Abstract:

Official statistics such as demographics, environment, health, social-economy and education from national and sub-national sources are a rich and important source of information for many important aspects of life and should be considered to be more used and acknowledged in education. Citizens/students would be able to get informed and at the same time participate in increasing the knowledge on how life is lived – and can be improved – from region to region. A lot of this information can be reached on the Internet. This is producing what is often called information overload and causing people to be increasingly faced with the problems of filtering and interpreting enormous quantities of information.

We know that official statistics are used as a more or less important background for decisions especially in public planning and policy making. However, in education, official statistics are much less recognized and used than they ought to be and among the informed public they are even less used. Information visualization is a technique that can help illustrating complex statistical data which for the eye are hard to uncover or even are not possible to perceive or interpret.

In this paper, we introduce novel “storytelling” means for the experts to first explore large, temporal and multidimensional statistical data, then collaborate with colleagues and finally embed dynamic visualization into Web documents e.g. HTML, Blogs or MediaWiki to communicate essential gained insight and knowledge. The aim is to let the analyst (author) explore data and simultaneously save important discoveries and thus enable sharing of gained insights over the Internet. Through the story mechanism facilitating descriptive metatext, textual annotations hyperlinked through the snapshot mechanism and integrated with interactive visualization, the author can let the reader follow the analyst’s way of logical reasoning.

This emerging technology could in many ways change the terms and structures for learning, especially for the young generation. A better understanding of how students can exploit visualization and its associated science of perception and learning is the focus of this paper in relation to the use of official statistical data. The potential is vastly under-utilised and there can be several explanations to this. Do the young generation and their teachers know about existing statistics? – Not sufficiently. Can they find them? – Not as easily as statisticians tend to think. And if they eventually get to them, do they actually understand them in such a way that they can use them. Are the possibilities for these new tools to turn information into sense and knowledge for children? Are the contributions from the information visualization technique suitable for this purpose? Can this technique be used in educational practices? How will this affect children’s strategies and learning? For more information: http://ncva.itn.liu.se/explorer

Keywords:

Information Geovisualization, embedded dynamic visualization, HTML, Blogs, MediaWikis, statistics, interaction, storytelling, collaborative work, learning.