Week 11 – University & Personal Life Visualisation

Figure 1 – Visualisation

Following on the governance block I have focused here on showing general information on my university life and my personal life. From the readings for this block, it seems as though the view decision makers have is that of averaged, abstract data that can show little about who the person is but give broad indications of what is occurring.

Description of the Visualisation

Everything to the left in the visualisation is related to my university studies and everything to the right is covering a general area of my personal life.

On the University side I have split it into three areas which are:

  1. Reading – course specific reading
  2. University Admin – checking tasks, gathering all the readings, reading feedback
  3. Reflections, Tasks – Visualisations, writing reflections

On the personal side I have three areas also:

  1. Food – Eating, preparing, cleaning up food
  2. Exercise – Walking, yoga, etc
  3. Relaxation – TV, playing video games, reading books

Legend

Figure 2 – Legend

Reasoning

Through the readings on governance and over the course of this module I have become aware that decision makers are looking for vague or general information on students, teachers, schools, districts, etc. The closer to the student a viewer of the data is the more detailed information they seem to require, meaning teachers want to have as much information as they can to hand to make a decision on a given student, an administrator wants to see how a class is achieving and district supervisor wants to see how a school is performing.

With this visualisation while it is showing my data in one-hour segments, it would be possible to utilise the same visualisation to show data for an entire class or school. What I have seen as important over the course of this module is to reduce training on how this data can be interpreted and one way to do that is have the same visualisation, so people understand how to read it and then have the visualisation be able to represent a student, a class, or a school. While this has its drawbacks in so far as removing a lot of granularity to the data it ensures that training can be given, and the pitfalls can be called out by the training.

The idea also with this visualisation is that it gives the decision maker some method of being able to express certain areas where they want to see improvement in such as ‘we want people to spend more time reading, how do we achieve that?’ Or ‘we want to ensure students are accessing more exercise as this improves student retention, how can we encourage that?’

1 thought on “Week 11 – University & Personal Life Visualisation

  1. bwilliamson

    This point seems right to me: “decision makers are looking for vague or general information on students, teachers, schools, districts”. But at the same time, as you’ve noted, there is increasing demand for granularity too. This seems to reflect a certain tension in the use of educational data–that the available data can usually *only* produce a partial, generalized representation; but yet *more* granularity and precision are constantly promised. I wonder whether you think partiality and precision are useful key terms to characterize this?

    Reply

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