Visualizing The Complexities Of Time and Place

Source: ASIDE 2019

Mapping challenges learners to think, develop literacy skills, and understand the complexity of global issues, design, and data. There is a direct correlation between the act of making a map and the knowledge acquired by doing it. Mapping their own visualizations increases a student’s understanding; they become more actively engaged in the learning process. This exercise in fine-tuning reinforces the notion of relational meaning and spatial adjacency. It is the fluid movement of change in time, position and detail instead of a static fixed point. It is about observing patterns or relationships alongside external connections. The chance to practice visual thinking through the mapping process builds proficiencies in reading multimodal, visual inputs.

Source: ASIDE 2019

Lessons And Resources

 

Mapping Activities For The Classroom

• 10 Ways Pokemon Go Augments Real-World Education & Student Learning
• Sketchnoting, Mapping, And Making Enhance The Visual Thinking Process
• Rethinking Global Education - Maps As Social Media
• Geography: An Impromptu Kid Visualization
• Mapping By Hand: Another Case For Paper
• Geography On A Different Scale
• Maps In The Wild

Current Events & Map Engagement

• Visualizing The Summer Olympics - Mapping The 2016 Torch Relay
• The Geography Of The Cold - Interactive Mapping Of Flu Season
• Making It Personal - Maps & Visualizations To Teach Disasters
• Visualizing The Winter Olympics - Mapping The 2014 Torch Relay

Modern Maps & Contemporary Theory

• Can Maps Save The Planet? The Interactive Geography Of Crisis
• Digital Empathy: How Modern Maps Are Charting A Personal Cartography
• Geography Is Having A Moment - Why Maps Are The New Meme
• The Visual Politics Of Cartography
• Mapping The Visual Beyond The Visible

 Digital Tools And Hands On, Experiential Mapping

Source: Logos For Referenced Sites

• Mapskip
• Kullect
• Everplaces 
• TagWhat
• Findery
• Leaflet
• Korsakow 
• Geocommons
• Open Layers
• Ushahidi

Mapping As Social Narrative

• Maptia: reimagines geography as a social narratives
• Mapbox: choose layers and details to quickly share online
• Mapstack: create custom maps, with easy access to social portals

Jerry's Map from Jerry Gretzinger on Vimeo.

Data Fluency Follow-Up - Beware of Content Manipulation

Source: TED Ed

In light of our recent post, we thought it worth sharing one of the latest TED Ed videos released this summer. It is entitled “How To Stop A Misleading Graph,” by Lea Gaslowitz. We haven’t used this with our students yet, but we plan to this fall. Graphs can aid us in grasping complex data; that does not mean they always tell the correct story. With the so many visible software resources available today, it’s easy to design graphs, charts and tables for all types of media.

This video makes for a perfect mini-lesson to reinforce visual literacy, one of the core skills of graphicacy. Just because a graph looks good doesn’t mean it’s accurate. We want our students to look beyond the sleekness of design and not be swayed by colors, shapes, lines, and curves. Instead, they should question the labels, numbers, scale, and content. In other words, ask what the graph is trying to convey and not take it at face value.

Source: TED Ed

Graphs should represent data, not an opinion. By distorting the scale on either axis, they can be intentionally manipulated. The video provides straightforward examples of “cherry picking” the data points to skew the scale for the purposes of persuasion or bias. As we’ve stated in our previous post, our students are growing up in a data-rich world that increasing relies on the design of information. It’s for this reason that they need to be more discerning about misleading content. Visually literacy is a necessity now more than ever.

Building Data Fluency - Visually And Literally

ASIDE 2017

In this data-rich world, our students face growing amounts of statistical content. That's why we believe  teaching graphicacy is vital to the modern classroom. We develop ways to incorporate visual literacy and visual thinking in some capacity in most assignments and consistently look for ways that students can transfer content from a linear to visual format. This process enables them to connect more deeply with the material. The graphs in this post represent statistics on immigration that our students used to build graphs for a project-based learning unit on immigration.

ASIDE 2017

Each student studied a particular immigrant group for the project. For the graph assignment, they gathered the data for their group’s country of origin, as well as immigration data for two other countries. They recorded the information in a table format for five consecutive decades. While the organization of the data gave them a quick overview, the disparity in size of immigration over the course of 50 years was not immediately evident.

ASIDE 2017

Giving the students the opportunity to literally construct the graphs allowed them to experience visual data firsthand. Using the decades along the horizontal axis was easy; however, the vertical axis required a bit more intellectual work to determine the coordinates for plotting the data. Some had to revise their decisions several times by reexamining the numbers to adjust the coordinate values.

ASIDE 2017

The process of using statistics to construct meaning regarding immigration to the United States as visual data reinforced their understanding from both a historical and mathematical perspective. The students could visually see the highs and lows by group over time in addition to the places where immigration intersected or overlapped.

ASIDE 2017

Using statistics is an effective tool for learning. Since we know that our students will encounter numbers on a daily basis, the more we can do to build in data analysis, the better they will be able to make choices based on evidence and authenticity. Visual data is used in everything from household products to political campaigns. Without the proper skills, learners, like any other consumer, can be misled. Interpreting the pictorial representation of information is an essential skill of graphicacy; all students must master this proficiency.