Dear R-Devel, I have had it in my mind for some time now that a Task View related to R and education might be a good thing. There are currently 19 Task Views, covering a broad spectrum of general topics for which R may be used. The homepage lists 64 books related to R, and several of them have accompanying packages on CRAN. There is a wiki and a host of contributed documentation. We also have a SIG-Teaching mailing list. But the resources for professors seems scattered, and there doesn't appear to be a fully developed consensus on exactly what types of educational resources are out there. Further, CRAN is so large that it takes a careful and patient eye to get an idea of what is available. What might an Education Task View look like? Right off the top of my head, there seem to be at least the following four loose categories: * packages associated with a specific book/text/monograph (many of these...) * packages specifically designed with education in mind (e.g. TeachingDemos, LearnBayes, epibasix, tutoR, schoolmath, ...) * packages perhaps not specifically designed for educ, but nevertheless are useful in the classroom (actuar, distr family, financial, hints, urn, ...) * GUIs: selected GUIs that provide interfaces to common course topics/demos, or that professors might use to introduce students to R (Rcmdr, pmg, RWinEdt, rattle, SciViews,...). With only a _cursory_ glance on CRAN I found 69 packages which, from their subject line, appeared to fall into one of the above. You can see what I am talking about at http://www.cc.ysu.edu/~gjkerns/educationR.pdf At 70+, an education task view would fall in the upper 20% with respect to the number of packages, but it would not be the largest... nobody can beat "Multivariate". :-) Yes, there are probably some packages missing from the list. Yes, there are additional packages for which an argument could be made that they are useful for teaching something. Yes, the above categories are broad and could be tweeked/reorganized or slimmed down. My point is this: R is already being used in academia worldwide. There does not exist (yet) an organized, semi-comprehensive CRAN package representation of what R has to offer the classroom. Such a thing would - in my view - be a useful addition to the R community, and might make many, many professors' lives easier. A Task View may be a step in the right direction. I am confident that the R leadership knows individuals that are perfectly suited to spearhead something like this if it were decided to move forward. By all means: go for it. If there is trouble finding volunteers, then you're looking (reading?) at one. Best, Jay -- *************************************************** G. Jay Kerns, Ph.D. Assistant Professor / Statistics Coordinator Department of Mathematics & Statistics Youngstown State University Youngstown, OH 44555-0002 USA Office: 1035 Cushwa Hall Phone: (330) 941-3310 Office (voice mail) -3302 Department -3170 FAX E-mail: gkerns at ysu.edu http://www.cc.ysu.edu/~gjkerns/
Jay, thanks for your suggestion and for the effort you already put into this.> I have had it in my mind for some time now that a Task View related to > R and education might be a good thing.When I read your subject line, I thought: Yes, good idea. But reading through your suggestions I realized that it might a bit difficult to define what should go in there and what not.> What might an Education Task View look like? Right off the top of my > head, there seem to be at least the following four loose categories: > > * packages associated with a specific book/text/monograph (many of these...)I don't think that this should be among the inclusion criteria because not all books are designed for teaching in a narrower sense (and all publications are designed for education in a wider sense).> * packages specifically designed with education in mind (e.g. > TeachingDemos, LearnBayes, epibasix, tutoR, schoolmath, ...)This might be feasible.> * packages perhaps not specifically designed for educ, but > nevertheless are useful in the classroom (actuar, distr family, > financial, hints, urn, ...)It is unclear to me what this could mean. Almost every package might be "useful in the classroom" if you're teaching the topic that the package addresses.> * GUIs: selected GUIs that provide interfaces to common course > topics/demos, or that professors might use to introduce students to R > (Rcmdr, pmg, RWinEdt, rattle, SciViews,...).This should also be feasible. After reading through this, I think that the following might work: Focus on directly teaching-related packages, especially for teaching basic stats, e.g., packages with demos, data, functions, or user interfaces (graphical or not) designed specifically for basic/introductory stats and/or use of R. "Teaching" might also be somewhat more focused than "Education".> With only a _cursory_ glance on CRAN I found 69 packages which, from > their subject line, appeared to fall into one of the above. You can > see what I am talking about at > > http://www.cc.ysu.edu/~gjkerns/educationR.pdf > > At 70+, an education task view would fall in the upper 20% with > respect to the number of packages, but it would not be the largest... > nobody can beat "Multivariate". :-)Note that the goal is to have focused task views not to have large task views. To be useful, it should be clear to authors and readers what the task view is about.> If there is trouble finding volunteers, then you're looking (reading?) > at one.Great, thanks! Please look at vignette("ctv-howto", package = "ctv") (it's only two pages) and produce a Teaching.ctv. Then send it directly to me and I'll have another look and give you some feedback. Then, we can move it to CRAN and you can ask for further feedback on the mailing lists. If anybody wants to post ideas now, that's of course fine as well. Best, Z