Hi, do you know there are several GUI for R? See:
http://www.sciviews.org/_rgui/ and in particular: http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/jfox/Misc/Rcmdr/ R-Commander is quite like GUI of commercial softwares. Give a look: they can help your pupils which are able to use SPSS. Although I prefer command line, for me is simplier. Best Vito Dear all, in the coming Winter Semester, I will be a teaching assistant for a course in Survival Analysis. My job will be to do the lab sessions. The software used for these lab sessions will be R. Most of the students have a background in social sciences and the only stats package they used so far is most likely SPSS. So I assume they might be quite surprised the first time they see R ("where is my rectangular data window?", "where do I have to click to make a new variable?", ...). That is why would like to ask the experts on this list if anyone of you has encountered a similar experience and what you could advise to persuade people quickly that it is worth learning a new software? I imagined to give them a short presentation about the nice capabilities what R can do which would be impossible or troublesome with conventional software like SPSS.[1] The reason is that I want to create an atmosphere where people have a positive attitude towards learning a new software right from the beginning. This would make it easier for me and I guess also the students learn more and faster if they have a positive first encounter with R. (Afterwards I plan to introduce them to the basics of R with the help of Venables/Smith/R Core Team: "An Introduction to R", Dalgaard "Introductory Statistics with R" and Krause/Olson "The Basics of S and S-Plus" before doing any survival analysis relevant exercises.) I would appreciate any suggestions! Thanks for your help, Roland [1] I originally thought to show them how easy it is to estimate in R a Kaplan-Meier-Survival curve in the presence of left truncation, whereas I have seen no possibility so far to do that in SPSS (that could be also due to my lack of knowledge using SPSS) but the KM-estimator is a topic during the course, so I can not use this example. http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/jfox/Misc/Rcmdr/ ===== Diventare costruttori di soluzioni Visitate il portale http://www.modugno.it/ e in particolare la sezione su Palese http://www.modugno.it/archivio/cat_palese.shtml ______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
