invited colleagues to attend the R labs for my 
> classes,
> and have had minimal response (one political scientist, one 
> ecologist).
> Even having students from my classes do demonstrations of phenomenal
> graphical
> representations of data sets didn't convince colleagues to even 
> download R
> (except for again, the political scientist; the ecologist already had 
> it).
>
> I teach at a very small college with a very small IT budget and no
> departmental budgets for software. The sociologists, economists and
> business administration faculty won't let go of SPSS n the classroom;
> the biology
> faculty use Excel and SPSS, with the exception of the ecologist 
> mentioned
> previously; the psychology faculty will only use calculators and 
> tables.
>
> So, what I would like to hear from some of you at other institutions 
> is what
> can I do to convince/encourage my colleagues in other departments to 
> adopt
> R and save our institution a significant amount of money in 
> licensing?
>
> Thank you in advance for your insights and advice.
>
> ---
> Dr. Paula Grafton Young
> Associate Professor of Mathematics
> Chair, Curriculum Committee, 2011 - 2013
> Chair, Strategic Planning Steering Committee, 2012 - 2013
> paula.young at salem.edu
> 336.721.2747 (O)
> 336.721.2653 (F)
>
>  
> <http://www.facebook.com/SalemCollege><http://www.twitter.com/SalemCollege>
>
>
>
> On Fri, Jan 18, 2013 at 10:12 AM, Bob <bob at statland.org> wrote:
>
>>
>> I am one of the people who lobbied for the creation of this list 
>> long
>> ago.  I am not sure R is a great choice for a first course in
>> statistics, but I thought that if someone chose to use it, then they
>> and their students might need all the help they could get to make it
>> easier for the class.  But right from the beginning, the bulk of the
>> posts to the list were like this latest one quoted below -- 
>> questions
>> about how to do something with R that has no obvious connection to
>> pedagogy or to using R in a first course.  This means that those of 
>> us
>> interested in the actual topic of this list get lots of off-topic
>> messages, while those who post the messages reach only a small
>> audience that may not be interested in their question.  Some off 
>> topic
>> posts are answered, some ingnored, and some posters get redirected
>> (even scolded) toward a more appropriate list.  I see only losers in
>> this process.
>>
>> So my question is whether this list really serves any useful 
>> purpose,
>> or does it just siphon off queries that should have gone elsewhere?
>> Those who post those queries would be likely to get an answer, and 
>> get
>> it sooner, if they posted to an appropriate list in the first place.
>> My own answer is that this list is not useful at the present time.
>> Possibly in the future more people will be interested in R for an
>> introductory course and then they might be glad if this list were
>> still alive, but so far...
>>
>> So I am wondering what others on the list think.
>>
>> Here's the official description of this list.
>>
>> Special Interest Group (SIG) on teaching statistics with R. The
>> primary purpose of the group is to provide a forum where instructors
>> using R in their statistics courses can share ideas, teaching
>> materials, and experiences. One particular focus of the SIG is to
>> provide helpful support to instructors new to R who are teaching
>> introductory statistics courses populated with students with little
>> experience in statistics, statistical software, and command line
>> interfaces.
>>
>> Here is where most posts to this list really should have gone.
>>
>> R-help
>>
>>     The ?main? R mailing list, for discussion about problems and
>>     solutions using R, announcements (not covered by ?R-announce? or
>>     ?R-packages?, see above), about the availability of new
>>     functionality for R and documentation of R, comparison and
>>     compatibility with S-plus, and for the posting of nice examples
>>     and benchmarks.
>>
>> Forwarded message:
>> >
>> > Hi Everyone,
>> >
>> > I am a little new to R and the first problem I am facing is the 
>> dilemma
>> > whether R is suitable for files of size 2 GB's and slightly more 
>> then 2
>> > Million rows. When I try importing the data using read.table, it 
>> seems to
>> > take forever and I have to cancel the command. Are there any 
>> special
>> > techniques or methods which i can use or some tricks of the game 
>> that I
>> > should keep in mind in order to be able to do data analysis on 
>> such large
>> > files using R?
>>
>>
>> ------->  First-time AP Stats. teacher?  Help is on the way! See
>> 
>> http://courses.ncssm.edu/math/Stat_Inst/Stats2007/Bob%20Hayden/Relief.html
>>       _
>>      | |          Robert W. Hayden
>>      | |          142 Main Street
>>     /  |          Apartment 104
>>    |   |          Jaffrey, New Hampshire 03452  USA
>>    |   |          email: bob@ the site below
>>   /    |          website: http://statland.org
>>  | x   /          phone: (603) 532-7224 (home)
>>  ''''''
>>
>> _______________________________________________
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