Visualizations in Learning Ed 299X Professor Roy Pea Wallenberg Hall 127 9:00-11:50 Thursday Spring...

Visualizations in Learning

Ed 299X

Professor Roy Pea

Wallenberg Hall 127

9:00-11:50 Thursday

Spring 2003

ED 299X: VLED 299X: VLSpring 2003Spring 2003

Stanford University Stanford University ©

Professor Roy PeaProfessor Roy Pea

Goals for today

• Introductions • Brainstorm activity:

• Where have visualizations helped you learn? Why do you think so?

• Purpose of the course• What will I need to do in the course? • What is coming up in the weeks ahead? • Setting the framework: Part 1 (Roy Pea on Historical

and Foundational Issues; Mike Mills on Perception and Visualization)

• Setting the framework: Part 2 (Roy and Mike on DIVER and “guided noticing” of visualizations)




Introductions

• What background and interests bring you here?

• What would you like to get out of the course?




Brainstorm activity…..

• Where have visualizations helped you learn?

• Once we have a list…..• Do we find any categories? • What are some emergent functions for

visualization for learning you see?

• Why do you think they may help?




Purpose of the course

• Provide historical and multidisciplinary framework for importance and functioning of visualizations for learning

• Formation of a mental map of the terrain of visualizations for learning and their diverse functions

• Explore powerful visualization domains in detail for their educational prospects and challenges, using DIVER as a ‘focusing tool’ for annotating and analyzing visualizations in terms of the literature.

• Engage your interests through a “video paper” that integrates the coursework in an investigation of visualizations in learning




What will I need to do in the course?

• Our work together will involve critical discussions of key readings on theory and research in visualizations for learning, and demonstrations and explorations of information visualization environments and tools.

• We will also use DIVER for creating DIVEs into media such as video and visualizations for analytic purposes; and get experiment with interpretive dialogs on the DIVEs we do.

• In teams, you will provide a series of short presentations and interactive activities engaging the core ideas of our readings, and a class presentation and integrative final “video paper” due and presented orally the week of finals.

• Assessment will be on the basis of student group presentations, classroom contributions, oral presentations, and the written paper.




Setting a framework

• Socio-historical issues in visualizations for learning

• Cognitive and social issues in visualizations• Latour: Visualizations as “inscriptions”• Human tasks using visualizations for

learning• Relationship of visualization to media

technologies




Representations and Thinking

• The 20th century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, in his typically aphoristic style, raised a question that cuts to the heart of our concerns:

"How do I know what I think until I see what I say?"

• Wittgenstein is attributing remarkable mediating powers to the explicit nature of written language forms. Without them, he questions whether he knows what he thinks at all.

• We will ask about how vision is used to think.




Seeing-As: Perception as theory-laden

• In his later writings, Wittgenstein showed an interest in the phenomenon to which the Gestalt psychologists had drawn attention, of seeing (or hearing, or, ...) something as something. The duck-rabbit is an example: a picture that can be seen either as a duck or as a rabbit. Part of Wittgenstein's interest in this phenomenon had to do with his rejection of a naïve account of perception ; he took the interpretation of what is seen to be less separable from seeing itself than empiricist philosophers had been wont to think. But perception was not his only concern. We see one continuation of a number-series as 'more natural' or 'simpler' than another; see one grouping of objects in a class as 'cutting Nature at the joints', another not; and so on. Our use of concepts depends on 'seeing as'.

• Bibliography L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, tr. G. E. M. Anscombe, 3rd edn. (Oxford, 1967). (from xrefer.com)




Illusion loved by the Gestaltists (www.curiouser.co.uk )




Socio-historical issues in visualizations for learning

• How have new symbolic systems for representing concepts and knowledge been created and diffused?

• How are new computational systems for visualization transforming inquiry, communications, argumentation in science, mathematics and other knowledge domains?

• How can visualizations for learning make complex concepts and skills accessible to more learners?




Cognitive and social issues in visualizations• Visualizations as “cognitive artifacts” (see B.Smith from

MITECS, next slide); doing thinking in the external representation; “things that make us smart”

• What are some of the distinctive cognitive and social advantages of visual representations for learning? (Arnheim; and Mills today)

• What new forms of visual literacies and representational practices are emerging and what do we know about their challenges for learners?

• A focus on “inscriptions” - representational practices and their power: • Bruno Latour’s famous paper: "Visualization and cognition: thinking

with eyes and hands." Knowledge and Society, 1986, 6, pp. 1-40.




Visualizations as cognitive artifacts

• “A further step, embodied in research on COGNITIVE ARTIFACTS, recognizes that an agent's embedding situation is not only a semantical resource for determining REFERENCE, but also a material resource for simplifying thought itself.

