As I was listening to the keynote address by David Warlick at the Christa McAuliffe Conference in December 2008, I jotted notes on my program. One was the phrase “data visualization is a medium”. That really fit with my current educational strivings. Perhaps because it brings two parts of my professional life together—my years in social research (creating, compiling and analyzing data) and my current work in education. As I strive to have students understand information, visualization can be key. And it can be key to having them get excited by and want more of this information.
Web 2.0 has enhanced data visualization (could I make a bigger understatement?) Examples abound that are beautiful, fascinating, and informative. More clever and useful creations appear daily. (For just a few examples, see Flowing Data .
In the midst of the excitement about Web 2.0 examples of data visualization (and let me be the first to admit that I am so excited about them that it is hard for me to type about them, when I could be busy viewing more of them), we must not loose touch with other ways to visualize data. Edward R. Tufte is passionate about data visualization of the paper variety. Those of us in educational settings have easy access to the physical beings to make data be performance art.
Next week I have invited the students from another elementary school to join those at my school so that we can visually represent the distribution of population and resources in the world. (This excellent lesson, Food for Thought, was developed by Population Reference Bureau. We will follow the performance by using three Web 2.0 tools: Stat Planet, Show World , and a Time Multimedia look at US population.
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