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. 

        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...

            This post is partially the result of me realizing that I have not yet written about my final journey with the footnotes which has been a slightly frustrating but ultimately victorious venture; however, this post is also partially the result of me procrastinating writing up my reflection on my final project.   [ 1 ]             A long time ago, aka two months ago, I thought it would be a great idea to write all my unnecessary yet (in my opinion) generally entertaining thoughts in a foot note so that the body of my post would not become an unreadable mess. However, I can’t just transfer over the footnotes that I made in Microsoft Word to Blogger because, as my professor explained, what Microsoft does behind the scenes to get footnotes to work has to be done manually and explicitly by me first in Blogger. I began to write of this phenomenon here , and even though ...

            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 . 

  Whew boy, this will be either be a ridiculously long post or I’ll split it up into different posts because I did a lot (or at least it felt like I did!) and I took plenty of screenshots. Whether or not I’ll be kind to my readers by not making them go through scrolling hell to read of my Turtle Blocks exploits really depends on how much energy I have left in me. EDIT AS OF 9/28 AT 9 PM: I am sorry my loyal readers, my energy is failing thereby forcing you to endure the perpetual scrolling.

This is just a short post to both share some new information I found.   EDIT AS OF 9/30 3:38 PM: I went through various trial and errors trying to get the linked articles’ advice to work, but I wasn’t successful. I eventually asked my professor for help and he linked me to this article which you should probably use if you are having similar problems with footnotes that I was. I am tempted to just delete this post but I figured it’s good evidence of working through a technological issue.