Learning Together at the Data Science Learning Community

DSLC who?

From R4DS to DSLC

❓ Name is confusing

🤝 Name is inviting

We’re still the same community.

• You may know us as R4DS or the R4DS Online Learning Community
• Started as a book club for that one book in 2017, but
  • We’ve never been affiliated with that book
  • We cover much more than that one book
• Now we’re the data science learning community (as of April 2024)
• If you want to learn anything about data science, we’re here to help.

Our mission

To provide tools and resources to foster a diverse, friendly, and inclusive community of data science learners and practitioners.

DSLC.io

📚 Learning together

👩‍🏫 Helping one another

📢 Learning out loud

🖇️ Making connections

• I was lucky when I started to learn Data Science.
  • Found a friendly community on social media.
  • I have advantages that not everybody has.
• Let’s make sure everybody has a good learning experience.
• Tools and resources are focused in these areas:
  • Learning together
  • Helping one another
  • Learning out loud
  • Still to come: Making connections

What do you do?

Learning Together with Book Clubs

📚 Over 60 free, online data science books

Small groups to encourage discussion

Videos on YouTube to catch up

Slack channel per book for asynchronous discussion

• Start: R4DS
• (move through fast)
• Added Advanced R in April 2020 (bored at home)
• Also books in other languages.
• Books from “Advanced R” to “What They Forgot to Teach You About R”
  • If anybody knows a data science book that starts with “Z” to make that work better, please let me know!
• Books and book-like things like online courses and even pkgdown sites.
  • Just needs to be free (legally) online.
• The name “R4DS Online Learning Community” became less and less accurate.
• 5-6 is ideal.
  • (Don’t move forward yet)
  • 1-hour weekly meeting
  • Shared slide decks that we’re developing collaboratively
  • I’ve worked in educational publishing for about 25 years, sneak in best practices
• (Next slide) Vids on YouTube, so it’s ok to miss a week

Helping Each Other with Friendly Q&A

🙋‍♂️ Supportive community for asking questions

🤝 Culture of collaboration – it’s ok to not know!

🎦 Learning by Teaching me @ rstudio::conf(2020)

• #help- channels to ask and answer questions
  • From the start: code of conduct has encouraged friendliness.
  • “The anti stack overflow.” Don’t make people feel bad for asking questions.
• Everyone has things they don’t know yet.
• Lightning talk: “Learning by Teaching”, because answering questions is a great way to practice and cement skills
  • Step up from book clubs.
  • Strongly encouraged at all skill levels.

Finding Unanswered Questions

👩‍🏫 {mentordash}

• Mentordash = unanswered question tracker
• This one is older, and has had more help from the community.
  • Tan Ho did most of the UI.
• We try to keep that at 0, but here it was relatively high!
• Loads live data from Slack

Learning Out Loud with #TidyTuesday

Datasets @ tidytues.day

👩‍💻 Participants share:
   data visualizations
   code

• Weekly social data project
• Started by Tom Mock back in April 2018
• Now me and Tracy Teal curate datasets
• Datasets on social media & tidytues.day
• Nicola Rennie from March 2024
• Used in college courses for projects
  • See github.com/r4ds/ttmeta

TidyTuesday in Education

DSLC.io/ttsurvey23

• If you use TidyTuesday in education (as a student or as a teacher), please fill out this survey!
• In part, we’re using this to decide what to do in ttmeta tool.

How can I help?

Contribute

Answer questions on Slack: dslc.io/mentordash

Facilitate a book club cohort

✨ Contribute to Shiny apps

• Come to DSLC.io to join our Slack!
  • Answering questions is a great way to learn!
  • Try to keep replies in threads so mentordash can keep track
• Must participate in a club first, but
  • after you do we can always use facilitators
  • Times are chosen out of your choices, so it’s guaranteed to work for you
• Convince me to let you contribute!
  • I’m trying to make the github repos welcoming
  • Bookclubber exists because Priyanka Gagneja made a v1.
  • Automatic processing happens because Kevin Kent sorted out how to interact with the YouTube API.
  • I mentioned needing help, they ran with them.

Sponsorship

🔍 Seeking a new fiscal host

💸 Grants and sponsorships helpful!

🙏 Grateful for all contributions

• We’re a collective in the Open Collective Foundation, which makes us count as a 501c3 charitable organization for US taxes.
  • OCF dissolved suddenly in March 2024
  • Need a STABLE new host by end of this year
  • Application in progress!
• Even before then we can start working out details of grants and sponsorships!
  • I don’t get paid for any of this yet.
  • My dream is to work on this full time.
• We had a fundraiser in March 2024 while we still could, and my heart is warmed by the response.
  • Will let us keep things running, but won’t get us all the way to where I envision us going.

Join the community!

@jonthegeek

@DSLC

@DSLCvids

/jonthegeek

/company/DSLC-io

/company/DSLCvids

• If the join link fails, let me know at [email protected]!
• When you join, post in the #0-intros_and_welcome channel!
• Ok to ping me for DSLC questions, but ask your help questions in the open in the help channels, so everyone can learn together!