Posts Tagged ‘r’

Excuses, excuses, excuses!

I have been pretty bad about not writing for the past several days. I have been very busy – what’s new? The Board of Trustees were here last week. I had to attend a retreat followup and several other meetings. Wellesley faculty did a great job talking about the MOOCs and other blended learning activities taking place at the College. Trustees were very impressed. I was so happy how the faculty acknowledged the partnership with LTS several times. Our staff members who are contributing to all of these collaborations deserve a lot of credit for their enthusiasm, creativity, hard work and patience.

I have been spending every waking moment of the past week thinking about a “competition” that I am part of. Well, it turns out that I was also dreaming about it and waking up in the middle of the night. As I may have mentioned, I am enrolled in a fantastic MOOC – The Analytics Edge. I have learned so much from it in terms of data handling techniques and statistical modeling. I have also learned the open source statistical programming language called R.  We have been given access to very interesting data sets for analysis ranging from Framingham Heart Study to data from Netflix as it related to the Netflix Prize.

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EDUROAM – A great collaboration

We can point to so many different success stories in the open source world. I have a long list of favorites, but some of the top ones are:  Linux, Apache, Drupal, Moodle, Hadoop and R. I have personally benefited from all of this tremendously and at Wellesley we use Linux, Apache, Drupal and R. We also use Sakai, which is another open source software. I am taking a course titled “The Analytics Edge” from MIT and loving it. As a part of this, I am cracking away at R. It is such a brilliant system, which has matured so much in the past two years. I have been involved in data modeling in collaboration with my wife for quite some time and was looking at R to replace SAS for . The last time I seriously looked at it was 2 years ago, but ruled out on lot of counts. But, the progress in the past couple of years has been tremendous and along with R Studio, a GUI front end to it, it is awesome.

Along the similar lines, I wanted to talk about eduroam, another brilliant idea. It is one of those collaborations amongst higher ed that works great. As I have written several times before, collaboration in higher ed a lot of times is simply more talk than action. Here is one where it is a tangible collaboration that we can all point to and be proud of.

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