An Educational Technology Journal--Or Is It?

  In my first post about my final project, which you can read here , I lament the difficulty of condensing everything I learned into one blog post and that difficulty has followed me into this week’s post. I also remark that part of why I think I’m having trouble writing was because I wasn’t sure how to make it a reflection post and not a “this is what I did post.” While there’s a certain truth to that for this week as well, I am finding that the difficulty arises primarily due to the fact that I have a paltry week to wrap up this project. For those of you who did not read the first post, or just need a refresher, my final project involves me learning, or attempting to learn, two programming languages, R and Python, and contemplating how, if at all, I might use this in my future classroom. 

          This post will be the third in my Field Experience Reflections series; if you want to read the two others you can find them by clicking on the three horizontal lines in the left-hand corner of your screen and then clicking on the page entitled “Field Experience Reflections,” or you can just click this link . In case you need a refresher on what exactly this series of post entails here is the required context:  I will be using these posts to reflect on my field experience by taking the concepts I learned about in special guest presentations and then thinking about how I might apply them to my own teaching. Alright, now that that little introduction is out of the way, let’s get to the reflecting portion of tonight’s entertainment. EDIT AS OF 12/8/2020: Thanks to my professor, I have realized that I mention a picture of a cirrus cloud, but never actually put in the picture! My apologies and that mistake has now been fixed.

        On this dark and stormy day, I will attempt to somehow condense what I learned during the first week of working on my final project into a blog post. I am, perhaps, making a mountain out of a mole hill here, but the part of my brain that is normally in charge of writing is giving me the blue screen of death so, you know, I’m not that off base.   [ 1 ] Part of why I am having a hard time writing this post, I think, is because I’m not sure how to make this post into a reflection rather than a mere “this is how I did the thing” post. However, I’ve been putting off writing this for longer than I should have—apologies to my professor—so I’m just going to write and hope for the best. With that being said, please read on to find out exactly what this mysterious final project is entails.             My final project for this course focuses on something that I have always thought I would lea...

            Two weeks ago, my class began an exploration of the wild frontier of raw datasets with the goal of ultimately finding ways to visually represent said data.   [ 1 ] I wrote about my experiences (read: battles) here and here . The second week gave us a specific tool to use, DataWrapper which was introduced to us by Dr. Tom Liam Lynch , as well as an added goal of processing the data in some way prior to said visualization. What this means is that my professor wanted us to (virtually) get our hands dirty and manipulate the raw data into new formats that helped give the data meaning. To further clarify, I don’t mean that we altered the data in any unethical way, just that any comparisons or functions completed using the data (e.g. percent changes, comparing data from one chart with data in another chart) would be done by us and not the original collector/creator of the dataset. Unbeknownst to me, I had already done ...

Hello, I am once again blogging about my foray into the world of data and data visualization. This time, however, I will mostly be discussing the work I am doing rather than committing half of my post to a bit of a rant about a particularly biased set of data I found on Kaggle. If you haven’t read and that post and are now curious, here it is . 

For our latest project we have to find a data set, explore the data set, pose and answer questions based on that data, create a visualization of said data, and finally post about the experience. Currently, I have yet to even find a dataset let alone do all the other tasks. The problem arises from a difficulty in finding data that involves a topic I care about, appears reliable, is updated enough where I feel that the data is still relevant, and is accessible enough to my humanities centered brain that I can formulate questions about it. Why are you writing a post then, I hear some of you ask, well read on and find out!

  Dealing with Data and Data Visualization