More often than you realize as an academic, you will be representing data or other information. This might come in the form of a simple table, a straightforward graph, or a more elaborate visualization of data. Visualization of information is an incredibly difficult and yet outstandingly important task to focus on doing correctly. Not only does a good visualization convey information more clearly, but also in many cases more accurately.

One of the gurus of information visualization is Edward Tufte who has published a number of incredibly informative and stunningly beautiful books on the subject. I highly recommend that you check out his books. He also has an insightful, critical short work that examines the challenges of using Powerpoint effectively.

For a constantly updated stream of complicated and beautiful visualizations, I also like to follow http://infosthetics.com/.

Finally, if you know you need a beautiful and informative visualization but don’t have the skill-set on-hand to create one yourself, I highly recommend you contact Chris Fink at Protagraphics.

My recommendation, therefore, is that you attend to these! Furthermore, if you can come up with your own tags and categories to organize your materials, it will be incredibly helpful down the road. Having keywords in your reference manager, notebooks, and filing cabinets can be the difference between spending 2 minutes to find a few key articles, or spending hours looking for that one paper you are sure you read 5 years ago. In all of your writing, if you have an idea of what the big categories are that it will be linked to, it will help you shape your argument, experiment, ideas, etc. even if those aren’t the exact tags or keywords that you use in the end. The goal here is to use the concept of a tag, in any form, to organize and position your work effectively.

The CCRP project has two main goals:

1. To further examine students’ understanding of complex systems related concepts in the context of honeybees collecting nectar.  In short, a follow-up to several aspects of the first BeeSign study with a modified curriculum to reflect lessons learned from the prior implementation.
2. To further our understanding of students’ representational practices by examining them in both science and language arts.  This will provide some important contrast and further unpack the influence of context upon students’ representational activities.

This is a collaboration with Kylie Peppler and David Phelps.

This project also makes use of the BeeSign simulation software.

This project involved the implementation of a 10 week science curriculum unit for kindergarten and first grade which was designed to:

1. Examine students’ representational practices, and encourage students to be more reflective as they create representations in science.
2. Teach students about the process of honeybees collecting nectar from the perspective of complex systems, focussing on concepts such as emergence and interdependence in order to better understand how young students engage with and learn these complicated concepts.

To support these goals, the curriculum included a new form of activity called participatory modeling. Participatory modeling is an activity in which students engage in acting out their current understanding of the content in a way that leverages their ability to communicate well with their peers to help them focus on refining their model of the concepts. In addition, I developed a computer simulation called BeeSign to help students examine and experiment with the simulated behavior of a honeybee hive as it collects nectar.

Check out the related publications.