How to use this site
Site layout
In an effort to streamline both my time and efforts and to reduce the excessive repetition, unnecessary technical restrictions, absurd pyramid-scheme pricing, and the ecosystems of bloat and faff that typically accompanies a “web-based learning management system”, class material (including dates and assignments) but excluding submission portals and grade administrivia, will be hosted through these webpages. Lectures will typically not be recorded but slides will be linked from the main class page. Labs will have dedicated pages under the respective classes. Each lab will start off with an objectives section that outlines the analyses or skills the lab aims to teach. Following this, the requisite data and question document is attached. Page level navigation can be accomplished with the menu table of contents at the top-left of the page.
Layouts
The remainder of this page will visually call out the different elements I tend to deploy across this site. Sections (major parts of labs, navigation headings) will have a level 2 heading, and will look like so:
Independent unit analysis
Major steps you take in an analysis will generally have a level 3 heading, and look like this:
Digestible steps
Substeps or other milestones are in a level 4 heading like so:
Sub steps
Writing for technical documentation is awkward and unpleasant, but I’ll try and make it less so. If you need to click or select something I attempt to Bold them. This includes toolbar and options clicks. If I want you to write something out explicitly I’ll “typically quotation it”. If I’m directing you to an option to chose or an intermediate click in some sort of settings or sub tabs I’ll italicize it.
Notes (formatted like this) typically serve as asides, parentheticals, or image credits where appropriate.
{{% notice style=question color=“fuchsia” title=“There may be pirates” %}} Questions in the word documents you have to answer are also repeated in the tutorials like so. {{% /notice %}}
General Lab syllabus & help
The lab is a huge part of my teaching. Lectures can take you pretty far, but what you can accomplish in your own time is what you will be judged for. I have attempted to make these labs as consistent, organized, and followable as I can; but inevitably something would have updated with a breaking change, I will have missed something, or you will encounter an error. Fortunately for you, you happen to be sitting in front of one of the most powerful tools the world has ever assembled. I refer of course, to the magic rectangle you are currently staring at, and our overlords of Google, who make the internet searchable. Being able to effectively Google is critical to success, so if you ask me a question regarding what went wrong with your analysis, the conversation will generally play out like so:
You: I found an error, what did I do wrong?
Me: What was the error?
You: It was XYZ…
Me: What did you Google?
You: Not XYZ…
Me: What happens when you Google XYZ?
You: I find the 200,000 other people who have had this same issue along with a solution… and the 800,000 AI generated regurgitations of those solutions… and documentation 12 years ago on the first page… and then documentation from 2 weeks ago that is now obsolete once you limit results…
When in doubt, you can always try to execute something and then reverse engineer your way back. These are just PC’s and nothing we’ll do is mission critical. The worst thing you’ll do is cause the computer to BSOD (Blue Screen of Death), and although those aren’t great, they are not the end of the world and your work is backed up. It is backed up, isn’t it?
The following is my general checklist to follow as I debug:
Most of the time that gets me past my problem, and if the error message is less than helpful and there are no relevant Google results, you now have all the pieces needed to ask for help in public.
Grading
I dislike touching on this subject as I find it a bit counterproductive to the goal behind attending university, but it seems warranted given that is likely how you’ve ended up on this page :) There are many things I love about teaching, but gatekeeping is not one of them. A 4 year degree is a great signpost on your resume that says you are a well rounded and capable individual with the requisite background and theoretical foundation necessary to excel in your chosen field (and who has hopefully learned how to play well in the sandbox). However, I dislike that my say so (in the form of a pass or fail grade) can act as that barrier to your perceived success or failure. Even more so, a grade is one of the last things you as a learner should be concerned about. If you find yourself chasing points, in my mind you’ve playing the wrong game. You should be concerned about whether you understand the steps and rational behind the material, and how well you are able to apply that understanding to new situations. Although I have no wish to contribute to grade inflation via grade leniency, the bulk of the grading on these labs are as positivistic as math in that there is a right and wrong answer, and I do not grade on a curve. I will of course push you to do your best and go the extra step, but many of the labs are cut and dry when it comes to assigning a points value. If you do well, you get an A, and I’d rather not explore the alternative end of what that range is.
Finally, although it should be obvious at this point in your academic careers, under no circumstances is cheating tolerated. This includes but is not limited to plagiarism in papers; I’ve got a whole page dedicated to how to cite sources here, using previous students’ course material in quizzes and tests, and submitting others’ work, (including trained word vomits from learning algorithms) as your own. Not only does this detract from the overall integrity of the department and the school (the lesser of the evils in my mind), but cheating in these classes sets you up for disappointment and misery further down the line. You’ll have failed to adequately learn foundational concepts which lead to the more advanced skills that the world (and employers) are looking for and which all subsequent material will stand upon. In short, it is counterproductive to the very concept of attending college in the first place and sets you up for a world of friction down the line (credit to Dr. Brian Harvey as the inspiration for this framing). I am always available through email, slack, and office hours (or by appointment) and am here to help, so don’t do yourselves the disservice of cheating through what should otherwise be interesting and simulating material.