Welcoming new contributors and users

[marcosvital]

If you are interested in this project as a contributor or simply as a potential user, please say “Hi” and tell us a little bit about yourself. :)

I’ll start: my name is Marcos, I’m a Biologist from Brazil, with a Ecological and Entomological research background. I work as a lecturer and researcher the Federal University of Alagoas in northeastern Brazil, teaching Biostatistics and Ecology to Biological Science students.

I’ve been using, teaching and offering R courses for a few years now, and with this project I would like to take another step to promote R usage among biology researchers (and, hopefully, go even beyond and promote Open Science practices!).

I hope you all few welcomed at this project! :D

[zjsteyn]

Hi Marco,

Hope this finds you well! Promoting Open Science initiatives if very important for future opportunities to collaborate and come op with much-needed solutions to challenges faced by our diverse society.

I've been involved with the Software and Data Carpentry community during the past year and their resources could prove a valuable consideration during the sprint, they, for instance, have quite a few lessons to introduce R that is already available openly and maintained. In some cases, it is also domain specific such as the Data Carpentry lessons.

In particular - http://datacarpentry.github.io/R-ecology-lesson/ http://www.datacarpentry.org/R-genomics/ http://neondataskills.org/tutorial-series/vector-data-series/ http://neondataskills.org/tutorial-series/raster-data-series/ http://www.datacarpentry.org/semester-biology/readings/

in particular - http://swcarpentry.github.io/r-novice-inflammation http://swcarpentry.github.io/r-novice-gapminder

Looking forward to hearing more, will probably be hosting a project as well during 1-2 June 2017, submitted the proposal today.

All the best hope it helps your project,

Juan

[amandamiotto]

Hey Marco

I second the software carpentry- we teach the classes at my university and they are very well received. Have a look at http://swirlstats.com/students.html, they do good work too. We run a 'hacky hour' at our uni, feel free to borrow or follow through via our site here: https://hackyhourgriffith.wordpress.com/learning-resources/r-resources/

I won't be able to make the sprint but would love to see the outcome (and promote it with your permission).

Amanda

[marcosvital]

Welcome, and thanks so much for the comments, Juan and Amanda!

I'll definitely look into the material from software carpentry; thanks, Juan, for point me to specific content there, this will help a lot and save me a lot of searching time!

Amanda, Swirl seems to be a great tool! I remember taking a quick look at it a long time ago (in an early, maybe one of the first versions, I think), but I believe it got lost among a bunch of mine “take a good look at this later” stuff… I will spend some time at this, thanks! Also thanks for sharing the material from your hacky hour, I will also look at it.

Best regads!

Marcos

[pardalismitis]

Hi there! My name is Fernando. I'm a biologist, and a researcher at IPÊ – Instituto de Pesquisas Ecológicas since 2003. I'm a PhD candidate at UNESP-Rio Claro, Brazil. My research aim to understand if and how mesopredators increase extinction risk of sensitive bird species in fragmented landscapes.

I'm no expert, but have been working with R, SQL and dbases in my research in the past years. I'm really exited about this project!

Best, Fernando

[SachinPawaskarUNO]

Hi there, I'm an Educator, Research and Open Source enthusiast at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, in the US and teach multiple courses which use R such as "Data Visualization", "Big Data". I'm also planning on using R in a new course being developed for "Applied Data Sciences". I have some experience with R, Python & Tableau and would be able to make some contributions as a R-course developer and tester. I would also like to second @zjsteyn and @amandamiotto comments about Software Carpentry resources as I have used them in the past and have found them very useful.

Respectfully, Sachin

[marcosvital]

Hi there, Fernando and Sachin, and welcome aboard. Great to have you here!

I'm trying to work right now on a small demo course, and I hope it could help us both as a first material to work on and, after some feedback, as a general model for the project. I'll let you know when I'm done, but in the meantime feel free to chat and exchange ideas here and at our chat room at gitter: https://gitter.im/teach-R-project/Lobby

Cheers! Marcos

[barnabaskm]

Hello Marco,

I am Barnabas, a student at the University Dar es Salaam in Tanzania and a club captain for Mozilla clubs in Dar es Salaam.

I am interested in contributing in this project. I have never contributed in an open source project before and I haven't studied R yet, so that makes me a beginner. I have basic skills in developing basic websites. I know HTML, CSS, and a bit of JavaScript. I am very interested in contributing in this project.

Sincerely, Barnabas.

[avrodrigues]

Hello Marco,

My name is Arthur. I'm a biologist and grad student on forestry engineering at Universidade de Blumenau (FURB), Santa Catarina, Brasil.

