Is data visualisation just style over substance?

If you're teaching lessons on climate change and human impact on the landscape, State of Flux could be a handy resource. Along with each set of images there is a caption about the area and the significance of the images. You could show some of the images to students without revealing the captions and ask them to propose ideas accounting for the causes of the changes they're seeing.

Infographics are all over the web these days. Some are useful, some are not, and some are just plain fun. Yesterday, on Cool Infographics I discovered an infographic that explains what infographics should do. The fun and somewhat informative explanation of infographics is made using Legos. Check it out below.

Jack Shulze of Berg says the map exploits today's higher levels of visual literacy from games, television and comics. Part of his purpose, he says, was "an exploration into way-finding devices." He writes about his influences here. It's a great image. To me it's also a great metaphor for one of statistics' all-time headaches: how to make aggregate data that describes whole populations, their lives, chances and risks, feel real and relevant to everyone's sense of "me, here, now".

We need to look at the whole world of communication in a more complete way. We need to take art and music out of "the arts class" and put it into the English class. For instance, the various forms of communication form a circle. On one end of this circle is math, the least emotional of all forms of communication. It's very strict and very concise, and has a very precise way of explaining something. Then you start moving around the circle, and you get to the other end, where we have music, which primarily appeals to your emotions, not to your intellect. So, in this great circle of communication, you go from the emotional end of music and painting and art -- the visual forms of communication -- to the written communication and spoken communication. Finally, you end up at math, which is the most precise. It forms a beautiful circle of communication. But it's all part of the same circle. All these forms of communication are extremely important, and they should be treated that way. Unfortunately, we've moved away from teaching the emotional forms of communication. But if you want to get along in this world, you need to have a heightened sense of emotional intelligence, which is the equal of your intellectual intelligence. One of my concerns is that we're advancing intellectually very fast, but we're not advancing emotionally as quickly.

Share student work.  Parents don’t go to a Christmas Concert to see the teacher; they go to see their child.  If you give them opportunities to see different work from students, they are more likely to be interested in the places you are communicating then by simply posting homework assignments.  Make opportunities for parents to look at the learning and creation that is happening in schools to make it more meaningful for them.

The Library 2.012 virtual conference (to be held October 3 - 5, 2012) call for proposals end tomorrow, 15 September.  The conference is free and held online with events to suite different time zones. The broad theme is "the current and future state of libraries. Subject strands include physical and virtual learning spaces, evolving professional roles in today's world, organizing and creating information, changing delivery methods, user-centered access, and mobile and geo-social information environments." There are already a number of accepted proposals about information literacy. http://www.library20.com/page/2-012-conference Photo by Sheila Webber: washing on the line in what seems like it was the last of summer, a few days ago