Thinking Allowed.

Web 2.0 continues to just amaze. To think that we hardly had internet 15 years ago and now I learn, accept, use new tools constantly. How can education not embrace this? How can we not provide better learning for children (and adults) with what is at our disposal now.

Justin just showed off the amazing animoto over at Medagogy. A truly cool presentation tool.

And a social studies teachers just shared with me Hans Rosling’s videos on TEDtalk using his amazing Gapminder software (named after the saying, Mind the Gap heard hundreds of times on the London tube). Gapminder was recently acquired by Google, which is a good indicator that it’s about to take off.

[side note: for a very cool lesson in "new" visual literacy check out the home page of TEDtalk. They use visual cues of image size to demonstrate most recently updated. You can switch the views on the side and change the visual cues to represent most discussed, most emailed, etc. Now this is visual literacy. How can anyone argue that we need to talk about things like this with kids!?!]

Am I really late on all of this? Is this old news?

I feel like I should have known about Rosling’s work already, but it really blew me away seeing it. If you haven’t seen his presentation, watch that first to get a real sense of how powerful this statistical data animation software can be. He is pretty dynamic, but it’s his graphs that steal the show. Calling them graphs is almost unfair…like calling a Ferrari a car or an iPod a walkman.

He has brought together world data with design and animation to truly provide understanding of what’s happening in the world. In the video I linked to he debunks the myths many have of the Third World.

He does not tackle lack of knowledge, but rather pre-conception. And that’s pretty powerful.

Don’t our students have preconceptions?

Don’t we want to students to question them?

This data analysis truly promotes understanding. When was the last time you could honestly say that about the data analysis your students are doing?

Watch his videos, then check out the tool.

Really, if you don’t know it…you should really check it out.

Man, the tools are cool now. Makes me miss the classroom.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 21st, 2007 at 9:42 pm and is filed under 21st century learner, Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.