Re: [R] Input appreciated: R teaching idea + a way to improve R-wiki
Hi Matt, The R-Wiki is actively maintained... the addition of material to it is up to R users with any kind of initiative like this being warmly welcome. As for Bill Venable's comment, I totally agree: you should better test your concept first, and be ready to have very poor, as well as probably some excellent documents. I think it should be wise to announce to your students that the best documents will be posted to the R wiki, so that you may place a filter somewhere. As for the format, PDF is interesting as the student could learn Sweave too. However, the R Wiki allows for further corrections and additions to the documents. For the possible section in the Wiki, may be, a dedicated section like Users' guide (written by users) could be created, and then, you will organize material inside as you like. Otherwise, the existing Guides section should be fine (feel free to create subdirectories). I tend to give a lot of attention to documents written by beginners, because they are the best people to tell what is difficult and what is not in R! It is the starting motivation for the R Wiki, indeed. If you like, it is possible to install the R Wiki engine on a local server in your Intranet. Then, students work on your Intranet Wiki, and you transfer to the public R Wiki the best pages as and when you like. You just need a web server with PHP. I can provide help to install the wiki engine on your machine, if you like that idea. Best, Philippe Grosjean ..°})) ) ) ) ) ) ( ( ( ( (Prof. Philippe Grosjean ) ) ) ) ) ( ( ( ( (Numerical Ecology of Aquatic Systems ) ) ) ) ) Mons-Hainaut University, Belgium ( ( ( ( ( .. Matthew Keller wrote: I appreciate the input. Off-list, someone suggested that I set up a class wiki, and have this be the first sieve. I could do some quality control there first (perhaps sending the link to this list serve at the end of the semester for others to check over), and then post the final manuals on the R wiki. I think its a good idea and am mulling it, but part of me asks: why not just post the (perhaps imperfect) manuals on the wiki and allow the wiki to do what wikis are supposed to do? I guess I resonated with Ricardo Pietrobon's point: the essence of a wiki is that it is evolving and self-correcting. Even to get something started over there would be an improvement. If people wait until they are 100% certain that everything is 100% accurate, a much diminished pool of people would post... The accuracy of wikis improves as more people post. In other words, I think that it is the number of posters, and not necessarily the signal:noise ratio, that drives wiki accuracy... Matt __ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
Re: [R] Input appreciated: R teaching idea + a way to improve R-wiki
--- Philippe Grosjean [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: -clip- I tend to give a lot of attention to documents written by beginners, because they are the best people to tell what is difficult and what is not in R! It is the starting motivation for the R Wiki, indeed. Might it be a useful idea to ask for some of the most egregious errors to be collected in a worst practice area to illustrate the difference between good and bad practice? Philippe Grosjean ..°})) ) ) ) ) ) ( ( ( ( (Prof. Philippe Grosjean ) ) ) ) ) ( ( ( ( (Numerical Ecology of Aquatic Systems ) ) ) ) ) Mons-Hainaut University, Belgium ( ( ( ( ( .. Matthew Keller wrote: I appreciate the input. Off-list, someone suggested that I set up a class wiki, and have this be the first sieve. I could do some quality control there first (perhaps sending the link to this list serve at the end of the semester for others to check over), and then post the final manuals on the R wiki. I think its a good idea and am mulling it, but part of me asks: why not just post the (perhaps imperfect) manuals on the wiki and allow the wiki to do what wikis are supposed to do? I guess I resonated with Ricardo Pietrobon's point: the essence of a wiki is that it is evolving and self-correcting. Even to get something started over there would be an improvement. If people wait until they are 100% certain that everything is 100% accurate, a much diminished pool of people would post... The accuracy of wikis improves as more people post. In other words, I think that it is the number of posters, and not necessarily the signal:noise ratio, that drives wiki accuracy... Matt __ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
Re: [R] Input appreciated: R teaching idea + a way to improve R-wiki
