R awareness session for IT Staff
I’ve just delivered a session called ‘R awareness’ to a group of IT staff at University of Manchester. The audience was a combination of desktop support, applications support and research software engineers and initial feedback indicates that it was well received.
The focus of the session was not the language itself but the software infrastructure that surrounds it. Multiple versions of R, packages, R Studio, Jupyter notebook, Microsoft R Open, SageMathCloud and the way that various applications such as Mathematica, Maple and Visual Studio interact with R.
I chose to deliver the material in the same way that The Code Cafe is delivered – self directed material where I act as facilitator. This seemed to work really well and there was a lot of conversation and interaction with the audience that I find is missing when doing a more traditional presentation.
Course material is at https://github.com/mikecroucher/R_awareness