During this session, we will consider how to use questions to drive inquiry into our classroom practices. We will also look at how data are collected and communicated between both users and systems and ethics related to that. While most of the work of a classroom teacher may not include frequent access with state or national data, it is important to understand how to access additional information.
This page is rather long. :/ Be sure to bring your snacks along as you make your way down the page. The top section relates to the Identify problems and frame questions section of our framework. Keep on scrolling, scrolling, scrolling for Use data.
None required for this week. Instead, complete the first assignment (see Session 1 Page for details) and spend a few minutes clicking through the resources listed below.
- Identify problems and frame questions
- What's the problem you're trying to solve?
- Involving other participants or stakeholders
- Student privacy and data ethics
- Use data
- Debrief Assignment #1 (consider data organization, management, quality, types)
- Data sources
Here is what your input on the framework looked like for Identify problems and frame questions and Use data. These are the two areas of the framework we will focus on during our time together.:
Involve other participants or stakeholders was identified by three students as something they most wanted to learn in this area. I've placed some resources at the bottom of this page, but we will certainly spend some time talking about how to include educators, parents, and students as part of the decision-making process. How do we involve other stakeholders in our work? Whether they are peers, students, families, or community, we can use data with them (as opposed to something we do to them) to enact and support positive change. We will also start a conversation about data privacy and ethics around what we collect and share.
One of the promises of our abundance of data is its democratization—the ability for anyone to access and share the stories found within the data. However, this work requires a basic level of data literacy that many may not have. Miriam Posner, a professor in the digital humanities program at UCLA, reminds us that “The boxes we use to label others are often not the ones they might use to describe themselves.” When data use and storytelling with data are the province of only a few skilled people, we are not inclusive of the views of others. We can only expect disproportionate outcomes from this absence of voice “because a single visualization supplied by authorities may show only one facet of the data” (Jofre, 2016). To use data in service of equity, we must do better in our collaborations with students, parents, and the community. This is not just about building their skills with data, but also creating spaces for them to tell their own stories. In Feminism and Methodology: Social Science Issues (1987), Sandra Harding notes that “the questions an oppressed group wants answered are rarely requests for so-called truth. Instead, they are queries about how to change conditions.”
The sites below are offered as some quick starting points for exploration. You do not need to review them in depth, but take a quick glance at them. Consider where the data entered either about you or by you ends up.
Sample community data projects and resources
- Check out a community-based example from Barcelona and consider the reasons wy Smart Cities Need Thick Data, Not Big Data.
- Students in Civic Art & Design Studio (IN123), with professor Catherine DʼIgnazio, visualized 100 of the more than 6,000 citizen questions collected by the City of Boston as part of the GoBoston 2030 transportation planning process. This video is realized as a large, projected public art installation. Are you interested in making your own gifs? There are lots of great resources on the web. Check out the repo on making data-related animated gifs from Lena Groeger of ProPublica.
- Browse the projects from the Tactical Technology Collective. These focus on three themes: politics of data, digital security and privacy, and exposing and shaping issues. The White Room is highly recommended. You can also watch Marek Tuszynski speak about the project in this Eyeo 2016 presentation.
- Shannon Mattern and Jonas Voigt have posted their materials for an Urban Intelligence workshop, including illustrations, interfaces, kits and guides.
- Visualising Information for Advocacy is a book about how advocates and activists use visual elements in their campaigns. This 160-page guide features nearly 50 case studies from around the world to provide an introduction to understanding visual information and a framework for using images for influence.
- Check out Citizen Sensing: A Toolkit from Making Sense. "Citizen sensing is often inspired by concern over a critical problem. The first step is to identify the concerns of those in the community and develop an understanding of the issue. This is a collaborative process that informs and guides community action, and helps build a shared position around an issue." You may also be interested in their report on Co-Desgining Participatory Approaches for Communities.
Student data privacy
- The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) is a federal law that protects student privacy in terms of education records. It even applies to college students like you. As a classroom teacher, it is important to understand what you should or shouldn't share (and with whom).
- OSPI also has a page devoted to student privacy for our state. In addition, it uses a data governance group to determine what types of data should be collected.
The articles below are not required reading. They are included here as reference only.
Cantù, D., & Selloni, D. (2013). From engaging to empowering people: a set of co-design experiments with a service design perspective.
Chueng-Nainby, P., & Lee, J. Transformative Learning: Co-design with Communities’ Collective Imagery as Data for Social Innovation.
David, S., Sabiescu, A. G., & Cantoni, L. (2013, November). Co-design with communities. A reflection on the literature. In Proceedings of the 7th International Development Informatics Association Conference (IDIA) (pp. 152-166).
Jofre, A., Szigeti, S., & Diamond, S. (2016). Citizen engagement through tangible data representation. Foro de Educación, 14(20), 305-325.
Kim, Y. S., Reinecke, K., & Hullman, J. (2018). Data Through Others' Eyes: The Impact of Visualizing Others' Expectations on Visualization Interpretation. IEEE Transactions on Visualization & Computer Graphics, (1), 1-1.
Taylor, A. S., Lindley, S., Regan, T., Sweeney, D., Vlachokyriakos, V., Grainger, L., & Lingel, J. (2015, April). Data-in-place: Thinking through the relations between data and community. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 2863-2872). ACM.
There was not a clear cut winner in this area. We will try to address the various learning interests in Sessions 2 and 3. For this session, we will primarily focus on possible sources/variety of data.
The Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) hosts a variety of data, from student performance, to facilities, to fiscal allocations, and more. We will talk about the various paths and connections between these during class time, but here are a few of the most relevant starting points to learn more:
- You can view and download historic data for districts and schools on the Data Portal.
- Our state report card is intended to answer parent and community questions about student demographics, program participation, and performance.
The Educational Research Data Center (ERDC) has built a longitudinal data system that includes information on Washington students across multiple sectors. These sectors include early learning, K-12, post-secondary, and workforce sectors. These data are shared with ERDC by partnering agencies and institutions across the state. In this way, ERDC acts as a kind of “central hub,” where partnering agencies, institutions, and organizations can pool their data and seek answers to questions that none of them have the resources to answer by themselves.
Visit the National Center for Educational Statistics is the primary federal entity for collecting and analyzing data related to education in the U.S. and other nations. You may also be interested in the Civil Rights Data Collection which collects and publishes educational data related to civil rights and equity.
Many public organizations have open data collections (and, if not, you can obtain information through the public disclosure process). Here are some links to additional collections, including wikipedia edits, air quality, Pokemon, and more.
Head over to Data USA, a "comprehensive website and visualization engine of public US Government data" to find, map, compare, or download all manner of data related to living in the United States.