Convincing other colleagues to use R in the classroom

Re: the post from bob at statland.org: As one of those people who uses R 
in
introductory statistics courses, I hope that this list does not go 
away. I
agree that most of the posts I see are off-topic but the ones that 
are
on-topic have been helpful to me in the classroom. Perhaps a name 
change
would be in order to avoid the confusion relayed by the previous post
on reading
large data sets--maybe R-sig-ClassroomTeaching or something like that 
to
make it clearer.

I do actually have a question that I hope is relevant. I chose to 
adopt R
for all the reasons most people adopt it--open source, accurate,
extensible, platform independent. I thought that I would be able to 
convince
my colleagues in other departments to at least consider using R (with
something like RKWard or another GUI). I have failed miserably in
doing so. I've
offered workshops, invited colleagues to attend the R labs for my 
classes,
and have had minimal response (one political scientist, one 
ecologist).
Even having students from my classes do demonstrations of phenomenal
graphical
representations of data sets didn't convince colleagues to even 
download R
(except for again, the political scientist; the ecologist already had 
it).

I teach at a very small college with a very small IT budget and no
departmental budgets for software. The sociologists, economists and
business administration faculty won't let go of SPSS n the classroom;
the biology
faculty use Excel and SPSS, with the exception of the ecologist 
mentioned
previously; the psychology faculty will only use calculators and 
tables.

So, what I would like to hear from some of you at other institutions 
is what
can I do to convince/encourage my colleagues in other departments to 
adopt
R and save our institution a significant amount of money in 
licensing?

Thank you in advance for your insights and advice.

---
Dr. Paula Grafton Young
Associate Professor of Mathematics
Chair, Curriculum Committee, 2011 - 2013
Chair, Strategic Planning Steering Committee, 2012 - 2013
paula.young at salem.edu
336.721.2747 (O)
336.721.2653 (F)

 
<http://www.facebook.com/SalemCollege><http://www.twitter.com/SalemCollege>



On Fri, Jan 18, 2013 at 10:12 AM, Bob <bob at statland.org> wrote:

I am one of the people who lobbied for the creation of this list 
long
ago.  I am not sure R is a great choice for a first course in
statistics, but I thought that if someone chose to use it, then they
and their students might need all the help they could get to make it
easier for the class.  But right from the beginning, the bulk of the
posts to the list were like this latest one quoted below -- 
questions
about how to do something with R that has no obvious connection to
pedagogy or to using R in a first course.  This means that those of 
us
interested in the actual topic of this list get lots of off-topic
messages, while those who post the messages reach only a small
audience that may not be interested in their question.  Some off 
topic
posts are answered, some ingnored, and some posters get redirected
(even scolded) toward a more appropriate list.  I see only losers in
this process.

So my question is whether this list really serves any useful 
purpose,
or does it just siphon off queries that should have gone elsewhere?
Those who post those queries would be likely to get an answer, and 
get
it sooner, if they posted to an appropriate list in the first place.
My own answer is that this list is not useful at the present time.
Possibly in the future more people will be interested in R for an
introductory course and then they might be glad if this list were
still alive, but so far...

So I am wondering what others on the list think.

Here's the official description of this list.

Special Interest Group (SIG) on teaching statistics with R. The
primary purpose of the group is to provide a forum where instructors
using R in their statistics courses can share ideas, teaching
materials, and experiences. One particular focus of the SIG is to
provide helpful support to instructors new to R who are teaching
introductory statistics courses populated with students with little
experience in statistics, statistical software, and command line
interfaces.

Here is where most posts to this list really should have gone.

R-help

    The ?main? R mailing list, for discussion about problems and
    solutions using R, announcements (not covered by ?R-announce? or
    ?R-packages?, see above), about the availability of new
    functionality for R and documentation of R, comparison and
    compatibility with S-plus, and for the posting of nice examples
    and benchmarks.

Forwarded message:

Hi Everyone,

I am a little new to R and the first problem I am facing is the 

dilemma

whether R is suitable for files of size 2 GB's and slightly more 

then 2

Million rows. When I try importing the data using read.table, it 

seems to

take forever and I have to cancel the command. Are there any 

special

techniques or methods which i can use or some tricks of the game 

that I

should keep in mind in order to be able to do data analysis on 

such large

files using R?

------->  First-time AP Stats. teacher?  Help is on the way! See

http://courses.ncssm.edu/math/Stat_Inst/Stats2007/Bob%20Hayden/Relief.html
      _
     | |          Robert W. Hayden
     | |          142 Main Street
    /  |          Apartment 104
   |   |          Jaffrey, New Hampshire 03452  USA
   |   |          email: bob@ the site below
  /    |          website: http://statland.org
 | x   /          phone: (603) 532-7224 (home)
 ''''''

	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]