Albyn, Yeah, I did have a good look at that before I went to the trouble of the online R primer. I have no concerns about the comprehensiveness of R -- it would certainly provide an open ended learning environment. It is good to hear that you have been teaching R at undergraduate level for years, and with some success no doubt. I will probably run them in parallel and see how I go. Thanks for your advice, Arthur
At 08:56 AM 11/08/2007, you wrote:
Hi Arthur I (and others) have been using R at the undergraduate level for years. I don't think SPSS is suitable for much of anything; maybe SAS is useful for managing databases. R does require some investment of time and effort. Have you looked at the CRAN website "taskviews" Environmetrics (Analysis of ecological and environmental data) section? The packages discussed there may be a bit advanced for intro courses, but it does give an overview of packages useful in the domain. albyn On Sat, Aug 11, 2007 at 06:40:36AM +1000, Arthur Georges wrote:
Hi, Great to discover this mailing list. I have been running a course in environmental statistics using SAS for some years now, but have recently moved to delivering the material online or in mixed mode delivery. It would not come as a surprise to you as R users that the SAS licencing is getting in the way of this, as the students know no national boundaries, and distributing SAS across the globe is problematic. I am therefore exploring switching to R. I do so with some trepidation, as I chose SAS in part because the code is intelligible to novice programmers (I use the command line approach for pedagogical reasons) whereas R syntax is likely to present a greater obstacle to learning for budding environmental scientists. Can anyone comment on their experiences with this? Are SAS and SPSS more suitable for undergraduate levels, and R better introduced at graduate level? Should I not go there for the undergrads? Any tricks of the trade? My course is on http://ecology.lamsinternational.com/ and you will note that there is an Introductory R module there that I have not yet trialed on a class -- plan to in February. If you want to poke around in there, the enrolment key is Fisher. All the best, Arthur
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