An Educational Technology Journal--Or Is It?

The following post is the result of some more pent-up frustration regarding gender and how it's discussed in a class of mine.   

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!

  Writing is hard. A bit on the nose to be sure, but I find that sometimes the longer I wait to start writing something—e.g. this post—the harder it seems to get my thoughts to travel from my head to the tips of my fingers and onto this digital page. Frustratingly, I tend to monologue to myself the perfectly pithy and entertaining introduction whenever I have neither access to the proper technology nor the freedom with which to obtain said access, like when I’m driving. I suppose I could always verbalize aforementioned monologue and then transcribe it later, but that’d be making my life too easy, wouldn’t it? Even though I know that no one is a harsher critic of myself or my writing than I am, and that no one is likely to really care if one or even multiple posts are not up to par writing-wise with previous ones, I still get the paralyzing anxiety of not making myself properly or adequately understood. That’s more of a philosophical question than this blog I created for my class ...