Hi Jason, On Wed, Mar 30, 2016 at 1:09 AM, Jason Bell <[email protected]> wrote: > This being my first post to this list, as I recently become a software > carpentry instructor (as of last week) and I hope this is the appropriate > channel to ask a few questions in regards to learning, and then teaching, R > and python to my local research colleagues.
Congrats on becoming an instructor! The discuss list is an appropriate channel for your questions. If in the future you have questions that are more R-specific, I'd also recommend using the r-discuss list. http://lists.software-carpentry.org/mailman/listinfo/r-discuss_lists.software-carpentry.org > · What is the best (the quickest) way to get up to speed in R (and > python a little further down the track). As you can appreciate my time is > extremely limited (like most of us these days) and thus am chasing the most > efficient method for learning R and python, so I can begin providing lessons > in the very near future. If you are limited in time, and have the dual goal of learning R/Python and also delivering SWC workshops on these topics, why not learn R/Python using the SWC lessons? Since you are already familiar with other programming languages, you should be able to learn R/Python syntax very quickly. And if you find areas that need improvement, you can send a PR to update the lesson material. http://swcarpentry.github.io/r-novice-inflammation/ http://swcarpentry.github.io/r-novice-gapminder/ http://swcarpentry.github.io/python-novice-inflammation/ > · Do you think “instructors” should know more than just the teaching > material for the “subjects” they plan on teaching. For example, I recently > ran a local “UNIX Shell” locally and given I have been using bash for over > 15 years, I was extremely comfortable with the teaching material (even > though I did pick up a few tips and tricks), there were no unexpected > questions that I could not answer. I doubt this would be the case with R or > python, as I don’t use it regularly enough to feel competent to answer left > field questions. Now, I appreciate that you cannot know everything, but > having a greater knowledge than just the 3-4 hour lesson material would like > highly desirable – thus would welcome any suggestions in resources, training > material that could help me to get up to speed ASAP. I'd argue no. And furthermore, even if you do have advanced knowledge, you should limit the amount you use it in the workshop. If someone asks a question that is so specialized and/or advanced that the instructor needs to be an expert to answer it, then it is likely of limited interest to the entire group of learners. It can also be discouraging to the other learners. Since they will not understand the question, this will make them doubt their ability to learn this new material. When given a hard question, I'd recommend saying something like "That's an interesting question, but the answer isn't simple. Let's chat at the next break." > · I see there are a few “R” lessons within software and data > carpentry, so I wonder if there are any recommended lessons that are > designed as an overview and not so much research domain specific? The SWC lessons I listed above are not designed to be domain specific. > · I am also be interested in some visualisation aspects of R as > well, as a lot of my users are still trying to use “excel” to graph data. The r-novice-gapminder lesson covers ggplot2 for visualization: http://swcarpentry.github.io/r-novice-gapminder/08-plot-ggplot2.html > o I have taught myself how to pass command line arguments in R, as this > allows you to write a script to submit hundreds or thousands of separate > jobs to solve on a HPC system. Is this sort of thing covered anywhere? Yes, r-novice-inflammation shows how to create simple command line scripts. http://swcarpentry.github.io/r-novice-inflammation/05-cmdline.html Best, John _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.software-carpentry.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss_lists.software-carpentry.org