• Agents need not remember what remains in their visual fields, nor measure what they can directly compare.

• More generally, as captured in Brooks's (1997) slogan that "the world is its own best model," it is more efficient for an agent to let the world do the computing, and determine the result by inspection, than to attempt to shoulder the full load deductively.”




Scribner’s studies of dairy workers

• Used visual units of milk crates and dozens as units to reason with about filling orders; bypassing mathematical formula.

• But they were doing mathematics all the same - reasoning with the visualizations of the world rather than ‘in their heads’

• She called this “working intelligence” (with pun intended)




Situated Math and Cottage Cheese

• “Moreover (see, e.g., Kirsh 1995), if the world happens not to provide exactly what one wants, one can sometimes rearrange it a bit so that it does.

• Lave, Murtaugh, and de la Rocha (1984) cite a near-mythic example of someone who, when asked to make 3/4 of a recipe that called for 2/3 of a cup of cottage cheese, measured out 2/3 of a cup, smooshed it into a flattened circle, and cut away 1/4 of the resulting patty.”




Things that make us smart

• “The power of the unaided mind is highly overrated.”

• Without external aids, memory, thought, and reasoning are all constrained. But human intelligence is highly flexible and adaptive, superb at inventing procedures and objects that overcome its own limits.

• The real powers come from devising external aids that enhance cognitive abilities. How have we increased memory, thought, and reasoning?

• By the invention of external aids: It is things that make us smart.” (Don Norman, 1993, p. 43)




The problem Latour considers

• Latour refutes claims that changes in human consciousness, in the brain’s structure, in social relations, economic infrastructure, etc. are the reasons for a sudden emergence of science in the 16th century. “The idea that a more rational mind or a more constraining scientific method emerged from darkness and chaos is too complicated a hypothesis.” (p. 2)

• "The differences in the effects of science and technology are so enormous that it seems absurd not to look for enormous causes....It seems to me that the only way to escape the simplistic relativist position is to avoid both "materialist" and "mentalist" explanations at all costs and to look instead for more parsimonious accounts, which are empirical through and through, yet able to explain the vast effects of science and technology.”




Latour’s Modest Proposal

• “It seems to me that the most powerful explanations, that is those that generate the most out of the least, are the ones that take writing and imaging craftsmanship into account.”




A brief tour of Latour’s “Great Divide”

• "...first we must consider in which situations we might expect changes in the writing and imaging procedures to make any difference at all in the way we argue, prove and believe....

• Who will win in an agonistic encounter between two authors, and between them and all the others they need to build up a statement S?

• Answer: the one able to muster on the spot the largest number of well aligned and faithful allies. This definition of victory is common to war, politics, law, and, I shall now show, to science and technology.

• My contention is that writing and imaging cannot by themselves explain the changes in our scientific societies, except insofar as they help to make this agonistic situation more favorable."




Transformations

• Bruno describes a scene where he witnesses the “transformation of rats and chemicals into paper.” After all the experiments were conducted in large laboratories, filled with many technicians, using sophisticated equipment… in the end there was only a report filled with diagrams, blots, bands, and columns. (p. 3)

• These inscriptions are “immutable mobiles”




Latour’s Immutable Mobiles• "...you have to invent objects which have the

properties of being mobile but also immutable, presentable, readable and combinable with each other.”

• Latour calls these external objects of thought “inscriptions”

• INSCRIPTIONS are representations that exist in some material form and can be used in social practices in the ways described below.

• As “immutables,” they are not subject to or susceptible to change.




Inscriptions as Immutable Mobiles1. Inscriptions are mobile2. They are immutable when they move, or at least everything is

done to obtain this result 3. They are made flat4. The scale of the inscriptions may be modified at will5. They can be reproduced and spread at little cost6. They can be reshuffled and recombined7. It is possible to superimpose several images of totally different

origins and scales8. They can be made part of a written text9. The two-dimensional character of inscriptions allows them to

merge with geometry.




On Immutable Mobiles: Optical Consistency

• The rationalization that took place during “scientific revolution” is not of the mind, of the eye, or philosophy, but of the sight.

• Linear Perspective - no matter from what distance and angle an object is seen, it is always possible to transfer it, and to obtain the same object at a different size as seen from another position.

• Since a picture moves without distortion it is possible to establish, in the linear perspective framework a “two way” relationship between object and figure.

