Help students use visualization to better understand concepts
The introduction or use of complex concepts and information in courses can be made easier through the use of visual representations. Using visualization techniques in the classroom can give students more options for exploring information - data, texts, or even virtual objects and spaces - and can help them gain a deeper understanding of concepts or better analyze conflicting or controversial information. Visualizations can be used during lectures for clarifying points or for demonstrations or explored by students themselves to enhance class discussions and explore topics in more depth between class sessions.
Strategies
Have students explore interactive applets - Several interactive applets are available on the web that allow students to explore information. Many examples are linked below including applets that let students visualize information from political speeches or economic and demographic data.
Have students create concept maps - Concept mapping is a tool used by many instructors or graphic artists to present data in forms that make relationships or patterns apparent. There are many desktop software tools available for creating concept maps or data visualizations, even including PowerPoint and Excel. More sophisticated visualizations can be produced using specialized statistical software for research purposes.
Have students create their own visualizations - Several tools are available that allow students to create their own visualizations of information including interactive timelines or "tag clouds" that represent occurrences of words or phrases in texts. Students can even build 3d models and environments using free software.
Examples
Is It Better to Buy or Rent? An applet created as an online feature for a New York Times story that allows the user to explore the advantages and disadvantages of buying a house; the applet lets the user enter various parameters for interest rates, price of the house and term of a mortgage and displays a graph over time of the savings of buying versus renting.
Visualizing the GW Bush state of the union addresses Another interactive graphic created for a New York Times online feature story. This applet lets the user graphically display occurrences of phrases and words from the various State of the Union addresses by President Bush.
Gapminder This applet developed as a test applet by Google lets the user visualize relationships between population, GDP, life expectancies, and many other variables in either a map or graph form.
Tree of Life Project An online tool that demonstrates relationships between organisms.
Timeline An AJAX widget for timeline visualizations, "like GoogleMaps for time-based information," according to the creators. The Simile project also includes other applications such as Exhibit that allows users to create interactive, data driven web pages using HTML and CSS without a back-end database.
newsmap Visual representation of news from Google news aggregator by categories (color) and country (selectable).
An interactive timeline of the Iraq war From National Public Radio, this applet shows US fatalities on one page, and Iraq estimates of the toll on the other page as an example of dealing with known data versus data that is controversial).
Tools
Timelines An open source project from MIT that allows you to create interactive multimedia timelines using XML encoding.
Tag crowd Allows the user to paste in text or upload a text-based file that the site will parse into a tag cloud, a visual representation of occurrences of words and phrases.
Opendx Open source software based on IBM's visualization data explorer
Google Sketchup - Free, simple 3d modeling software package that integrates with in Google Earth.
CMAPS - For creating concept maps and sharing them online. The maps can include documents, other maps, video and other file types.
R Project - open source software for Linux, Mac and Windows that can be used for visualization of data sets.
Xmdv Tool - public domain software package for Linux, Mac and Windows that supports visualization of data in the forms of scatterplots, star glyphs, parallel coordinates, dimensional stacking, and pixel-oriented displays.
Visualization periodic table An array of examples for visualizing data, which may help to decide what style of visualization to use
Neoformix Site that explores many ways to visualize data including topic flowers, arc diagrams, etc.
