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WebLenses - bringing data into focus

an online, in-context, human performance and learning support environment

WebLenses "bring online information into focus" by providing different tools ("lenses") which can be applied to online content,
within context, in order to visualize, annotate, interactively explore, and otherwise engage the learned material.

While the implemented system narrowly focuses on a single topic within the domain of College Statistics and offers a small set of lenses,
WebLenses is an extensible environment, able to support more domains and more lenses.

The WebLenses support learning through just-in-time, as-needed, interactive resources, leveraging guided noticing,
differentiated perception, and time and context relevancy.

Overview

What is to be sought in designs for the display of information is the clear portrayal of complexity; not the complication of the simple.

      - Edward R. Tufte

Intelligent and critical consumers of statistics-based research/information often find it hard to assess the soundness and validity of the claims being made. Some of the challenges are: not all the data are given (due to lack of space, knowledge, time, honesty), consumers and producers of statistics-based information have misconceptions (e.g., correlation vs. causality), data are very terse/hard to envision or language is dense, cryptic, full of jargon, alternatives are not considered (due to a different focus, different agenda).
If consumers are not able to better understand these kinds of claims, they run the risk of acting out of ignorance or due to (intentional and unintentional) misrepresentation, making them less critical, less responsible consumers and citizens.
The WebLenses solution targets high school and college students as well as adults, who need or want to be "critical consumers" of statistics-based research and information as it's presented on the web in various forms. The solution creates an extensible set of "lenses", which are various tools for visualizing, analyzing, transforming, highlighting, capturing, and otherwise manipulating or processing statistics-loaded web content in the context of that content to enable better understanding of, and sounder decision making based on that content.
The learning was assessed by both comparing a control and a treatment group (without lenses and with lenses, respectively), as well as learning transfer (i.e. statistics-based reasoning), in the absence of the lenses.

Inspiration for the WebLenses Masters Project

In 1923, Edna St. Vincent Millay, applauding the growth of good data while simultaneously decrying the lack of good techniques for exploratory data analysis, wrote:


Upon this gifted age in its dark hour
Falls from the sky a meteoric shower
Of facts. They lie, unquestioned, uncombined.
Wisdom enough to leach us of our ills is daily spun,
But there exists no loom to weave it into fabric.

         - Graphic Discovery by Howard Wainer

I find this still very fitting today. My hope is that this project at least encourages more loom-builders.

 

WebLenses Demo video (.avi, 272MB)

WebLenses Presentation (PowerPoint, 601KB)