• Perspective is an essential determinant of science and technology because it creates “optical consistency”––a regular avenue through space.

http://www.c3.hu/perspektiva/adatbazis/abrae.php3?MUID=112&LN=2




On Immutable Mobiles: Visual Culture• Svetlana Alpers speaks about how

“visual culture” (science, art, theory of vision, organization of crafts and economic powers) changes over time. (p. 9)

• Our eyes are able to look at “representations” (i.e. through letters, mirrors, children’s books, microscopes) and know what they are

• All innovations are selected “to secretly see and without suspicion what is done far off in other places.” (p. 10)




On Immutable Mobiles: A New Way of “Accumulating Time & Space”

• Elizabeth Eisenstein speaks of the importance of the invention of the printing press because it made immutable mobilization possible. (p. 11)

• During the Renaissance books and materials were able to be gathered from places far away in space and time.

– Copernicus gathered astronomy materials from the 4th C. to 14th C.

• Errors were accurately reproduced and spread, but corrections were also reproduced fast, cheaply and with no further changes.

• A new interest in “truth” resulted.




On Inscriptions

• Inscriptions are the the final stage of a whole process of mobilization. Without the displacement, the inscription is worthless; without the inscription the displacement is wasted. (p. 17)

• The trend toward simpler and simpler inscriptions that mobilize larger and larger numbers of events in one spot cannot be understood if separated from the agonistic model that we use as our point of reference. (p. 18)

• The point of inscriptions is to be able to convince any dissenters with even more dramatic visual effects.




Power of inscriptions

• There are two ways in which the visualization processes may be ignored:• By granting the scientific mind what should be granted to the

hands, the eyes, and the signs• By focusing exclusively on the signs as signs, without considering

the mobilization of which they are.

• A man is never much more powerful than any other––even from a throne; but a man whose eye dominates records through which some sort of connections are established with millions of others may be said to dominate. (p. 29)• The “great man” is a little man looking at a good map.




Inscriptions as Social Practice

• Roth & McGinn (RER, 1998) illustrate these issues for 8th grade classrooms doing ecozone inquiry on their school grounds.

• The students’ activities moved from digging up soil to representing soil properties on charts as dots via drawings, height measurements, percentage calculations.

• Discussion of how the inscriptions served as immutable mobiles once constructed.

• Some of the educational and learning issues raised.




Human tasks using visualizations for learning• Last year’s list from the brainstorm….• To help ask questions - new conceptual objects like slopes• To help see patterns - exploratory data analysis,

hyperbolic trees, sci-vis with false color maps• To help make inferences beyond the information collected

(maps) • To identify changes over time among variables

(animations)• To make a persuasive case in rhetorical situations (e.g.

global warming, ozone hole); to get others to see what you see clearly

• and…..more to come….




Visualization RE media technologies?

What is a media technology? (A combination of 1-4)

(1) Media symbol system (serving as means of expression with semantics, syntax, pragmatics): e.g., written language alphabet, diagram notations, algebraic equations (Cassirer, Peirce, Goodman, Gardner)

(2) Registration technology, on which signals to be perceived are inscribed for storage (e.g., for written language-papyrus scrolls, paper, magnetic floppy disk; for video-videotape, digital medium), and which may or may not allow for reproducibility (e.g., photograph versus negative, cf. W. Benjamin, S. Sontag)




Visualization RE media technologies?

(3) Display technology, which enables the symbols to be perceived (e.g., printed page, headphones, television monitor, computer screen, movie screen)

(4) Control technology, which enables the spatial and temporal sequencing of the media components for display (e.g., slide projector, remote VCR controls, computer control of digital video or hypertext)




Weeks 2-10: What is coming?

• Whirlwind visualization touring and DIVER (#2)• Math Visualization: Simcalc ( #3)• Math Visualization: Geometer’s Sketchpad (#4)• Scientific visualization: Geo-gridded data (#5)• The World as Interface to Information (#6)• Information Visualization: Multidimensional data

(#7) and Hyperbolic star-trees (#8) • Your paper presentations (#9, #10)




Wk2: Whirlwind Tour




Wk3: Visualizations in Mathematics Learning: Part 1• Simulations for Calculus Learning

(SimCalc): Visualization environment for learning mathematics of rate and change




Wk4: Visualizations in Mathematics Learning: Part 2• Geometer’s Sketchpad: Visualization

environment for dynamic geometry




Wk5: Scientific visualizations for geo-data learning using WorldWatcher

• Addressing the challenges of inquiry-based learning through technology and curriculum design

• Prospects for scientific visualization as an educational technology

• What are the new representational literacies involved?




Wk6: Scientific visualizations for geo-data learning • WorldBoard

• Jim Spohrer (Apple -> IBM)

• Dot.geo, GeoWeb• PicoRadio, RFID • HP Cooltown




Wk 7: Topics in Information Visualization: Pt. 1

• Environments for multidimensional data visualization (Fathom, Spotfire, Advizor)




Wk 8: Topics in Information Visualization: Pt. 2

• Hierarchical information: navigation with tree maps, hyperbolic trees

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