--- hadley wickham [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 10/23/07, Philippe Grosjean [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi Matt, The R-Wiki is actively maintained... the addition of material to it is up to R users with any kind of initiative like this being warmly welcome. As for Bill Venable's comment, I totally agree: you should better test your concept first, and be ready to have very poor, as well as probably some excellent documents. I think it should be wise to announce to your students that the best documents will be posted to the R wiki, so that you may place a filter somewhere. As for the format, PDF is interesting as the student could learn Sweave too. However, the R Wiki allows for further corrections and additions to the documents. For the possible section in the Wiki, may be, a dedicated section like Users' guide (written by users) could be created, and then, you will organize material inside as you like. Otherwise, the existing Guides section should be fine (feel free to create subdirectories). I tend to give a lot of attention to documents written by beginners, because they are the best people to tell what is difficult and what is not in R! It is the starting motivation for the R Wiki, indeed. But they are simultaneously the worst people to provide good advice. The wiki seems to be riddled with poor practice and hacks to get around misunderstandings of the way R works. Then perhaps a before and after section might be helpful. Example of awful coding and the 'preferred' approach, hopefully commented as to why it is better? A real problem that I have encountered with ?help is that the help is very good if you know a lot about R in the first place. If, like me, you're just learning the basics often the help examples are terse enough or include enough other odds and sods that it can take a long time to figure out what is and what is not essential to get a procedure to work. Hadley -- http://had.co.nz/ __ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. __ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
Re: [R] Input appreciated: R teaching idea + a way to improve R-wiki
hadley wickham wrote: On 10/23/07, Philippe Grosjean [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi Matt, The R-Wiki is actively maintained... the addition of material to it is up to R users with any kind of initiative like this being warmly welcome. As for Bill Venable's comment, I totally agree: you should better test your concept first, and be ready to have very poor, as well as probably some excellent documents. I think it should be wise to announce to your students that the best documents will be posted to the R wiki, so that you may place a filter somewhere. As for the format, PDF is interesting as the student could learn Sweave too. However, the R Wiki allows for further corrections and additions to the documents. For the possible section in the Wiki, may be, a dedicated section like Users' guide (written by users) could be created, and then, you will organize material inside as you like. Otherwise, the existing Guides section should be fine (feel free to create subdirectories). I tend to give a lot of attention to documents written by beginners, because they are the best people to tell what is difficult and what is not in R! It is the starting motivation for the R Wiki, indeed. But they are simultaneously the worst people to provide good advice. The wiki seems to be riddled with poor practice and hacks to get around misunderstandings of the way R works. Is there any way on the R-Wiki for people to quickly and easily add an annotation indicating that they believe some particular advice is poor practice? Ideally, these annotations would be easily searchable so that other users could find and fix or respond to them. -- Tony Plate Hadley __ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
Re: [R] Input appreciated: R teaching idea + a way to improve R-wiki
Tony Plate wrote: hadley wickham wrote: On 10/23/07, Philippe Grosjean [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: snip I tend to give a lot of attention to documents written by beginners, because they are the best people to tell what is difficult and what is not in R! It is the starting motivation for the R Wiki, indeed. But they are simultaneously the worst people to provide good advice. The wiki seems to be riddled with poor practice and hacks to get around misunderstandings of the way R works. Is there any way on the R-Wiki for people to quickly and easily add an annotation indicating that they believe some particular advice is poor practice? Ideally, these annotations would be easily searchable so that other users could find and fix or respond to them. -- Tony Plate Well, it is possible to define a specific emoticon for that... and looking for the corresponding code in the search box will bring you all these pages. It is also possible to define a plugin, for i,nstance, to list all pages where there emoticons are located. But I doubt experts will loose their time looking at the wiki to make such corrections... and it is a pity! Philippe __ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
Re: [R] Input appreciated: R teaching idea + a way to improve R-wiki
Possibly. I find it difficult to argue the case either way in the abstract, though. I think once you see some of the outcomes, it will become clear which are good enough for posting and which are not. Bill Venables. _ From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Ricardo Pietrobon Sent: Monday, 22 October 2007 2:56 PM To: Venables, Bill (CMIS, Cleveland) Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [R] Input appreciated: R teaching idea + a way to improve R-wiki Bill, very interesting comment. However, do you believe that by posting these tutorials on a wiki they could, even if initially faulty, be improved by the community over time? Ricardo On 10/22/07, [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I think you need to see how things work before making any decision on this. While the principle seems OK, in a optimistic sort of way, you may be a little disappointed by the outcome. Some will likely be