Carol Gering

In light of my recent foray into data visualization, I just had to post this:

seen on infosthetics.com

Perhaps I should make my own version: I’m thinking a chocolate BAR chart.

I’ve been working on this off and on throughout the summer, but haven’t posted anything! It’s probably about time to document the things I’ve been doing.

Context

Earlier this year I performed a review of OpenCourseware courses from three different institutions: MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and The Open University. I evaluated three courses from each of the three institutions.

Process

As I reviewed the courses, I kept a log of features that I recognized as valuable. At the end of my review I codified the results by creating a master list of features, and then organizing the features into five categories:

1. Site Structure and Features
2. Coruse Structure and Features
3. Types of Content
4. Efficacy of Content
5. Community of Learners

After creating the list, I went back through all nine courses and marked whether or not each feature existed in each course. I found that a binary answer wasn’t always satisfactory. In some cases, the feature existed, but wasn’t complete or fully developed. In this resulting chart, green checks represent “fully present”; black squares represent “partially developed.”

My next step was to assign a relative value for each feature. It was obvious during my review that different institutions valued different features. To serve my purposes, I needed to determine the value that my organization (Center for Distance Education) places on each item in the list. I collaborated with a colleague, Chris Lott, to place a value of 1, 2, or 3 on each item in the list (three being high).

After designating a value for each item on the master list, I entered everything into a spreadsheet and created a series of formulas to calculate relative weights for each of the five categories. As one product of my research, I wanted a way to visually compare the strengths of institutions as well as individual courses, using CDE’s perceived values as a metric. My first thought was to create a treemap (view the treemap attempt), but the data wasn’t as visually intuitive as I’d hoped in this format. After a bit of trial and error, I settled on Bubble Charts as a more effective type of display for this particular data. In the first chart below you’ll see a comparison between the three institutions. In the second chart, a more detailed view comparing all nine courses against the CDE ideal.

Note that the size of the bubble indicates the total number of features employed, while the colors represent the distribution within categories. It’s readily evident that Carnegie Mellon (OLI) and The Open University (OpenLearn) implement more of the features from the list than MIT. It’s also clear that The Open University has placed more emphasis on learning community features than the other two institutions.

Meta

Data Visualizations were created using IBM’s Many Eyes site. I stored some of my pdf documents on Issuu. (This site creates an interesting way to view and expand pdf documents.) For convenience in linking from this blog, the pie chart and bubble charts were uploaded to Flickr.

I love this! Adobe Kuler—an online color-scheme generator—now allows you to create a custom color palette based on a single photo. You can upload a photo directly into Kuler, or use photos from Flickr (your own, your contacts’ photos, or other people’s photos).  To access this feature, go to the Kuler web site and click on “Create.”

Here’s an example of one of my photos and the matching color scheme:

I’ve completed my review of nine open courseware courses (three from MIT, three from Carnegie Mellon, and three from the Open University). As expected, I found a great deal of variety—particularly between the different institutions. It seems clear that these schools have very diverse approaches to instruction. I’ve compiled a list of features that I found within the various courses and I’m in the process of coding each course on a master list of features. I would like to create some type of data visualization with the results, but haven’t yet formulated what it will look like. I’ll seek input from colleagues before I link the results here.

Adobe made news last week by releasing a beta version of a web-based photo editor, Photoshop Express. They also created a significant stir with over zealous terms of use—implying that Adobe can use your images in any way they please. According to multiple sources, Adobe heard the outcry; they’re currently working with their legal department to rewrite the terms document. Photoshop Express follows other online photo editing tools like Picnik, and photo storage sites like Flickr. They trumped Picasa by offering more storage space (2 GB of free storage), but neglected to add the capacity to organize with tags. I haven’t yet found any compelling reason to create a Photoshop Express account, other than pure curiosity.

While I was looking at Photoshop Express and reading assorted reviews, I came across this article on  ReadWriteWeb about Adobe’s growing set of online tools, like:

• Buzzword (a competitor for Google Docs)
• Share (a competitor for Scribd)
• myFeedz that uses rss feeds to make customized reading recommendations based on your interests
• Brio web conferencing software

Adobe Labs has been busy! I had no idea. As with Photoshop Express, none of these tools appear to be the first on the block. They do have a certain elegance in design, but I’m not sure that elegance and the Adobe name are enough to attract throngs of users. As ReadWriteWeb speculated, combining all these tools into a one-stop suite might, however, give them a significant edge over single-tool competitors. Several of these tools have potential for educators…something to keep an eye on.

