Abstract:

The paper focuses on the most ancient of social rituals: “storytelling” – exemplified through telling a geovisual analytics story about a country’s development over time and shape the measure of economic growth and well-being, applied in an educational setting to 1) customize a geovisual analytics application for educational purpose, 2) improve the teaching in social science and 3) study teachers and students experiences and learning. Our tool “World Statistics eXplorer” with a database link to the public World dataBank with more than 400 indicators for 1960-2009 will help to improve the students knowledge and understanding of a variety in national demographics, healthcare, environment and economic structures and their performances over a longer time period. Teachers might be able to, individually and together, develop a dynamic teaching material about the progress in the world through storytelling accessed on the Web. Students will be able to, with help of powerful geographical statistics, explore statistical relations on their own. A better understanding of how educators and their students can elicit deeper user understanding and participation by exploiting dynamic web-enabled statistics visualization is of importance. Together with the associated science of perception and learning in relation to the use of multidimensional spatio-temporal statistical data this will contribute to the research fields of geovisual analytics as well as educational science.

Keywords:

Geovisual analytics education, web-based learning, statistics visualization, statistics database, world databank.