July 9th – Stan Ruecker
Data visualization is a whole new area of web application that, along with the whole semantic web (or Web 3.0) movement, has come as a revelation to me. As I was listening to Stan Ruecker talking about the applications he was creating with his team, it really reinforced this whole idea of where the Internet needs to go. Namely, moving towards providing people effective ways to not only find information but sort information that is relevant. This isn’t just sorting information any old way, but in ways that are socially meaningful to them in the context that it is needed. Lately, I have really given strong thought to how the “infoglut” that is out there can only increase and increase to such a level that we will actually regress (and question the relevance of the society’s contributions to the social web). In order for the web to maintain its usefulness, and keep users from becoming internet dropouts, it needs a way to allow users to find relevant information quickly and easily. Google was among the first to provide an attempt to create search experiences close to model. However, we have moved far beyond this to a need for “mash-ups” that search and bring together larger amounts of diverse information that fit our needs at any given moment – data visualization tools that allow us to quickly skim the surface and retrieve only information that keeps us from sifting through everything ourselves. Stan Rueckers discussion and particularly is examples, really served to illustrate how this new Web 3.0 can unfold and be made real.
How is this relevant to me as an educator though? I think this reinforces our need to look at curriculum and what skills we should be teaching students. Thomas Friedman, David Warlick, Jane Healy, amongst others, all point to a need for critical thinking skills and constructivism to be the focus of instruction. As Karl Fisch and Scott Mcleod point out in in their presentation Did You Know?, we are preparing students to deal with jobs and problems that don’t even exist yet. Critical thinking skills are going to be and have to become increasingly important in our classrooms, schools and society to deal with this information technology. In our classrooms, data visualization will allow us to not only use these to encourage critical thinking but also create visualizations that can allow visualizations to become relevant to our situation, in this case the classroom setting and objectives. Using these tools, students can take information and create meaning in their own contexts.
However, the other issue is making this applicable to all levels of students. Though the tools shown by Stan Ruecker were intriguing and relevant to the context he was working in, it was hard to see how they could be used in the elementary level. One idea where the “pill database” was transformed to a database of rocks and minerals that could be sorted according to a variety of properties, would be very useful and practical. What I would like to see is the ability for these data visualization tools to become more user-friendly to the point where educators could easily create their own data visualizations using tools that were graphically rich and intuitive. I think we are starting to see that a little with the Many Eyes web application. However, it needs to become more educator friendly and student friendly. The company Edmark produced a series of software called “Thinking Things” that really tried to help students deal with visual data, sorting, arranging and solving open ended problems using this information. Now we need to take it and apply real life problems to it so students from the youngest ages can begin to create and critically think about the world evolving around them. Stan Ruecker showed us the beginnings of where the web is going. Educators need to make sure students are prepared for it.
