Stories, Not Atoms

This is the 100th post for this blog, and while it has not always featured Excel, it has always tried to keep a focus on telling the best stories we can with data. I've been thinking about the future...how storytelling with data may evolve. The recent Tapestry Conference was just what I needed to spur me creatively and think about the next stories to tell.

I have a few conference posts to share in the coming weeks, but will wait to publish them until the videos are available. I hope that you will appreciate the presentations as much as I did for the diverse lenses represented and how presenters tell stories with their data. We all have our challenges with data quality, helping our peers and audience become more data literate, and the storytelling process. For now, I'd like to share my takeaways and next steps.

Continue Sketching
I draw very poorly. I haven't had an art class since elementary school, and I assure you that was many many years ago. But I find that when working with data, drawing things by hand is a critical part of the storytelling process. I keep a notebook and coloured pens with me nearly all the time. The notebook is a place to just dump ideas. I find myself jotting down various things while I'm in meetings, out for a bite to eat, or even on the plane home from the conference. Not all ideas make it into production, but having them captured in one place is extremely useful.

Thinking about how to display attendance

Catherine Madden and Nick Sousanis both spoke to the importance of recording and communicating with visuals. More on this in other posts, but if you're not using sketches to draft or sort through your data, I encourage you to try it. No one has to see these. They'll just be pleasantly amazed at the final product.

Be Open with Your Audience
This seems obvious, but the presenters at Tapestry put some new spin on the idea. Alan Smith spoke about supporting our peers in becoming competent critics, Enrico Bertini implored academics and practitioners to connect and collaborate, and Eva Galanes-Rosenbaum encouraged us to be transparent about the sources and quality of our data.

Photo by Ben Jones from Bertini's presentation; This slide has good advice for educators, too.

This sense of openness really does need to be mutual. It's one thing to tell an audience that your story is missing some data or is of dubious provenance...and it's another for the audience that you tell the story in specific ways. Scott Klein presented a nice timeline of how data visualization has developed as a journalistic endeavor. This includes educating readers on how to interpret a line chart. Jessica Hullman talked about the types of sequencing with visuals that readers prefer. These lessons are useful, but they are not the whole picture. As an audience, we have a responsibility to be open to new types of visuals and stories. We have to be willing to engage and grow.

Seek New Territory to Explore
I met a lot of people this week. Some I've only known from an online presence, others I would never have connected with had Tapestry not brought us together. It was good for me to get out of my little box that is normal life, but this also applies to the wide variety of boxes in which we work. Sousanis showed us how comics and graphic novels encourage narratives to bleed over the edges to create new directions. This message was a little at odds with Jessica Hullman's presentation on her research on how to generate the right sequence for stories, as well as Trina Chiasson's look into creating data selfies. We like things that are predictable...but we are creatures that like novelty, too.

The opening slide at Tapestry quoted Muriel Rukeyser: The universe is made of stories, not atoms. As I continue to think about this push-pull between staying safe in the universe we create and the need to explore beyond those borders, I've come up with an idea to try for next year. Maybe you'd like to play along, too.

I'd like to tell ten new stories about my school district next year---one for each month we have classes. It's convenient that we have ten schools, but I don't know that they have to based that way. Maybe there should be a month about attendance or early learning. The views of different stakeholders could be featured. Or perhaps something more Dear Data-like, capturing a month of meetings in the board room. I want to use a bulletin board in our district office for some offline data viz...as well as links to some online data to explore.

That's my ambition, anyway. I'm using my sketchbook to gather all kinds of ideas now and maybe this summer I can start putting the structure in place. By putting this goal out here...making it public...I hope you'll keep me honest and on target with it. And of course, you're more than welcome to do something similar in your own school.

So here's to the next 100 posts for this blog. There are lots of stories left to be told.

A Tale of Two Tumblrs

As Dickens might have said, had he been around today, "It was the best of viz...and the worst of viz." Or, as my mother might have said, "If you can't be a good example, you'll just have to be a horrible warning." You get the idea.

Two new tumblrs are collecting examples of data visualizations. One, called Thumbs Up Viz, posts examples of visualizations done well. I especially like this one on Kindergarten Readiness by Stephanie Evergreen (excel tutorial here).

by Stephanie Evergreen of Evergreen Data

It hits all the right sweet spots for me. A title that summarizes the chart, with a subhead that provides context. A dot plot that recent research suggests is superior to bar charts. Labels close to the data (which are set on a common scale). Good use of colour. Thumbs up, indeed. For those of you on teh twitters, there is also a #thumbsupviz tag you can follow or use to share your own excellent finds.

At the other end of the spectrum, there is WTF Visualizations for "Visualizations that make no sense." For example...

http://wtfviz.net/image/64871769069

Um, yeah.

