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: [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.cc.ysu.edu/~gjkerns/ ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
