R help - Apr 2018 - Reasons to Use R in a Public Administrations and Ideas for a Short Training

Dear All,
Ages ago I posted to this mailing list asking for advice about to
evangelize the use of R in an international public
administration where the fact that R is free is not a decisive factor
(actually its being "freeware" may even be seen negatively). After a
long time, I think it is worthwhile asking the question again and see
what suggestions other users have.

Another question related to that: let's say you have the possibility
to give a short course (most likely short of 10 hours) to people
who are not trained in statistics (people with a background in
international relations or political scientists frustrated at Excel
and who sometimes have to do a number of repetitive tasks). How would
you formulate a short training to make them not R proficient users,
but aware and looking forward to learning more about R?
Any suggestion and/or pointer to online resources is appreciated.
Many thanks

Lorenzo

Courses are good for people who are motivated to learn. It sounds like you need
to generate the motivation first. Why not develop 4 - 5 case study examples?
Kinds of analyses currently performed on Excel that would be easier to replicate
and repeat using simple R scripts so that you are showing how it would be done
in Excel and then how it would be done in R structuring the code so that running
a similar analysis requires only minor adjustments in contrast to Excel which
might involve copying formula blocks into a new spreadsheet tab or creating
templates that fail and are hard to debug.

----------------------------------------
David L Carlson
Department of Anthropology
Texas A&M University
College Station, TX 77843-4352

-----Original Message-----
From: R-help <r-help-bounces at r-project.org> On Behalf Of Lorenzo Isella
Sent: Wednesday, April 18, 2018 8:47 AM
To: r-help at r-project.org
Subject: [R] Reasons to Use R in a Public Administrations and Ideas for a Short
Training

Dear All,
Ages ago I posted to this mailing list asking for advice about to evangelize the
use of R in an international public administration where the fact that R is free
is not a decisive factor (actually its being "freeware" may even be
seen negatively). After a long time, I think it is worthwhile asking the
question again and see what suggestions other users have.

Another question related to that: let's say you have the possibility to give
a short course (most likely short of 10 hours) to people who are not trained in
statistics (people with a background in international relations or political
scientists frustrated at Excel and who sometimes have to do a number of
repetitive tasks). How would you formulate a short training to make them not R
proficient users, but aware and looking forward to learning more about R?
Any suggestion and/or pointer to online resources is appreciated.
Many thanks

Lorenzo

______________________________________________
R-help at r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.

Dear Lorenzo,

First of all I would focus on topics which immediately usable by your
audience. E.g. making figures and tables based on preprocessed data
files (txt, Excel, GoogleSheets, data base query, ...). And pick
examples in which the definition of the figures and tables remains
more or less stable but the data is updated with some frequency. In a
next step you could focus on processing the data.

I would even skip the step of writing R scripts and start with basic R
notebooks. The ability to include both plain text and code into one
source document is very useful for repetitive tasks. And you
significantly reduce the need to copy/paste results.

Think about a list of packages which you can recommend to your
audience. I would consider the tidyverse collection.

Best regards,



ir. Thierry Onkelinx
Statisticus / Statistician

Vlaamse Overheid / Government of Flanders
INSTITUUT VOOR NATUUR- EN BOSONDERZOEK / RESEARCH INSTITUTE FOR NATURE
AND FOREST
Team Biometrie & Kwaliteitszorg / Team Biometrics & Quality Assurance
thierry.onkelinx at inbo.be
Havenlaan 88 bus 73, 1000 Brussel
www.inbo.be

///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
To call in the statistician after the experiment is done may be no
more than asking him to perform a post-mortem examination: he may be
able to say what the experiment died of. ~ Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher
The plural of anecdote is not data. ~ Roger Brinner
The combination of some data and an aching desire for an answer does
not ensure that a reasonable answer can be extracted from a given body
of data. ~ John Tukey
///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////




2018-04-18 15:47 GMT+02:00 Lorenzo Isella <lorenzo.isella at
gmail.com>:
> Dear All,
> Ages ago I posted to this mailing list asking for advice about to
> evangelize the use of R in an international public
> administration where the fact that R is free is not a decisive factor
> (actually its being "freeware" may even be seen negatively).
After a
> long time, I think it is worthwhile asking the question again and see
> what suggestions other users have.
>
> Another question related to that: let's say you have the possibility
> to give a short course (most likely short of 10 hours) to people
> who are not trained in statistics (people with a background in
> international relations or political scientists frustrated at Excel
> and who sometimes have to do a number of repetitive tasks). How would
> you formulate a short training to make them not R proficient users,
> but aware and looking forward to learning more about R?
> Any suggestion and/or pointer to online resources is appreciated.
> Many thanks
>
> Lorenzo
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide
http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.

A few years ago I gave two 5-hour workshops about R to a class of US high
school students in a somewhat-accelerated science research class (so these
were already science-motivated kids).  They had been using mainly Excel,
and some SPSS for which the school had a license.  Overall they seemed to
like the sessions. They started a computer programming club afterward, and
some continued to use R.

As for motivation, I found it helpful with the kids to contrast the
instructions for making a scatterplot in Excel, with the command in R.  You
can find many long documents on the internet describing how to do it in
Excel. Find a long one (I've seen 17 pages) filled with screenshots and
many numbered steps ("click here, then click there, then click over here .
. . ")  Then contrast it with something like plot(force, acceleration) or
plot(x,y)   It becomes pretty clear which is easier (postponing, for the
moment, the question of where x and y came from)

Showing cool graphs that could never be made in Excel is also helpful.

Lastly, in the international setting you describe, I would emphasize the
portability of code. Ask them how, with Excel, they would share their
analysis steps with colleagues in another country, for application to the
colleagues' data.

--Chris Ryan
Broome County Health Department
Binghamton, NY US

On Wed, Apr 18, 2018 at 9:47 AM, Lorenzo Isella <lorenzo.isella at
gmail.com>
wrote:
> Dear All,
> Ages ago I posted to this mailing list asking for advice about to
> evangelize the use of R in an international public
> administration where the fact that R is free is not a decisive factor
> (actually its being "freeware" may even be seen negatively).
After a
> long time, I think it is worthwhile asking the question again and see
> what suggestions other users have.
>
> Another question related to that: let's say you have the possibility
> to give a short course (most likely short of 10 hours) to people
> who are not trained in statistics (people with a background in
> international relations or political scientists frustrated at Excel
> and who sometimes have to do a number of repetitive tasks). How would
> you formulate a short training to make them not R proficient users,
> but aware and looking forward to learning more about R?
> Any suggestion and/or pointer to online resources is appreciated.
> Many thanks
>
> Lorenzo
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posti
> ng-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>
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