Tag: teaching

I had the honor to record an introductory data visualization course for high school students as a part of the Israeli national distance learning project. The course is in Hebrew, and since it targets high schoolers, it does not require any prior knowledge.

Many people know me as a data scientist. However, I also teach, which is sort of unnoticed to many of my friends and colleagues. I created a page dedicated to my teaching activity. Talk to me if you want to organize a course or a workshop.

TL/DR

I consider teaching and presenting an integral part of my job as a data scientist. One way to become better at teaching is to collect feedback from the learners. I tried different ways of collecting feedback: passing a questionnaire, Polldaddy surveys or Google forms, or simply asking (no, begging) the learners to send me an e-mail with the feedback. Nothing really worked. The response rate was pretty low. Moreover, most of the feedback was a useless set of responses such as “it was OK”, “thank you for your time”, “really enjoyed”. You can’t translate this kind of feedback to any action.

I teach data visualization to in Azrieli College of Engineering in Jerusalem. Yesterday, during my first lesson, I was talking about the different ways a chart design selection can lead to different conclusions, despite not affecting the actual data. One of the students hypothesized that the preception of a figure can change as a function of other graphs shown together. Which was exactly tested in a research I recently mentioned here. I felt very proud of that student, despite only meeting them one hour before that.

When I teach data visualization, I love showing my students how simple changes in the way one visualizes his or her data may drive the potential audience to different conclusions. When done correctly, such changes can help the presenters making their point. They also can be used to mislead the audience. I keep reminding the students that it is up to them to keep their visualizations honest and fair. In his recent post, Robert Kosara, the owner of https://eagereyes.org/, mentioned another possible way that may change the perceived conclusion. This time, not by changing a graph but by changing the order of graphs exposed to a person. Citing Robert Kosara:

If you know me in person or follow my blog, you know that I have a keen interest in teaching. Indeed, besides being a full-time data scientist at Automattic, I teach data visualization anywhere I can. Since I started teaching, I became much better in communication, which is one of the required skills of a good data scientist.
In my constant strive for improving what I do, I joined the Data Carpentry instructor training. Recently, I got my certification as a data carpentry instructor.

There’s an interesting mini-drama going on in the data visualization world. The moderators of DataIsBeautiful invited Stephen Few for an ask-me-anything (AMA) session. Stephen Few is a data visualization researcher and an opinionated blogger. I use his book “Show Me the Numbers” when I teach data visualization. Both in his book and even more so, on his blog, Dr. Few is not afraid of criticizing practices that fail to meet his standards of quality. That is why I wasn’t surprised when I read Stephen Few’s public response to the AMA invitation:

The first lecture of the data visualization course will be published on July 7 (7/7/17). There was a typo in the original announcement.