Convincing other colleagues to use R

I do actually have a question that I hope is relevant. I chose to adopt R f=
or all the reasons most people adopt it--open source, accurate, extensible,=
 platform independent. I thought that I would be able to convince my collea=
gues 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 graphi=
cal representations of data sets didn't convince colleagues to even downloa=
d R (except for again, the political scientist; the ecologist already had i=
t).

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

So, what I would like to hear from some of you at other institutions is wha=
t can I do to convince/encourage my colleagues in other departments to adop=
t 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.htm=

l

      _
     | |          Robert W. Hayden
     | |          142 Main Street
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   |   |          Jaffrey, New Hampshire 03452  USA
   |   |          email: bob@ the site below
  /    |          website: http://statland.org
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