I use R in plant community ecology and I'm already preparing a course that I will lecture soon. I support the inniciative of compile lecture materials and I think this will be very helpful to ones who want to learn and teach R.

So, I want to contribute sharring the materials of my course when I finish it (in Portuguese).

best reggards, Arthur

[marcosvital]

Hi, @barnabaskm and @avrodrigues , and welcome!

Barnabas, it's great that you want to help with the site, this would be great. There is some discussion about it going on at our gitter chat, and I believe that we might work on that during the sprint. Thank you for joining us!

Arthur, adding you material would be great, and we can try to translate it to english later. Having Portuguese material is important for this project, and my plan is to translate from English to Portuguese and vice versa as we gather more courses here. Thanks for joining!

[FrancescaMancini]

Hi Marcos!

I am Francesca, I am a PhD student in ecology at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. I use R everyday for my research and I have some experience teaching it for undergraduate and masters level courses. I am also the leader of the Aberdeen Study Group and in this role I have developed and led a few tutorials on how to use R for reproducible research. I would be very happy to contribute to this project!

[marcosvital]

Welcome, @FrancescaMancini , thanks for coming!

This is great, it will be fantastic if you can contribute with your tutorials! Guidelines coming in a few minutes. ;)

[rmjhassall]

Hi Marco

I'm a PhD student at the University of Aberdeen. I've been using R for a few years and use it regularly in my research. I've also been helping to teach undergraduate and postgraduate students to use R.

I would be happy to contribute to the project.

[marcosvital]

Hi, @rmjhassall , welcome aboard and thanks for being here!

I'm writing some guidelines here: https://github.com/marcosvital/teach-R-project/issues/7

[marskar]

Hi All! My name is Martin, and I am a Cancer Prevention Fellow at the National Cancer Institute (NIH, USA). I am interested in Data Science, Genomics & Immunology. I have finished the Software and Data Carpentry instructor training. I agree with @zjsteyn, @amandamiotto, and @SachinPawaskarUNO about the Carpentry lessons - they are great! I also really like swirl: http://swirlstats.com/

[marcosvital]

Hi, @marskar , welcome, and thanks for coming!

Yes, I'll have to take some time to dive into Data Carpentry lessons, they look amazing! I never used swirl, but it seems to be an awesome tool to teach, and I'll definitely try to use it soon.

Anyway, welcome aboard, and please feel free to ask or suggest anything.

[ghost]

Thought I should stop in and formally intro myself on github. I'm Steve, from Omaha, NE and I'd like to contribute javascript framework for your repo (x-tag) and help out your effort to teacheR.

[marcosvital]

Hi there, Steve, thanks for coming!

Your help with the framework will be great! Let me know if you need anything that will make it easier for you to help. :D

[laderast]

Hi Marcos,

I'm an instructor at Oregon Health Sciences University - we have a set of courses that we are putting together to get students from beginning R to a more intermediate level. We're happy to help out any way we can.

Here are some of the links to our material: Our beginner course: https://github.com/BioData-Club/Friendly-Intro-to-R A Tidyverse course we're giving: https://github.com/Cascadia-R/gRadual-intRoduction-tidyverse My R-Bootcamp: https://github.com/laderast/r-bootcamp

I'm also helping put on an R conference in Portland tomorrow called cascadiarconf.com.

There's lots of R users and teachers in Portland who would be happy to help!

Best, Ted Laderas

[marcosvital]

Hi, Ted, thanks for coming!

I will take a look at your material, thanks so much for sharing. I'm thinking about building a list of external material, so this would make it easy to direct people to courses like this.

And I would be really, really happy if you tell other users about the project! :D

[ghost]

@marcosvital, all I really need is some examples of sites that fit your needs and I'll see if their is an open source solution for your needs or see if I have a solution that suites you.

[marcosvital]

Hey there, @KipOmaha ! Sorry for taking so long to answer, had a lot of things to do after the sprint.

I'll look into some sites that have what I would like, and will come back here with them, thanks!

[jmtoral]

Hi! My name is Manuel Toral. I'm currently the data specialist of an non-partisan non-governmental organization in Mexico called Mexicans Against Corruption and Impunity (a little bit of work!). I'm convinced that the use of R is one of the strongest analytical tools we have in my organization and I'm trying to promote those values.

That's the reason I started a course in Spanish for very beginners from all knowledge fields. I'm still building it, but I'm happy to share :) https://github.com/jmtoral/Curso_R_Introduccion