Technology in Teaching

It's only the beginning of Week 2 of the quarter, but after today I'm already having second thoughts about my enthusiasm for R. I should have known better, but it is always the mundane technical details that can trip you up and derail an entire 90 minutes of class time. Today was the first real meeting of the lab section of my new econometrics course, in which the students were to download a pre-written R script from our Camino course page and run it. Well guess what? The R files refuse to download. Even I, who uploaded them in the first place, cannot retrieve them from the site.

As an empirical economist, I crunch a lot of numbers, and Stata is my statistical software of choice, as it is for many economists. Stata is powerful, easy to use, and well designed. It can be run interactively, using an extensive set of draw-down menus, or by writing and submitting batch programs. When our Economics Department decided to develop a new, required data analysis and econometrics course for all our undergrad majors, Stata was the early odds-on favorite. But upon further thought, and with some trepidation, we have adopted R instead.

This post from Prof. Doug Ward about using voice comments on on-line papers resonated with me as I don't think the students find on-line text grading as personal as hand written comments on paper. Interesting given that they can't read my writing (and sometimes I have a hard time myself)...