I’ve selected nine courses to review for my graduate studies project.  I mentioned in an earlier post that open courseware (OCW) initiatives can be broadly categorized into 3 groups:

1. Those that focus on publishing documents and artifacts from classroom courses (epitomized by MIT)
2. Those that focus on the cognitive science of interaction between students and content (epitomized by OLI at Carnegie Mellon)
3. Those that incorporate social interaction between students as a key element of course design (epitomized by OpenLearn at The Open University)

As outlined in my proposal, I’ve selected 3 courses from each of these groups. I briefly considered selecting the same course (or a rough approximation) in each of the 3 categories, but quickly realized that was impractical. As a compromise, I selected a beginning language course from each of the categories. I selected languages that I’ve never studied, and I selected three different languages (so that anything I learned in one ocw course wouldn’t influence my review of the other two courses). The additional courses were chosen either because they interested me personally, or because they have potential relevance for CDE course development. I looked at each of the courses deeply enough to verify that they contained a significant amount of content.   Here’s the list:

1. Chinese I—MIT
2. French—OLI
3. Spanish: Espacios publicos—OpenLearn
4. Physics of Atmospheres and Oceans—MIT
5. Logic & Proofs—OLI
6. Exploring data: Graphs and numerical summaries—OpenLearn
7. The Nature of Creativity—MIT (Linguistics and Philosophy)
8. Economics—OLI
9. Reading Visual Images—OpenLearn (Social Sciences)

Snapmania has a web-based tool for removing unwanted people from your photos. Titled Tourist Remover, it promises to clean up your vacation shots. Take multiple photos of a monument or landmark—ignoring passing cars and people. Upload your photos into Tourist Remover, and presto! The web-based tool identifies which things stay the same in all photos and which things change, then removes the transient elements.

This tool has been around for awhile…I just hadn’t come across it yet. Sure, you could do the same thing in Photoshop, but not in such an automated fashion.

I met with my committee yesterday and received approval on my proposal—now I’m officially beginning the project! As a short, one-sentence description of the study: I’m exploring the implementation of various open courseware projects, with an eye toward a “best fit” for CDE. The final product will be a recommendation document that outlines a practical way for CDE to launch an open courseware project, including software packages, overall design of the learning space, course features, and interaction spaces.I’m particularly interested in course designs that offer significant learning opportunities for individuals. Based on my initial literature review, existing open courseware projects can be divided into 3 major categories:

1. Those that focus on publishing documents and artifacts from classroom courses
2. Those that focus on the cognitive science of interaction between students and content
3. Those that incorporate social interaction between students as a key element of course design

I’m predisposed to believe the second and third types of open courseware are most useful for individuals and self-learners. I’m especially interested in finding a way to implement effective strategies for social interaction in a self-paced, stand-alone study environment.As I begin the project, I’ll post updates here—on Rhetorica—for anyone who’s interested in following my progress.

Catching up on my reading today, I found a couple of useful links from Brandon on the JavaJive blog. (I first began following Brandon’s photoblog because he posts wonderful photos like this one…but I digress…)

Every photographer I know has had moments when they kicked themselves for leaving the tripod at home. This short video on metacafe offers an ingenious do-it-yourself design for an image stabilizer using nothing more than a screw, a string, and a washer. MacGyver couldn’t do better! At least it looks ingenious. For less than $1, I’ll definitely try it. What an amazingly simple idea!

And since you’ll be taking photos with your new image stabilizer later into the evening, you’ll need to get the most from your coffee. (I know. It was a weak, cheesy segue!)

For all you coffee connoisseurs, a guide for getting optimum effects from caffeine. Backed by scientific studies, no less.

Flying home from Atlanta on Sunday, I picked up a copy of BusinessWeek and found an interesting article titled The Wiki Cable Channel. The report is about a cable television channel that allows users to submit short “You Tube” type content for use on air. The companion web site allows visitors to watch everything that has aired on the TV channel in the last two hours, as well as the content that will air in the next two hours. Users can comment or upload their own video (which could be used on TV). The idea is to capture citizen reports from people living in the immediate vicinity of breaking news. It’s an interesting attempt to transform TV from a broadcast medium to a participatory culture.