Category: teaching

Each spring I have the pleasure of teaching MIT undergrads and grad students in my Data Storytelling Studio course. It is a hands-on, projects focused course built around creating quick prototypes of data-driven stories that try to get an audience to do something.  This year the course focused on climate change as the theme, as part of the Boston Civic Media intiative.  I provide relatively clean datasets they can use, sourced from online portals and local community groups.  Over the course of the semester they work on building charts, creative charts, maps, creative maps, data sculptures, and interactive data experiences. Checkout the newly published full course content on MIT’s OpenCourseware site. Here is a quick run-down of their final projects.

Building Back Somerville’s Urban Forests

Students in this group combined a few datasets to create a public event that motivated people to ask the city to plant more trees.  They created the shadow of a “missing” tree on the ground and filled it with facts about the impacts and dangers to trees in the city.  Visitors were invited to fill out paper leaves with their favorite tree stories and hang them on a tree the community built together. Their conversations with visitors illuminated how the public thinks about the tree canopy of the city, and how and why people were motivated to advocate for more. Read more about the project in their write-up.

Save the Bees

This group used data about bees populations to create a playground game for 2nd and 3rd grade students.  The game helps them learn about why bees are important to us, and how to protect them.  The kids enjoyed the game thoroughly, and made great suggestions for how to improve it.  The quotes from the kids illustrated their drive to understand more fully how bees help our planet, and what they could do to help. Learn more about the game in their write-up.

Adventures of a Frequent Flyer

This group created a game visitors to a farmers market could play to explore data about how bees are moved around the US to pollinate crops in various states. Their goal was to engage the visitors in advocating for better laws to protect bees that move through their states. Participants were invited to pick their favorite fruit, and then follow the bees as they travelled to the state that produced it most. Read their whole write-up here.

It’s a Mysterbee

This group focused on the MIT population of students, appealing to they sense of curiosity to motivate them to work on projects that might help bee colonies thrive. This interactive data sculpture invited participants to dip crackers in honey to find out about the volume of bee colony production in two different years. We don’t fully understand how bee colonies thrive and/or fail, which turned out bothers MIT students desire to understand everything! The projects across campus that were shared sparked folks who participated in the activity to get involved in the research. Read more in their write-up.

Learning to work with data is like learning a new language — immersing yourself in the culture is the best way to do it. For some individuals, this means jumping into tools like Excel, Tableau, programming, or R Studio. But what does this mean for a group of people that work together? We often talk about data literacy as if it’s an individual capacity, but what about data literacy for a community? How does an organization learn how to work with data?

About a year ago we (Rahul Bhargava and Catherine D’Ignazio) found that more and more users of our DataBasic.io suite of tools and activities were asking this question — online and in workshops. In response, with support from the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, we’ve worked together with 25 organizations to create the Data Culture Project. We’re happy to launch it publicly today! Visit datacultureproject.org to learn more.

Update: Join our webinar on April 12th to learn more!

The Data Culture Project is a hands-on learning program to kickstart a data culture within your organization. We provide facilitation videos to help you run creative introductions to get people across your organization talking to each other — from IT to marketing to programs to evaluation. These are not boring spreadsheet trainings! Try running our fun activities — one per month works as a brown bag lunch to focus people on a common learning goal. For example, “Sketching a Story” brings people together around basic concepts of quantitative text analysis and visual storytelling. “Asking Good Questions” introduces principles of exploratory data analysis in a fun environment. What’s more, you can use the sample data that we provide, or you can integrate your organization’s data as the topic of conversation and learning.

Developing Together

We built DataBasic.io to help individuals build their data literacy in more creative ways. We’ve baked in design principles that focused on learners (read our paper), argued to tool designers that their web-based tools are in fact informal learning spaces (watch our talk video), documented how our activities are particularly well suited to data literacy learners (read another paper), and focused them on building a data mindset (read our opinion piece).

These activities and tools were designed and iterated on with interested users (with support from the Knight Foundation). We develop all our tools based on the problem organizations bring to us. Our latest grant was a partnership with Tech Networks of Boston, who brought years of experience working with organizations to develop their capacity and skills in a variety of ways. We prototyped a first set of videos, for the WordCounter “Sketch a Story” activity with them, and tried it out in a local workshop with some of their partners and clients.

Trying Out a Model — the Data Culture Pilot

Based on how that went, we recruited 25 organizations from around the world to help us build the Data Culture Project. Non-profits, newsrooms, libraries, community groups were included in this cohort, and we created a network to help us guide our prototyping. Over the last 6 months, each group ran 3 activities within their organizations as brown-bag lunches.

It was wonderful to have collaborators that were willing to try out some half-baked things! After each workshop, they shared how it went on a group mailing list. Then each month we hosted an online chat to get feedback and share insights and common points from the feedback.

Even in these prototype sessions, the participants shared some wonderful insights. Here are just a few:

• “It did lead to a pretty significant rethink fo the communications director for what is coming out in the spring.”
• “I hear back from participants regularly about how much they enjoyed the activities and wondering what comes next.”
• “As they were working through their data sets, they kept coming up with more questions it made them wonder about and more things to consider about those questions.”
• “They can relate everything back to their own situations / data / organizations.”

We were heartened and excited to see that our design partners were able to see impacts already!

How to Join the Community

We are launching the Data Culture Project today. Here’s how to make the best use of the project and the community:

• Read about why you don’t need a data scientist; you need a data culture to understand why data literacy needs to be understood as a community capacity, in addition to an individual capacity.
• Run one or more of the activities listed on the Data Culture Project home page. We found in the pilot that running one per month (and providing pizza) can work to bring people together.
• Remix and modify the activity to work for you and tell us about it! At the bottom of each activity page, you’ll see a “Learn With Others” comment box where you can tell others what worked for you (á la Internet food recipe sites).
• Join our mailing list to connect with others working on creative approaches to building capacity in their organizations (and be the first to hear about new activities and projects).

Remix and modify the activity to work for you and tell us about it! At the bottom of each activity page in the Data Culture Project, you’ll see a “Learn With Others” comment box where you can tell others what worked for you (á la Internet food recipe sites).

We are grateful to the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society for supporting the development of the Data Culture Project. The Data Culture Project is headed by Rahul Bhargava and Catherine D’Ignazio, undertaken as a collaboration between the MIT Center for Civic Media and the Engagement Lab@Emerson College, and with the assistance of Becky Michelson (project manager) and Jon Elbaz (research assistant).

Recently The National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership and Microsoft Civic Technology Engagement Group launched a project to expand training on data and technology to improve communities.  I’m pleased they’ve included Data Therapy as one of the resources they highlight to help you think about building your data culture.  Check out their training guide and their catalog of resources!

On a related note, if you are someone that does a lot of training and capacity building, or an organization that wants to be doing that, checkout the podcast and recording of a conversation about enabling learning with School of Data.