Category Archives: Data

Is it a lie?

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So I actually taught a 55 minute class Monday. I’d give myself a C- but I think the underlying concept and the examples are decent and worth sharing.

Here’s the idea. Essentially it’s easier and easier to tell convincing lies in a digital environment.

I’m stealing from Dan Meyer here. I asked the kids to tell me one thing they knew was true and then one thing they knew was false.  The next request was for a statement that was sort of true or sort of false.

Augmenting Reality

There are four photoshopped images from various ads.

 

So I start with the question “Are these pictures lies?” and then try to drill down to the various pieces and apply the idea of context, intent, and manipulation.

Essentially, maybe it doesn’t matter so much if Dana Carvey is airbrushed up.  He’s a comedian.  I don’t think anyone cares too much what he looks like.  He’s not selling anything to do with looks.

Does it matter more that they’re changing Beyonce’s skin color dramatically?  Why would they do that? Does it matter? Interestingly, the students seemed to feel that this was done with lighting and wasn’t a big deal.

With Demi Moore, I tried to add complication.  Would this be a lie if this picture was used to sell a beauty product?  That seemed to trigger something for the students and they stated that manipulation of the audience was what made these “augmentations” of reality acceptable or unacceptable.

A worker at Foxconn died after working a 34 hour shift image of Daisey speaking

 

Now I brought in Mike Daisey and his comments about Foxconn.  What was interesting to me was that most of his lies were simply adding himself into the story.  Matthew Baldwin illustrated that really well in this post. I tried to illustrate that by starting with the entry statement above (which is true) and then adding the lie portion in red (below). “It’s a lie but the important part is true. Does it matter?” The students seemed to feel that if he’d add himself to manipulate you that stripped him of any credibility.

It’s important to emphasize that he’s an entertainer.  That’s his excuse. It’s entertainment but the important parts are true.

Contrasting OJ Simpson covers on Newsweek and TimeSo now we have “real” news and they’re certainly altering things to make a more compelling story.  I didn’t seem to convince them that this mattered. The observation that the Newsweek title ought to have been on the Time magazine. The feeling was that the Time magazine looked like a movie poster.  I should have drilled down more on why the image was darkened. What is the purpose?

NYT's graph of the housing crash

 

Only the bottom $100,000 measure is showing initially.  I then ask them to guess how much the house would cost at the peak.  The red money markers appear sequentially and then we talk about how you might manipulate the axises to make graphs more dramatic and why you might want to do so.  I’ll stress again that this is accurate.  The question is then “Is this a lie?”

masterpiece quote

 

 

Now we get into quote mining or decontextualizing phrases. This was a quote used to promote the movie Se7en.1  The more complete quote is below and it turns out Owen was not very impressed by the movie.

So we got most2 of that done semi-decently in about 25 minutes.

I wrapped up with the idea that we were going to impugn the reputation of a historical or fictional hero.  The goal was to come up with two images- one that uses a partial quote from the character/person and then one that uses actual data in some way to discredit them.  My examples were from Star Wars.

Hero?

I originally had Hitler stats in the chart. I replaced them with the Khmer Rouge. It is strange that one mass murderer feels more acceptable than another but it seems that’s the case.

Place I got media or information

Dana Carvey
Beyonce
Demi Moore
Ralph Lauren
Daisey quote
Daisey image
Foxconn death
OJ Simpson covers
NY Times graph
Comparison for the NYT graph
Se7en quote excerpt
Yoda image
Deathstar population
Civil War
Khmer Rouge
Cultural Revolution and Mao
Democide
Skywalker image

1 That’s for you Alan!

2 I skipped a few slides that I used but I’ll put all of the links to stuff below.

Random Thoughts and Examples of Student Dashboards

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This collection of dashboards1 was brought on by a tweet2 from Dan Meyer but precipitated by the fact that I am struggling to figure out what matters in terms of a future LMS and how the data we present (or don’t present) to students and teachers impacts education as a whole.3

While we4 often say we5 want a balance between multiple choice assessment and other types of assessment, if the only data that teachers see and talk about is related to multiple choice we probably shouldn’t bother talking about other types of assessment. There’s also the idea that assessment data may just be the tip of the iceberg. I’m not sure what exactly would make a difference but there are lots of other things that ought to be looked at.

In the end I see the data displayed to students and teachers as being pretty important but it means nothing if it’s not set within the right context and used in the right way by both parties.

All that aside, let’s see what’s going on right now.

Delaware Insight Dashboards

Fairly traditional, I’m not sure these dashboards are even meant for student view but many of the systems I’ve seen lately just give students access to their own data with the same views they give teachers and call it a student dashboard. One of the things that concerns me here is the green/red binary system. There is no room for even a yellow in this world view? Even if your focus is purely on test scores, this kind of thought disregards the importance of scores that fall immediately below and above the cut score. Those scores can easily go either way so seeing green may lead to unfortunate degrees of over confidence.

EquipSchools

Despite having one of the worst icons I have ever seen, EquipSchools has some interesting pieces to this dashboard.


