Visual Literacy and New Technologies

This body of research addresses the connection between arts, identity and new technology, and investigates the impact of images on adolescent identities, the relationship between online modes of communication and cyber-bullying, the increasing visualization of information and explores the way drawing and critical analysis of imagery develops visual literacy. Commissioned by Adobe Systems Pty Ltd, Australia (2003) to compile the Visual Literacy White Paper, Bamford’s report defines visual literacy and highlights its importance in the learning of such skill as problem solving and critical thinking. Providing strategies to promote visual literacy and emphasizing the role of technology in visual communication, this report has become a major reference for policy on visual literacy and cyber-bullying in the UK, USA and Asia

Creating an Understanding of Data Literacy for a Data-driven Society

Society has become increasingly reliant on data, making it necessary to ensure that all citizens are equipped with the skills needed to be data literate. We argue that the foundations for a data literate society begin by acquiring key data literacy competences in school. However, as yet there is no clear definition of what these should be. This paper explores the different perspectives currently offered on both data and statistical literacy and then critically examines to what extent these address the data literacy needs of citizens in today’s society. We survey existing approaches to teaching data literacy in schools, to identify how data literacy is interpreted in practice. Based on these analyses, we propose a definition of data literacy that is focused on employing an inquiry-based approach to using data to understand real world phenomena. The contribution of this paper is the creation of a common foundation for teaching and learning data literacy skills

Literacy: Buzz Word on the Back Burner

This paper is reviews 12 published articles written on the importance of literacy in mathematics and the best practices to utilize inside the math classroom. The paper focuses on the definition of literacy of Orr, Kukner, and Timmons (2014), a definition that adapts literacy from reading and writing to the inclusion of problem solving, critical thinking, and the interaction with materials. The study conducted beyond the review of the literature was aimed at identifying the need for literacy across all content areas. The results of the findings show that as an educational community we show awareness of the deficit, but have not identified ways in which we may improve upon those deficits

Education in cartography: what is the status of young people's map-reading skills?

Due to recent technological progress, maps have become more popular than ever before. This is especially true for young people, who interact with these technologies on a daily basis. Therefore, it is essential that these potential map users possess sufficient knowledge and skills to process the content of cartographic products. A user study was conducted during which pupils (aged 11-18years) and geography students (>18years) had to solve a number of cartography questions using topographic maps. The data were analyzed statistically, taking into account a number of potentially influencing factors (user characteristics) on the participants' results: age, gender, youth club membership, knowledge about the area, among others. The results show a rising trend in the pupils' scores with increasing age, which can be explained by education in cartography at school. Geography students perform much better, but no influence of any other user characteristics was detected. For pupils, knowledge about the area and gender might be considered as influencing factors. However, the detected influence of gender depends on the scoring system

Country corruption analysis with self organizing maps and support vector machines.

During recent years, the empirical research on corruption has grown considerably. Possible links between government corruption and terrorism have attracted an increasing interest in this research field. Most of the existing literature discusses the topic from a socio-economical perspective and only few studies tackle this research field from a data mining point of view. In this paper, we apply data mining techniques onto a cross-country database linking macro-economical variables to perceived levels of corruption. In the first part, self organizing maps are applied to study the interconnections between these variables. Afterwards, support vector machines are trained on part of the data and used to forecast corruption for other countries. Large deviations for specific countries between these models' predictions and the actual values can prove useful for further research. Finally, projection of the forecasts onto a self organizing map allows a detailed comparison between the different models' behavior.cross-country;

Teaching Stats for Data Science

“Data science” is a useful catchword for methods and concepts original to the field of statistics, but typically being applied to large, multivariate, observational records. Such datasets call for techniques not often part of an introduction to statistics: modeling, consideration of covariates, sophisticated visualization, and causal reasoning. This article re-imagines introductory statistics as an introduction to data science and proposes a sequence of 10 blocks that together compose a suitable course for extracting information from contemporary data. Recent extensions to the mosaic packages for R together with tools from the “tidyverse” provide a concise and readable notation for wrangling, visualization, model-building, and model interpretation: the fundamental computational tasks of data science

From the Book Page to the Big Screen: An Exploration of Literature-to-Film Adaptions and Their Use in the Classroom

Many classic titles of children’s literature have been adapted into feature film presentations. Although often regarded as a mere form of entertainment, movies can and should be incorporated into the elementary classroom as supplementary material to be paired with their corresponding works of literature. The four examples provided include Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs by Judi Barrett, A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle, The Giver by Lois Lowry, and Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie. Each of these four works originated as a book that was later recreated into a film format with varying degrees of accuracy to the original story. Through a close examination of the author, theme, classroom application, and film connection, a greater appreciation is gained for the integration of film in the language arts classroom