superb, useful, well written and accessible. Others, I suspect, will fall short of this ideal, with some falling a fair way short. That's the way students learn, after all. They should use these exercises to straighten things out in their own minds, and some of them seem to have rather twisted ideas, at least initially, even at graduate-level. Some people argue it's useful to see the learning process in action, and some books I could mention seem to be written this way - but they don't get very good reviews. I just think there is a real danger here of giving misleading and inefficient teaching materials a spurious cloak of legitimacy, even if there are disclaimers all over it. I see a need to be very cautious about this, in other words. Bill Venables CSIRO Laboratories PO Box 120, Cleveland, 4163 AUSTRALIA Office Phone (email preferred): +61 7 3826 7251 Fax (if absolutely necessary): +61 7 3826 7304 Mobile: +61 4 8819 4402 Home Phone: +61 7 3286 7700 mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.cmis.csiro.au/bill.venables/ -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] ] On Behalf Of Matthew Keller Sent: Monday, 22 October 2007 9:45 AM To: R list Subject: [R] Input appreciated: R teaching idea + a way to improve R-wiki Hi all, I will be teaching a graduate-level course on R at CU Boulder next semester. I have a teaching idea that might also help improve the R wiki page... I wanted to know what you all thought of it and wanted to solicit some advice about doing it. During the latter part of the course, students will choose a topic of interest (e.g., hierarchical linear modeling), and show how to achieve it in R. They would present their findings to the class, and would also be responsible for writing a concise but well-written How To manual on the topic. These would be ~ 5-10 pages and would include basic background of the statistical procedure and a commented example with code in R. The goal would be for these to read like Baron Li's Notes on the use of R for psychology experiments and questionnaires. Originally I was going to post these as PDFs on my own web-page and let them grow into a compendium of how-to manuals as I teach this course over the years. However, perhaps a better idea, and one that probably benefits more people, is to have my students post their short manuals (not as PDFs but rather typed in) on the R-wiki page. Does this seem like a good idea to folks? Another question has to do with how barren the current R wiki page is... is it still being actively developed or has the community given up on it? Finally, any thoughts on where on the R-wiki site we should post our How To manuals? The tips and tricks section seems to barely be more than snippets of conversations from this list-serve (often sans the context). My guess is that the Guides section is where these should go. Your input would be most appreciated. Best, Matt -- Matthew C Keller Asst. Professor of Psychology University of Colorado at Boulder www.matthewckeller.com __ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented
Re: [R] Input appreciated: R teaching idea + a way to improve R-wiki
Just want to chime in and say that I think it's a great idea. It is, after all, a wiki, and even the bad entries will serve to be something like stubs that can be expanded upon by others and they play with them. When using e.g. the Gentoo wiki, I have run across some well-organized entries (as, it seems, all of these would be) that are nevertheless incorrect and/or missing steps. They have nonetheless been quite valuable, as they got me pointed in the right direction, and I could later come back and patch them up with what I'd learned. Ari __ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
Re: [R] Input appreciated: R teaching idea + a way to improve R-wiki
I appreciate the input. Off-list, someone suggested that I set up a class wiki, and have this be the first sieve. I could do some quality control there first (perhaps sending the link to this list serve at the end of the semester for others to check over), and then post the final manuals on the R wiki. I think its a good idea and am mulling it, but part of me asks: why not just post the (perhaps imperfect) manuals on the wiki and allow the wiki to do what wikis are supposed to do? I guess I resonated with Ricardo Pietrobon's point: the essence of a wiki is that it is evolving and self-correcting. Even to get something started over there would be an improvement. If people wait until they are 100% certain that everything is 100% accurate, a much diminished pool of people would post... The accuracy of wikis improves as more people post. In other words, I think that it is the number of posters, and not necessarily the signal:noise ratio, that drives wiki accuracy... Matt -- Matthew C Keller Asst. Professor of Psychology University of Colorado at Boulder www.matthewckeller.com __ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
[R] Input appreciated: R teaching idea + a way to improve R-wiki
