The future of education is plain text
Jeff Leek was recently at a National Academy meeting on Envisioning the Data Science Curriculum. One of the questions that came up was what kind of infrastructure do we need to enable shared curricula, compatibility across schools, and not reinventing the wheel. His answer to this question was that we need lecture notes stored in plain text files (like rmarkdown files) and data stored in csv files with direct links.
He was not nearly the first person to make this argument. Lorena Barba explained why her MOOC doesn’t use video almost two years ago now. More recently a blog post pointed out some advantages of plain text code files for data analysis. Te reasons he gives are the following (which are expanded a bit further in the linked article below):
– Plain text is always compatible
– Plain text is easy to mix and match
– Plain text is easy to maintain
– Plain text is lightweight
– Plain text is always forward compatible
See https://simplystatistics.org/2017/06/13/the-future-of-education-is-plain-text/
#education #csv #interoperability
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The future of education is plain text · Simply Statistics I was recently at a National Academy meeting on Envisioning the Data Science Curriculum. It was a fun meeting and one of the questions that came up was what kind of infrastructure do we need to enable shared curricula, compatibility across schools, and not reinventing the wheel. My answer to this … |