Visualizations

I recently needed to quickly create a map of higher education institutions Lumen is working with, and consequently needed LAT and LONG info for dozens of schools. Rather than do that all by hand, I created this little recipe for automatically retrieving coordinates given a school’s name using the Google Maps API and Google Spreadsheets. Here’s a demonstration of the recipe using a list of all the higher education institutions where I’ve taught: ...

As part of my work on the NGLC-funded Kaleidoscope Project I’ve been thinking about practical learning analytics. Why “practical”? My goal with practical learning analytics is to provide access to data in ways that an average teacher, with no special training, can leverage in order to help her students succeed. This is, of course, an extremely tall order. As I began to mull over some common conventions that teachers could interpret without training (e.g., time flows left to right, scores move higher and lower) I realized that there’s already a tool available that provides visualizations like this - the Google Motion Chart Gadget. ...