. I would love more quality online documentation around the same level as at UCLA (http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/; the Stata pages are fantastic), but I think I would like the first draft responsibility to fall to the well qualified instructor (Hi Matt!), and those with at least a Masters in statistics. I chose to learn Stata in 2002, because the documentation was far superior. R documentation has improved immensely, and now there is a lot more material to get average scientists (like me) comfortable with using R packages and writing R functions. However, R documentation is still too terse with regard to well explained examples, compared to other software. You can find examples, sure, but they may not be so well explained in the function help file. -Dave I appreciate the input. Off-list, someone suggested that I set up a class wiki, and have this be the first sieve. I could do some quality control there first (perhaps sending the link to this list serve at the end of the semester for others to check over), and then post the final manuals on the R wiki. I think its a good idea and am mulling it, but part of me asks: why not just post the (perhaps imperfect) manuals on the wiki and allow the wiki to do what wikis are supposed to do? I guess I resonated with Ricardo Pietrobon's point: the essence of a wiki is that it is evolving and self-correcting. Even to get something started over there would be an improvement. If people wait until they are 100% certain that everything is 100% accurate, a much diminished pool of people would post... The accuracy of wikis improves as more people post. In other words, I think that it is the number of posters, and not necessarily the signal:noise ratio, that drives wiki accuracy... Matt -- Matthew C Keller Asst. Professor of Psychology University of Colorado at Boulder www.matthewckeller.com -- David C. Airey, Ph.D. Pharmacology Research Assistant Professor Center for Human Genetics Research Member __ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
Re: [R] Input appreciated: R teaching idea + a way to improve R-wiki
Bill, very interesting comment. However, do you believe that by posting these tutorials on a wiki they could, even if initially faulty, be improved by the community over time? Ricardo On 10/22/07, [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I think you need to see how things work before making any decision on this. While the principle seems OK, in a optimistic sort of way, you may be a little disappointed by the outcome. Some will likely be superb, useful, well written and accessible. Others, I suspect, will fall short of this ideal, with some falling a fair way short. That's the way students learn, after all. They should use these exercises to straighten things out in their own minds, and some of them seem to have rather twisted ideas, at least initially, even at graduate-level. Some people argue it's useful to see the learning process in action, and some books I could mention seem to be written this way - but they don't get very good reviews. I just think there is a real danger here of giving misleading and inefficient teaching materials a spurious cloak of legitimacy, even if there are disclaimers all over it. I see a need to be very cautious about this, in other words. Bill Venables CSIRO Laboratories PO Box 120, Cleveland, 4163 AUSTRALIA Office Phone (email preferred): +61 7 3826 7251 Fax (if absolutely necessary): +61 7 3826 7304 Mobile: +61 4 8819 4402 Home Phone: +61 7 3286 7700 mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.cmis.csiro.au/bill.venables/ -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Matthew Keller Sent: Monday, 22 October 2007 9:45 AM To: R list Subject: [R] Input appreciated: R teaching idea + a way to improve R-wiki Hi all, I will be teaching a graduate-level course on R at CU Boulder next semester. I have a teaching idea that might also help improve the R wiki page... I wanted to know what you all thought of it and wanted to solicit some advice about doing it. During the latter part of the course, students will choose a topic of interest (e.g., hierarchical linear modeling), and show how to achieve it in R. They would present their findings to the class, and would also be responsible for writing a concise but well-written How To manual on the topic. These would be ~ 5-10 pages and would include basic background of the statistical procedure and a commented example with code in R. The goal would be for these to read like Baron Li's Notes on the use of R for psychology experiments and questionnaires. Originally I was going to post these as PDFs on my own web-page and let them grow into a compendium of how-to manuals as I teach this course over the years. However, perhaps a better idea, and one that probably benefits more people, is to have my students post their short manuals (not as PDFs but rather typed in) on the R-wiki page. Does this seem like a good idea to folks? Another question has to do with how barren the current R wiki page is... is it still being actively developed or has the community given up on it? Finally, any thoughts on where on the R-wiki site we should post our How To manuals? The tips and tricks section seems to barely be more than snippets of conversations from this list-serve (often sans the context). My guess is that the Guides section is where these should go. Your input would be most appreciated. Best, Matt -- Matthew C Keller Asst. Professor of Psychology University of Colorado at Boulder www.matthewckeller.com __ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. __ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. [[alternative HTML version deleted]] __ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