There has been some chatter about whether this tumblr is appropriate/productive/okay. Is it just making fun...and if so, maybe that's not very nice. While I agree that if that is the point, it's not very nice. But the educator in me sees opportunity here. I've built many a set of exemplars in my time, and I have to say that bad examples are often better for discussion than good ones. What feedback would you give? How would you change instruction to support better work next time? What would make this visualization "good" and why? Outstanding work makes for great examples and models, but doesn't always lead to the kind of conversation we need about how we work with data. Maybe we need something more like Carto-Critique on Wired?

What do you think? How would you use these to guide your own work?

Come on Over

Did you know there's a Facebook page for this blog? It has an RSS feed, as well as miscellaneous news from the data viz world. Here are a few items recently posted:

• Join a Massive Online Open Course (MOOC) that is an Introduction on Infographics and Data Visualization taught by Alberto Cairo. The next cohort begins in January. After seeing posts from Debra Dalgleish and Ben Jones, I'm excited to give things a go. Why don't you come along with me?
• Find data viz jobs using this Google Group.
• Explore Infogr.am for a simple way to create infographics.

 Hope you'll join the conversation on Facebook!

Housekeeping

In a fit of spring cleaning, I've reorganized some content for this blog. If you're viewing this post via RSS, you won't notice a thing. For visitors to the site, you will notice some updates.

Pages

I have created three new pages, all with their own permalinks. Depending upon the content of future posts (stats? add-ins?), I may add more pages. I do plan to take advantage of the more dynamic nature of the pages to update content.

All of the posts about building and using a gradebook in Excel are now in one place. Sure, you can use the gradebook tag on any of those posts to see all of them, but the new page houses things chronologically and with some additional text to help guide users. I've also moved the various resources off the sidebar and built a page just for Books and Links.  Finally, I've deleted the blogger profile info from the sidebar and built an About page with a statement about the blog, my contact info, and some backstory.

Blogroll

I've refreshed the blogroll with some great new reads. I hope that you'll check them out:

• chartsnthings is the (personal) blog of data sketches from the New York Times graphics department. I love the metacognitive aspect of this blog---a peek into the thinking of designers as they build visualizations.
• "Data Remixed is a blog dedicated to exploring data and sharing insights in an engaging way."
• Visit Tableau's Viz of the Day for a variety of visuals built by users like you. 

Subscriptions

I've added to the choices you have for getting information from and about this blog. You can still use RSS, but now you can use the buttons on the sidebar to follow me on Twitter, add this blog to your Facebook feed, or add my YouTube channel. Just click and go!

If you have additional suggestions to make the site easier to navigate or links/tools/resources that should be included, let me know.

When Full Brains and Calendars Collide

This is not going to be a post about why I haven't been posting. Okay, maybe a bit of it will be.

I've been putting together an article on using data visualization as feedback in the classroom, and my "free time" has been pulled in that direction. While I'd love to share the content here, I can't until a decision about publication has been made. But I can share a few general observations about what I've read.

• In education, we've known for a long time (since 1986) that using charts and graphs as feedback is second only to identifying interventions for raising student achievement.
• Almost all of the research about using visuals as feedback in the classroom has been done in classes involving computers: engineering, online classes/schools, programming, etc. Those with access to technology have been the ones able to harvest data and consider its applications. But, there's not a lot out there for general K-12 classrooms, other than using visualizations with special needs children.
• There are almost no examples of applying "business intelligence" models to K-12. Keep in mind that I would never advocate for schools to run as businesses, but what the private sector has learned about applying an understanding of visual perception to charts and graphs runs circles around anything in education. We need to raid and pillage this knowledge.

Summary: We know using data visualization is a powerful tool for the classroom and student learning, but we sure don't seem to make any effort to use it.

After reading a huge stack of educational research and digging deeply into several books on data viz, my head is bursting with ideas. If you have to have a problem in your life, then this is very best one to have. I highly recommend this sort of mania. However, with approximately two weeks out of this month spent on the road, this has also been one of the most frustrating problems to have: No time to write or finish my half-cooked workbooks for this space. I want to pull my hair out.

But my travel will be done in a week...and then I can have some time and space to pursue these ideas and beat them into submission.

In the interim, I have a post from my other blog to pull over and show you here. Wherever you are, I hope you're learning lots, too.

Welcome!

After many years of blogging about my professional life, I find that also need a space for my growing interest in integrating basic forms of data visualization into classrooms and schools. While the title of this blog refers to Excel, this space will grow beyond those boundaries. I picked "Excel for Educators," because this piece of software can be found in most schools and is---in my opinion---greatly underused. At a time when data discussions are becoming the heart of many conversations among professional educators, we need to increase our data literacy. Excel is as good of a starting point as any. However, you can expect to see various Google tools here, references to data sets, lesson plans (for those of you interested in getting your students involved), and more.

So, welcome to a new space and conversation. Let's get started.