Big Data

This poster was presented at the American Geophysical Union's (AGU) Fall meeting in 2014 to describe the DACUM process and present the finalized occupational profile.

This presentation at AAAS' 2015 Annual Meeting focused on how  teachers and instructional materials can help students transition from working with small, student-collected datasets to large, complex, professionally collected datasets. Strategies include minimizing extraneous information and maximizing insight-rich information in the data visualizations; leveraging the skill set that students bring with them from working with self-collected data; and practicing the use of spatial, temporal and quantitative reasoning to connect claims with evidence.

The Spatial Intelligence & Learning Center convened a small, focused workshop to contemplate the benefits and challenges of establishing a national data archive and data sharing infrastructure for spatial cognition data and associated education data.

Supporting students' work with authentic data requires a carefully developed and rigorously-tested curriculum to help them understand what the data represent, and to guide them in how to use data analysis tools and visualizations to identify meaningful patterns and develop evidence-based hypotheses.

Keynote Address, IBM's Big Data and Analytics EdCon 2013, November 2, Las Vegas

The world is awash with data. This growth of data shows no signs of slowing, and indeed seems to be accelerating. Analyzing data, spotting patterns, and extracting useful information have become gateway skills to full participation in the workforce and civic engagement of the 21^st century. Yet pre-college classrooms are falling short of preparing students for this world. And they’re missing the opportunity to harness the power of big data to transform student learning.

(October 2012)

The "Fourth Paradigm" of Science, which seeks insight by mining vast archives of existing data rather than by doing experiments to gather new data, is being touted as a new method of doing science.  But Walter Pitman mined data archives in 1966, as did Tanya Atwater in 1970, so is “The Fourth Paradigm” really new?...

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