Jon Harmon | Learning by Teaching: Mentoring at the R4DS Online Learning Community | RStudio (2020)
I host a weekly R Office Hour on the R4DS Online Learning Community Slack. By doing so, I have learned more about R than I ever would have thought. Here I'll present concrete examples of how R users can participate in the R community to expand their skills. R users of all skill levels can develop their skills by helping one another learn. Committing to help people with their coding challenges leads to the exploration of answers in areas you might otherwise not examine. A 5-minute presentation in our Lightning Talks series
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Transcript#
This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors.
I'm John Harmon. I'm a senior data scientist at Macmillan Learning, and today I'm going to talk to you about mentoring at the R4DS Online Learning Community.
So the takeaways I want you to get from this talk are that teaching is a good way to increase your fluency, and that I need 40 of you to go to r4ds.online, click Slack, and message me, JohnTheGeek.
About the R4DS Online Learning Community
So R4DS Online Learning Community was founded in 2017 by Jesse Mostapak. It started as a study group for going through the R for Data Science book by Hadley and And it's kind of evolved into just a place you can come when you're struggling with something in R, and someone will help you figure out how to do that thing.
You can find us at r4ds.online, click Slack. We have over 4,000 members, about 250 of which are active every week, and we're most famous for the Tidy Tuesday project on Twitter, where every Monday we release a data set, and then people create visualizations and post their visualizations and their code on Twitter.
We also do the RFeedback Friday hashtag and the Function Friday hashtag, just as a way to engage with the RStats community on Twitter.
Office hours
But what I'm focusing on today is we also do office hours. Every Saturday I am on R Slack from starting at 11 a.m. Central Time, 9 a.m. Pacific, and just when questions come in, I help people find the answers.
Now usually it's something like, hey, is there a function to do this? And I know what function it is, or I can go look up what function it is. But sometimes it'll be something that I have no idea, but I have more experience using R and I know how to read help and I know how to Google, and so usually I'm guiding people through how to do that.
My goal, why I said I need 40 people, is I want to have 40 people doing this. We've got, I think we're up to eight now. I want to have a full-time tutor by this time next year, equivalent, so 40 hours a week. More than that would be great.
Why you should teach
So I would like you to go to r4ds.online, click Slack, and message John the Geek. Some examples of why you should do this. Number one, teaching is a great way to learn. When you teach something, you have to understand it, and so it helps you develop more proficiency. There's some references on that in the learning by teaching article on Wikipedia. I don't have time to go through all of that, but it's there.
When you teach something, you have to understand it, and so it helps you develop more proficiency.
Some examples. Over on the left was just last week, someone was asking about how to learn to do presentations with RMD, and this was really helpful to me. Not quite timely enough, because if you look at my slides, this is in Google Slides, but soon, now I have the info that I know where to go to learn how to make these presentations in R.
Another example was when Toon from Tidy Models first came out on GitHub, a bunch of us were playing with that, and someone was like, hey, this example code in the vignette doesn't work, and so I was like, oh, let me look, and oh, it didn't work for me either, so I ended up creating an issue, worked through that with Max, and then I also did a pull request for some documentation, so I ended up, I'm a contributor to Toon now because of R4DS, and also, I learned a lot about how Toon works by going through trying to figure out why it didn't work and then realizing, oh, because it's broken.
So if you want to see more examples, you can go to r4ds.online, you can click Slack, and hopefully message me, John the Geek, and sign up for an hour a week, an hour every other week, an hour a month, whatever you can do. It's just, it's a lot of fun, and it's a great way to develop your skills. And that's my time. Thank you.
