The WebLenses Solution
The proposed solution could be part of a high school or college curriculum, or a stand-alone "human performance support" aid in the case of non-school environments. The solution will be available to users/learners who view web content containing statistics-based information through their browser. The solution will consist of an extensible collection of "lenses", which are tools for performing learner-initiated visualizations, analyses, and transformations, on data within the context of the content viewed, as well as tools for capturing, reporting and communicating observations, activities, and conclusions to other learners or teachers/mentors/experts (SMEs).The proposed solution has implemented a "narrow slice" of content, around the statistical concept of t-tests, but the design is such that support for additional content/concepts can be added in a straight-forward way. This will be accomplished by a data/content-driven design and framework, allowing education designers or SMEs to add more "content slices" by just providing content in a predefined format/template, without needing additional code. This design enables the support of different domains, other than statistics, and contexts other than an academic post-secondary level one.
Key features
The solution implements a "transparent layer" on top of existing web content with context sensitive tools ("lenses") enabling learners to:- Follow guidelines/questions from SMEs (Guided Noticing: Look, Notice, Comment) and Professional Vision
- Highlight/point, insert comments/content, in the form of post-it notes
- Examine term definitions and associated validity assumptions
- View "canonic/standard", as well as extreme and alternative explanations/cases/examples
- Exercise differentiated perception
- Directly manipulate variables so as to experience degrees of change and impact (e.g. the effect of outliers, or non-normal distributions)
- Capture and report on findings and conclusions
- Capture observations for later study, or for sharing with peers and SMEs
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.