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Distance sampling workshop content
http://distancesampling.org/workshops/
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How much prior knowledge of R is neccessary? #2

Closed dill closed 9 years ago

dill commented 10 years ago

Clearly we don't want to put people off coming by having a high level of R knowledge assumed, but we also are not in the business of running R workshops. I think we should be teaching all this stuff in R, but maybe I'm alone in that opinion?

erex commented 10 years ago

This is an interesting philosophical point. Don't have an answer. There is a bit of legacy to protect. Don't want somebody to have gone to a workshop given by St. Andrews folks saying to their buddies "and they never even showed us how to use Distance"

At the same time, your talents are best used by focusing upon R. I think (borrowing from Tiago/Danielle's IDEA experiences) that a) we can work outside of Distance, b) we can teach people enough R in the first morning before coffee to make them dangerous.

Nevertheless DSM workshop has a somewhat bigger R problem than IDEA because of shape file rodeo...

dill commented 10 years ago

I'm inclined to keep things R only, as it massively simplifies the teaching from my perspective. It also distributes the questions in the future (since they can ask GIS questions to R-SIG-GEO etc).

I also think the shapefile issues can be worked around. I need to address this in bookland too, and having read the start of Roger Bivand's book I think it's possible to get the key points across regarding "spatial data" in R relatively quickly. This also might be a good reason for me to write some helper functions.