Note the motivation/stress/energy/engagement/homework chart on the right. I’ve seen some people6 encouraging students to input those kind of data that through Twitter like status updates that use emoticons to indicate the emotional state but this is the first I’ve seen of something more sophisticated. It would be interesting to have those kind of data as a student and as a teacher but it seems like they have an awful lot of categories. I can’t think of a way to gather those data without it being either burdensome (and thus not done) or ineffective. Their method, multiple strand Likert scale ratings, seems to be presented in a way that ties it too loosely with time and too tightly with projects for it to be as useful as it could be.

I like the idea this seems to support. Students ought to set goals and the software ought to facilitate that as well as the tracking of progress towards those goals. While that’s a relatively obvious idea, it’s not often done. Most student data dashboards are purely passive visualizations of test data.7 If you’re lucky you might get a mouse over for more information or a dynamic chart.

Ten Marks


This is one of those dashboards that seems to creep up too often in education. It tries to make the data fun by letting you fill up these wacky body shapes with blood.8 It’s pretty much useless for student reflection and really only shows progression along a predetermined path.

You can also see some attempts at “gamification” going on in the sidebar. Apparently you can earn presents. This type of thing would prepare your children well to succeed in College Apprentice where they can accomplish feats and win awards by generating points by attending “events hosted and supported by College Apprentice.”

Read 180


Read 180 pulls out all the stops on the “gamification” bandwagon. I almost expect to get some virtual chickens for my virtual farm if I read enough. Personally, I don’t like this mentality. I fear it’s going to catch on and I imagine it motivates certain kids. I don’t think it does anything to help them learn or reflect on what they’re doing that might impact their learning. I don’t think it’s aiming too high to expect that.

1 A pretty imprecise word that appears to mean quite a few different things to different people.

2 I will never like that word.

3 Someplace I have an interesting way that someone was visualizing learning along five thematic branches (content, critical thinking, etc.) and displaying it as a star/pentagram in order to help reflect the idea of balance. For some reason I thought it was an NSF grant but I’m not finding it currently.

4 I have a frog in my pocket.

5 Yep, frog is still there.

6 I think it was eSparks but their website tells you nothing. I’m also pretty sure Dell’s new personalized learning environment does this as well but I can’t recall if they aggregate the results for student reflection.

7 CosmicMath seems to be a good example of that.

8 It’s bright red, apparently liquid, and in a body. What else could it be?

Based on Faulty Information

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Their opinions are based on faulty information .

I shot this quick clip in one of the classrooms that was doing the performance based assessment. The audio is terrible but what this student says is perfect.

It’s actually kind of scary because there are people who don’t do this out in the public- like they don’t check their sources and stuff, therefore their opinions are based on faulty information.

Now if we can create more assessments that cause students to come to those simple, yet powerful, conclusions I’ll be very pleased.

UMW Faculty Academy 2010 prt.1

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cc licensed flickr photo shared by bionicteaching
Here are a few of the things I’m thinking about after a great time at Faculty Academy. Raw notes are below.

The big picture stuff is pretty simple. Work that is student driven, public and has a real audience results in all kinds of good things happening.

We really ought to begin working on defining and publicizing best practice around blogs a lot of this stuff. And by “stuff” I mean things like student driven classes, online conversations, etc.

Simple things like “when/why does it make sense to give people feedback as audio? ” Kevin McCluskey gave his theater students feedback via audio files and saw his language being reflected when students did in class critiques. So there are a variety of times we ought to be recommending this type of feedback for reasons far beyond simple convenience.

Melanie Szulczewski had a really interesting look at how the action words her students used changed over time and focused on the idea that blogging allowed them to reflect as they progressed rather than after. So it’d make sense to make this kind of data visible and encourage people to look at it. Maybe a blog plugin that showed comments by user sequentially with chunks of additional information- maybe word count, links to outside content etc. Graphs of that information? Per user? Averaged? Probably both.


cc licensed flickr photo shared by bionicteaching
John Morello really broke down his commenting stats over a series of classes based on different required comment numbers. I need to compare data more between classes while playing with different requirements. I still fight a lot with the idea of requiring posts/comments. It’s unfortunate but I don’t see many alternatives.


–All notes likely to be flawed in a variety of interesting, but more likely horrific, ways. If you’re concerned about spelling, grammar or anything else annoying don’t bother reading below.

