Visualization Cheat Sheet

Visual-literacy.org has a great summary of a variety of information presentation techniques in their periodic table of visualization methods.  It’s probably the most concise summary that I’ve seen.  It is very likely that I will include an entire section on visual literacy in my next round of data utilization classes.

The “Dead Grandmother Problem” in Teaching

This article provides an amusing examination of the “dead grandma” problem.  Anyone who has ever taught at the post-high school level is quickly introduced to this problem the first time they give an exam or some other major assignment.  If only grandmas knew the risks involved in sending their grandchildren to college.

Cool Web Apps for Students

ReadWriteWeb has posted a list of 10 cool web applications for students, just in time for the new school year.  I’m embarrassed to say that I haven’t tried many of them.  I’m really interested in the note-taking apps, although getting students to realize that they should be taking notes during my lectures is my first challenge.  It looks like Google Notebook might be useful for putting together lecture notes if you use a lot of web content.  I may try it when I redesign one of my courses for next semester and then I can write a real review about it.  I’ve also heard good things about Zotero.

The Pausch Legacy

I suppose that most people have already seen the Randy Pausch videos, but since they are so great I felt it couldn’t hurt to be redundant.  Pausch was a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer two years ago and recently passed away.  Since his diagnosis he has built an amazing web presence by sharing his experiences and inspiring others to live life to the fullest.  The NYTimes compiled a list of his various web sites and online lectures and they are well worth exploring.  There are a lot of good professors who know a particular substantive area well and can communicate effectively with students; but the truly great professors, like Pausch, are those who aren’t afraid to show their humanity and  can connect emotionally as well as intellectually.

IT and Liberal Arts Education

As part of my role with the Department of Informatics I teach information technology related courses in the School of Criminal Justice and more generally try to advocate for the responsible use of technology in crime and justice research and teaching.  I enjoy this role a lot because it allows me to use a variety of skills.  One of the challenges I face in this role is how to advocate for IT as part of general education and not merely as a specialized skill reserved only for those with a particular interest in the area. 

Daniel Sullivan, the President of St. Lawrence University, has written an article explaining why IT is important for a liberal arts education.  He nicely articulates the value of critical literacies, which are intricately related to IT, for general education.  In particular, I like the way he frames IT in terms of modes of thinking and not simply as tools.  He writes, “technology in liberal learning becomes more than a tool or a means to an end: technology is also a locus for creating new knowledge and, often, a medium for creative expression. Twenty-first-century technologies in particular are dynamic media, encouraging collaboration and enhancing the learning process.”

Think Before You Use PowerPoint

Between the American Society of Criminology meeting and end-of-semester student presentations, I get burned out on PowerPoint by this time of year.  I end my Responsible Use of Information in Criminal Justice course with a lecture on the visual presentation of information and I rely heavily on Edward Tufte’s work, particularly his essay on The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint.  I really think this essay should be required reading for all graduate students.  Getting professionals to stop using PowerPoint is probably a futile endeavor, and that’s not really my goal since I also use PowerPoint for teaching and presentations.  Instead I’m simply trying to get students to think critically about how they present information regardless of the format and to discourage them from trying to get technology to do the work for them.  Today I stumbled upon a new and fun example of how PowerPoint is misused.  It’s a slideshow called Death by PowerPoint available at the Slideshare site.

Getting a Handle on the Generational Gap

One of the inevitabilities of being a professor is that the incoming students seem to get progressively younger while you get older.  The Beloit College Mindset List is a great way to keep this generational gap in mind when you enter the classroom and to get a sense of the worldviews and life perspectives of your students.  Since I teach about comparative and historical social issues, it’s important for me to remember that things that are part of my historical perspective are probably not even vaguely familiar to many undergraduates.  The items on this year’s list that are most relevant for my research and teaching are:

• What Berlin wall?
• Russia has always had a multi-party political system. 
• Tiananmen Square is a 2008 Olympics venue, not the scene of a massacre.
   

Mapping Tragedy

Google Earth has teamed up with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to create an interactive learning tool about the genocide in Darfur, Sudan.  Google Earth is a downloadable program that combines maps, satellite pictures, and three-dimensional imagery to allow users to surf the globe and zoom in on places of interest, such as neighborhoods, natural wonders, or national monuments.  The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum has created a new set of layers for Google Earth that provides information about the destruction in Darfur.  The layers include images of damaged and destroyed villages, statistics about displaced persons, and interview transcripts from victims.  It’s a visually compelling tool that highlights the creative ways in which we can use technology to learn about new things, but also to address social problems.

Visualizing Scientific Output

I recently learned of the data visualization work of W. Bradford Paley through Eszter Hargittai’s blog.  Some of Paley’s ideas overlap with those of Edward Tufte, but his networking graphics are quite unique and compelling.  He is probably most popularly known for his map of the relationships among scientific paradigms, which was recently published in Nature and Seed magazines.  As I was exploring Paley’s Web site, I came across a similar type of map called The Strength of Nations, which uses a network analysis to show the relative strength of various academic disciplines across ten countries. 

I love this graphic because it’s a great example of the intersection of my two main research areas, cross-national criminology and informatics.  One of the challenges of cross-national crime research is the differential amount of academic resources in this field across countries.  This concept has been difficult for me to adequately convey to undergraduate students who do not have a sense of academic disciplines in different countries.  Paley uses sophisticated information presentation techniques to nicely illustrate how the social sciences in general are stronger in some countries, such as the U.S., than in others.  I plan to use this picture in my Cross-National Crime class to illustrate why the field of criminology is more developed in the U.S. than in most other countries and why it is difficult to get cross-national crime information from other countries.

The Lucifer Effect

Today’s online New York Times has an interesting video interview with Dr. Philip Zimbardo, the recently retired social psychologist from Stanford University.  Zimbardo is probably best known for the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, which explored how people adapt to social roles, why people conform, and the conditions under which people can treat others badly.  It is also used today as a good example of why we need to take ethics seriously in social science research and why Institutional Review Boards are important.  Zimbardo’s intereview was promoting his new book The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, in which he takes the lessons learned from the Stanford Prison Experiment and applies them to the recent prisoner abuse case of Abu Graib.  I often show this film in my classes, to illustrate why it’s important for researchers to collect data responsibly, and I have had several class discussion relating this film to Abu Graib.  I’m now very curious to read Zimbardo’s take on this issue and I’m looking forward to getting this book.