Visualizations in Learning Ed 299X

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Visualizations in Learning Ed 299X

• Professor Roy Pea
• CERAS 130
• 900-1150 Thursday
• Spring 2002

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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)
• Setting the framework Part 2 (Mike Mills on
  Perception and Visualization)

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Introductions

• What background and interests bring you here?

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

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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?

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

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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.
• You will provide a series of short presentations,
  and a class presentation and integrative final
  paper due and presented orally the week of
  finals.
• Assessment will be on the basis of classroom
  contributions, oral presentations, and the
  written paper.

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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

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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.

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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)

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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?

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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 Latours famous paper "Visualization and
  cognition thinking with eyes and hands."
  Knowledge and Society, 1986, 6, pp. 1-40.

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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. 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.

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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)

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The problem Latour considers

• Latour refutes claims that changes in human
  consciousness, in the brains 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. 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.

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A brief tour of Latours 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."

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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

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Latours 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.

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Inscriptions as Immutable Mobiles

• 1. Inscriptions are mobile
• 2. They are immutable when they move, or at least
  everything is done to obtain this result
• 3. They are made flat
• 4. The scale of the inscriptions may be modified
  at will
• 5. They can be reproduced and spread at little
  cost
• 6. They can be reshuffled and recombined
• 7. It is possible to superimpose several images
  of totally different origins and scales
• 8. They can be made part of a written text
• 9. The two-dimensional character of inscriptions
  allows them to merge with geometry.

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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 consistencya regular avenue through
  space.

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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, childrens 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)

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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.

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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.

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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
  othereven 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.

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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.

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Human tasks using visualizations for learning

• Your 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.

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Relationship of visualization to 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)
• (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)

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Weeks 2-10 What is coming?

• Whirlwind visualization touring (2)
• Math Visualization Simcalc ( 3)
• Math Visualization Geometers Sketchpad (4)
• Scientific visualization Geo-gridded data (5-6)
• Programmable simulations and modeling worlds (7)
• Information Visualization Multidimensional data
  (8) and Hyperbolic star-trees (9)
• Your paper presentations (10)

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Wk2 Whirlwind Tour
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Wk3 Visualizations in Mathematics Learning
Part 1

• Simulations for Calculus Learning (SimCalc)
  Visualization environment for learning
  mathematics of rate and change

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Wk4 Visualizations in Mathematics Learning Part
2

• Geometers Sketchpad Visualization environment
  for dynamic geometry

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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
• Visualization for learners A framework for
  adapting scientists tools

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Wk6 Scientific visualizations for geo-data
learning In the classroom

• Visualizing Earth from the Classroom
• What are the difficulties?
• What are the new representational literacies
  involved?

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Wk 7 Simulations and Modeling Worlds

• Agent-based programmable simulations and modeling
  worlds for visualizing complex systems
  AgentSheets, StarLogo

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Wk 8 Topics in Information Visualization Pt. 1

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

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Wk 9 Topics in Information Visualization Pt. 2

• Hierarchical information navigation with
  treemaps, hyperbolic trees