FACULTY ACADEMY 2010

LOCATION BASED DATA FOR ELEM SCIENCE
-simplify GIS w Google Earth
-direct link in data via gadgets from google spreadsheets
-using flickr/youtube to concatenate in the media info

TED & FRESHMAN SEMINAR
-knowledge and inspiration freely distributed – interesting concept to apply more globally
-understanding into action and change
-2 linked first year seminars
-student constructed syllabus, grading etc.
-http://ted2009.umwblogs.org/about/syllabus/
-how difficult was getting students to take this role in their learning?
-pre and post blog commenting after class discussion
-2 students from each class met to discuss how to structure the class and then comments from two classes recombined
-texting was the main way students communicated with each other across sections
-twitter and facebook rejected
-twitter bc no students used it
-facebook bc their parents were on it

-TED works bc of interconnectedness of knowledge
-connects spoken word and new media technology
-textbook liberal education example
-spreads knowledge of human culture and natural world
-inquiry, analysis, critical thinking, teamwork, problem solving etc.
-inchoate personal and professional learning

-student reflection on their final ted talk one of the more powerful components in that they realized how much work was involved in condensing the topic to 18 minutes
-back channel and technology was encouraged, used to broaden conversation

-18 min limit on TED

So Easy a Caveman Could Do It or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Blog
Jason Davidson

http://jasondavidson.umwblogs.org

-goal was to bring students more into the class
-theoretical texts
-wanted students as creators of knowledge
-wanted policy relevance
-each student would have a pet alliance
-contemporary alliance they’d report back on
-couldn’t figure out a traditional way to do this so opted for a blog
-wanted following and info back but w/o presenting etc in each class
-allowed currency and analysis that tied back into scholarly reading
-not a tech guy, doesn’t like learning about technology
-believed it required more start up costs bc needs to learn the tech
-took 2 hrs and made the blog, shocked at how easy it was to make and maintain
-became credible when talking to students (only 1 student had a blog prior to this)
-only problem he had was problems with passwords
-student feedback was good
-tied into course more
-found analysis of pet alliance led to more understanding of theory readings
-led to policy understanding which was seen as more concrete and useful knowledge
-keep healthy skepticism but w an ear cocked to potential solutions
-referred to posts a handful of times in class
-skimmed student work

Good Intentions, Unintended Consequences, and Some of the Perils of Web 2.0 Teaching
John Morello

teaches off peak hours – nights and mornings
non-major classes related to gen ed requirements

attempt 1
-set minimum of comments but phrased to encourage more
-engage in points/subject not in speech analysis
-attempt to engage with students as part of current political conversation

attempt 2
-presidential campaign
-involve with what was actually going on

-consequence
-minimums may drive max participation if you’re not careful
-spring 08 min 6 and avg 6.35 (range 5-8)
-fall 08 min 10 and avg 11.45 (range 5-19)
-spring 10

-deadlines promote in the nick of time blogging
-127 posts 53% at deadline (last 10% of available time or after deadline)
-198 59% at deadline
-98 33% at deadline

-collective intelligence doesn’t happen
-37 initial posts – 65% drew no response
-30 initial posts – 50% drew no response

—-me- less about collective intel and more about community/conversation

-beware over contributing
-146 total 19 his most by student 8
-229/31/9

-hurry up and contribute
-6 posts 27 mins
-6 in 34 mins
-6 in 41
-6 in 50
-4 in 21
-total interaction w blog in total

where to next?
-guidance for blog discussion (essentially best practice for using blogs for X)
-communication issue not a tech issue
-what’s the equivalent of room arrangement w blog discussion
-equiv of ice breakers for blog
-roles for blog facilitation
-feedback management
-blog equiv to nonverbal dynamics

——————-KEYNOTE
The Googlization of Higher Education
Siva Vaidhyanathan (University of Virginia Law School)

@sivavaid

Neil Postman – critic of media and tech (had an asst read his email to him, never looked at computer screen (possibly))

“are students all want to work in media. we are critics of media. how would you negotiate that?”
response: job is not unlike clergy – feel just guilty enough about damage they are about to do

clergy as large illicit copiers and distributors of knowledge – making judgment about worth of knowledge

arguing against DIY U and What Would Google Do? books

google as mimic of academy
-google founders are faculty kids
-met as phd students
-google depends implicitly on higher ed produced talent
-surplus of $ allows for long term “waste” research/work – so do you need $ to do this? k12?

google offers pervasive life long email account
-perm connection to University (lots of marketing attractiveness)
-trapped into affiliation with a specific company

google scholar
-increased importance
-ever study compared to library searches shows scholar as far inferior
-students use them first anyway

if google is predominant search then we need to train faculty and students regarding source analysis (basic info fluency needed for faculty? where does k12 fit then?)

non-semantic search is kind of like memorization of process vs understanding

We Are All The Pretender Now: Learning In an Age of Just-in-Time Instruction
Mike Caulfield (Keene State College)

banking model of ed – store info, use somewhere down the road (maybe)
-inefficient- maybe need it, maybe not
-theor. unsound- no retention if not relevant

just in time instruction back then
-small learning modules
-kind of like choose your own adventure leading to direct instruction

if we live in a world of just in time ed, what is our purpose?
can learn whatever on the internet based on need
front of the room is gone
information is everywhere

nice activity to compare going veg vs cutting % of electricity for reducing carbon footprint
-why is this so hard?
-trust, info fluency etc.
-what is truth? how do we know? how do structures of power influence this information?

liberal arts ought to have more relevance bc it’s about all these things . . .

the place of ed in a world of just in time- ed is focused on information fluency