To make the course run smoothly, please bring a
calculator and a
laptop with you. The calculator may be useful for some of the practical exercises (it does not need to be one of those fancy graphical ones). The laptop will be needed to do the computer exercises.
You should have a current version of
R installed on the laptop. More information about R can be found at
http://www.r-project.org/. You can download R for free at
http://cran.r-project.org/ (if you use XP or Vista, choose "Windows", then "base", and then download the setup program). Although everything that you need to know to do the computer exercises will be explained in the course, it can't hurt to familiarize yourself with R a little bit ahead of time (manuals and contributed documentation can be found on the R website).
Once R is installed, you should also install the
metafor package. If you have an internet connection, then you should be able to install the package by start R and typing
install.packages("metafor").
Also, software to read pdf files should be installed on the laptop (e.g.,
Adobe Reader). In all likelihood, this is already installed anyway.
If you are unable to bring a laptop with you to the course, please let me know ahead of time (technically, not everybody needs to bring a laptop if people pair up for the exercises).