About the author
Welcome! My name is Marco Kühne. The very first thing I want to do is to invite you to call me Marco. That is, if we meet on the street, you come talk to me during office hours, you ask some question; Marco’s the name that I respond to.
- Web: http://marco-kuehne.com/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/marco_kuhne
- GitHub: https://github.com/MarcoKuehne
I am a PhD candidate in Economics at the European University Viadrina. I am generally keen on teaching topics related to research design, quantitative methods, and statistical software. My main methodological interests in quantitative social science include panel data modelling, causal inference with observational data and R programming.
I am also a gardening fanatic, a coffee enthusiast, a committed ballroom and Discofox dancer, a (vegetarian) food lover. I enjoy cutting down big trees and practicing new languages in its own sake. Feel free to contact me!
Dust and Dark
A dusty lecture hall. The light cuts through the darkness from the left side of the room. A dozen of seats in each bench, only few occupied by small groups of students who were trying to make sure that they sit far from each other and as far as possible from the lecturer. The bearish but competent assistant professor explained how to analyze and evaluate the results of various memory and cognition experiments through boxplots, t-test and the like in that software. My creaky, slow but loyal laptop in front of me. That's where R was introduced in my psychology undergraduate studies. – The Times They Are A-Changin'. This eBook is done in R.
The following animation is created with the gganimate package. It shows past course data. Which graphical feature is used to display 3 data dimensions in a two-dimensional graph: ?
How many students participated in summer 2021? Answer: .
Teach – Learn – Repeat
Teaching and learning are strongly connected. I fell in love with learning by teaching the moment I came across this concept. It put the experiences I made into scientific context. Studying for the undergraduate math classes, I soon became head of the study group, than a private tutor, than a student assistant and a doctoral student, now, teaching stuff for over a decade. Still, I feel that (trying) to teach stuff is the best way of learning it myself.
By writing the gitbook I hope to force myself to pinpoint exactly what I know and don't know about data and how to fill the gaps. Luckily, I am not alone with the approach of creating classes or writing books to learn:
I could feel that econometrics was indispensable, and yet I was missing something. But what? It was a theory of causality […]. So, desperate, I did what I always do when I want to learn something new — I developed a course on causality to force myself to learn all the things I didn’t know.
This project helped me to learn more about R, RStudio, R Markdown, R Bookdown, HTML/CSS, Git and Github, empirical research, causal inference, statistics, math, frustration tolerance and fun.
Learning by teaching was originally defined by in the 1980s. Did you know that some people who have Wikipedia articles also have user accounts on Wikipedia?