I think one of the main issue was that the student felt that the instructor's attitude was condescending. Unfortunately, I must say I see this often as well. This is something we must try to avoid so we do not alienate people who uses different tools.
-Joon On Sat, Sep 20, 2014 at 7:59 AM, W. Trevor King <[email protected]> wrote: > On Fri, Sep 19, 2014 at 03:35:18PM -0700, Hsi-Kai (Kai) Yang wrote: > > I think mixing Excel with VBA might be a better idea than mixing > > Excel with R. … Then we can focus on "programming" and "problem > > solving" and let the market do language comparative analysis. > > Focusing on best-practices while working with student's existing tools > sounds good to me, but I think it depends on how committed students > are to their existing tools. If you've worked with something for > twenty years, six hours of “hey, try this new tool” is going to be a > tough sell ;). If someone came to me with that much sunk effort, I'd > definitely try and point them towards an Excel+VBA workshop. However, > I'd tell them that *I* wasn't qualified to teach that workshop (it's > been about 10 years since I've used Excel, I'd just look silly telling > them how to use it more efficiently). On the other hand, if they'd > only been using Excel seriously for a few months, I'd recommend they > give my tools a spin, and see how it worked for them. > > Cheers, > Trevor > > -- > This email may be signed or encrypted with GnuPG (http://www.gnupg.org). > For more information, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy > > _______________________________________________ > Discuss mailing list > [email protected] > > http://lists.software-carpentry.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss_lists.software-carpentry.org >
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