Flowing Data is a great blog with some startling examples of data visualisation – visualising data to understand it better (note that some of the content on the blog might not be appropriate for students). For starters, here’s a bunch of ways you can visualise your email inbox. Some of these images are truly beautiful.
Data mashups – custom applications where combinations of data from different sources like Flickr photo tags or real estate sales are ‘mashed up’ into a single tool – are predicted as a top education trend in the next two to five years by the 2008 Horizon Report.
Here’s artichoke’s take on a classroom application of Google Maps, which follows the path of water from rainfall to tap. Each point on the map can include explanatory texts and images. I’m sure there’s a ton of ways that students could use Google Maps to explore spatial relationships overlaid with demographic, environmental, economic or social data.
Visualisations reveal the story behind the data. Powerful visualisations are more than pretty pictures and can convince and persuade. This TED talk by Hans Rosling has changed the way I think about economic development and poverty:
