On Fri, Sep 19, 2014 at 05:02:41PM -0700, Bill Mills wrote: > An interesting question is coming into focus here - are we trying to > teach best practices *within a toolset* (so we fork and teach excel > and VBA separately from R), or are we doing advocacy to funnel our > students towards the tools that most promote best practice (so we > continue to teach both and contrast the two)?
I think it's not a question of advocacy as much as a question of advertising. The student likely would not have been angry (or signed up at all) if the pitch for the workshop read: “Learn how to use R and join the open-statistics revolution. We'll go over enough Excel so we can extract your data, and then talk about regressions and plots while introducing you to modular, test-backed, version-controlled development.” A less scripted alternative is to just describe the instructors' own workflows and their benefits along with an install guide, and let the students decide what they want to cherry-pick from that [1,2,3]. If anyone has a pool of students interested in an approach like this, I'd love to give this approach a spin… Cheers, Trevor [1]: https://github.com/swcarpentry/site/pull/465#issuecomment-40879584 [2]: http://lists.software-carpentry.org/pipermail/discuss_lists.software-carpentry.org/2014-June/001792.html [3]: http://lists.software-carpentry.org/pipermail/discuss_lists.software-carpentry.org/2014-August/001986.html -- 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
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