1998 Conference Attendees

Project Visualizing Global Change
Contact Douglas Gordin
Project
description		 The Visualizing Global Change Project seeks to help K-16 students and teachers to understand global change. The primary mechanism I propose to accomplish this is to link learners to scientists and their work. In particular, scientists' data and analysis tools will be adapted for the use of learners and contextualized within curricula that link difficult global change issues to learners' local context and prior understandings.
Theoretical
background		 Our focus on visualization is an attempt to promote students' appropriation of the practices of scientists, thereby allowing students to study topical problems of global change and the process whereby new scientific knowledge emerges. Visualization is a good choice to provide this common ground because it is (a) increasingly important to scientific practice, (b) has powerful perceptual affordances that allow students to investigate complex patterns through the use of visual patterns, (c) has powerful representational affordances for investigating phenomena at various scales.

When students create and analyze visualizations they are using similar tools and data sets as practicing scientists, thus leading them into the scientific communities of practice. This participation can help students realize that science is a dynamic field where a primary activity is the design and analysis of theories, rather than the memorization of facts and processes.

There are serious obstacles before students can effectively use visualization. These obstacles need to be addressed through the design of material and social supports. Specialized software can help ease the task of crafting visualizations by extensive context for their creation, interpretation, and critique. Project-enhanced learning contexts can promote their use within meaning-making conversations, foster a community that creates scientific knowledge and representational practices, and build bridges that connect classroom-based communities with scientists and other professionals.

This approach was founded in the context of several NSF-EHR funded projects at Northwestern University which have accumulated a significant body of experience on using visualization for K-12 science learning. These projects include Learning through Collaborative Visualization Project and the Supportive Scientific Visualization Environments for Education Project.

Challenges Important challenges include:
  • Forming distributed communities that link teachers and students to one another and to scientists communities of practice
  • Designing software architectures that ease the task of creating ³vertical applications² that provide students with the context they need to understand and use visualizations.
  • Understanding how to combine studentsı use of visualization with other representations, activities, and experiences. Especially, how should visualization be combined with field studies? hands-on construction of maps? analytical modeling exercises? structured curricula and their accompanying textbooks, videos, and assignment sheets?
  • Integrating visualizationıs visual patterns with modelingıs numeric patterns so that the two methods complement one another. This is difficult since visualization often provides complex data sets that show spatial areas at high resolution and accuracy. In contrast, most educational modeling tools use scalars to represent quantities and are only very approximate. This means the inputs (observed data of visualizations) and outputs (results of models) are not easily comparable. This gives rise to difficult issues around helping students understand that the results of the model are quite limited and fragile.
  • Helping inservice and preservice teachers learn to use visualization and modeling tools and data in the context of topical scientific problems
  • Establishing a computational architecture whereby visualization and modeling tools are available over the WWW so that teachers and students need only use low-cost network computers
Partnership A wide range of partnerships would be useful since this work is at an early stage. In particular,
  • Global change scientists who want to adapt their analysis tools and data for the uses of students
  • Learning community organizers who are looking for curricula
  • Evaluators who are looking at understanding the role of visualization in enacting science education reform goals
  • Designers who are seeking to develop standardized architectures and principles to guide and speed the construction of visualization and modeling software systems
  • Cognitive scientists who are seeking to understand the means whereby visualization helps us to better understand complex systems and to act as a basis for shared meaning construction and cooperation.