Most students find ecology to be a highly quantitative and computationally-intensive discipline, especially when they begin their studies out of a love of nature. This poster describes issues that I have faced over the past 15 years, as my own skills as a both a teacher and practitioner of quantitative methods have grown. My recent experience includes literate programming taking advantage of both the programming language R and the document preparation system LaTeX. In addition, my students have used R to incorporate writing into code, and code into writing. In a completely subjective personal reflection, this poster has three sections. The first part is a time line of my attitudes and uses of technology during my brief career as a graduate student and assistant/associate professor. The second part of the poster is an example of my attempts to facilitate learning of an important ecological concept (resource competition in plants). The third part of the poster contains reflections on the approaches described in the time line and in the example.
Results/Conclusions
My reflections on the issues presented here have helped to drive my creation of more experiential and inverted classes, including more exercises such as those illustrated in this poster. At this point, I find myself moving ever increasingly back toward paper and pencil, and chalk and slate.
