Cross Post from Tech Psych: Visualization Symposium, Visualization Day

This is cross-posted on the Tech-Psych blog.

I recently attended the Visualization in the World Symposium, hosted by the Charlotte Viz Center at UNC-Charlotte. I was impressed by the variety of disciplines represented at the symposium- the speakers came from fields such as architecture, psychology, and geography. The audience was also diverse.

The slides from the presentations will be available soon, so check back to follow the links, or visit the Charlotte Visualization Center's website.

If you are interested in visual thinking, visual literacy, visual communication, and visualization in education, take the time to explore the links once they are posted!

FYI: There is a growing group of people who'd like to get a "World Visualization Day" off the ground. Earth Day is celebrated in our schools, why not a visualization day?! Dr. Kosara, the author of the Eager Eyes blog, is a strong supporter of this movement.

At the moment, various colleges and organizations offer a "visualization day" from time-to-time. If you live in the New York area, you might be interested in attending Visualization Day at City College of New York.

Revisiting the Cambridge Guide to Multimedia Learning

The Cambridge Guide to Multimedia Learning, edited by Richard E. Mayer, the "father" of this fairly new discipline, is a great resource for people involved in instructional technology and application development.

According to Mayer, "the focus of this handbook is on how people learn from words and pictures in computer based environments. Multimedia environments include online instructional presentations, interactive lessons, e-courses, simulation games, virtual reality, and computer-supported in-class presentations."

As I revisited the various chapters in this handbook, I realized that people interested in topics such as information visualization, computer-supported collaborative systems, and data-driven decision making might find some value from this book.

What I'd like to see next from Dr. Mayer is a handbook that focuses on ways people learn, think, and communicate through interactive multimedia that is presented on screens of all sizes. This is important, given the explosion of large interactive whiteboards in classrooms, large-screen displays in the home, and mobile devices that now contain higher-resolution screens.

Cross- Post: Visualizations: Telling a Story with Data -Making an Impact

More information about this topic can be found on the TechPsych blog: Visualizations: Telling a Story with Data-Making an Impact.

I posted a video of Hans Rosling's TED 2006 presentation using data visualizations, and Karl Fisch and Scott McLeod's "Do You Know: Shift Happens" revision of a presentation originally designed for a high school faculty that "went viral" after it was uploaded to the Internet.

If you have not yet seen these two videos, you'll need to set aside about 30 minutes to view them, and more, if you want to stop the video and reflect for a moment or two.

MYTHS ABOUT THE DEVELOPING WORLD




DID YOU KNOW? SHIFT HAPPENS

Information Visualization: Revisiting Hans Rosling's TED presentation

This semester I'm taking "Visualization and Visual Communication", which is a course I've wanted to take for a while now. Today, we looked at a variety of websites that provide interactive information data visualization applications, which I'll share on this blog in the near future.

After class, I came home and revisited Hans Rosling's TED presentation about information visualization, and thought I'd share it on this blog. This video is about 20 minutes, and provides a good overview how simple interactive information visualization applications can help to convey concepts and correct misconceptions in an engaging, effective manner.



For those of you who work in K-12 settings, imagine how powerful this method of visual communication would be for students, if presented on an interactive whiteboard or display.