Gapminder

I have seen the future of data presentation and it is Gapminder. Visit Gapminder and click on

• the Play button (bottom left)
• the geographic regions (top right)
• country names (right)
• the magnifying glass (bottom right of chart)
• the Map tab (top left)

Also use the three sliders at the bottom (under Income per capita in international dollars and above and below Population). Notice also that merely hovering your mouse over different parts of the graphs highlights various information aspects. Finally, you can change both the x and y axes by clicking on the dropdown box triangles for Income per capita in international dollars (right of label) and Life expectancy, years (top of label).

I had seen the video of Gapminder founder Hans Rosling at TED Talks, but it's fun to get to play with the software a little bit. How great would it be to have this tool for K-12 data-driven decision-making?

Wow.

Comments

[Scott Elias]

1.

Whoa! What an amazing tool! I would love to have something as interactive as that to share with faculty...

[Steve Poling]

2.

Very cool, Scott! Nice post. I am going to forward this to our Research and Evaluation Director. He will love it. We are creating the future of data mining and D3M.

[Kelly Christopherson]

3.

Scott, great tool. I will be showing my students this as we take a look at Europe, Canada and the Pacific countries. Thanks for sharing1

[Rich Magee]

4.

WOW is right! This is quite an interactive tool (with a ton of data sitting behind it). I've already forwarded it to our social studies teachers. And you're right, what if we had a similar, dynamic way to view student data?!

[Glenn E.Malone]

5.

Had seen this when Rosling showed it on TED Talks...interesting that Google bought into the idea since then.

TED Talks is a great source for new and exciting ideas ...thanks Scott for pointing us to it.

[Matt Horne]

6.

Wow! The more I play with this, the more different ways I see for organizing the data. What an incredible way for teaching our kids how to visualize data. I see the visualization of data a more and more important skill as we enter these changing times. Even still, when I hear a comment like, "If you are one in a million in China, there are 1,300 people just like you," or "It’s estimated that 1.5 exabytes (that’s 1.5 x 1018) of unique new information will be generated worldwide this year," I have a hard time visualizing those statistics.

I imagine that what I see in my head when I hear these numbers is different than what you see when you hear them. Wouldn't it be cool if the next generation just visualized these figures naturally in their brains. I think it's coming. Tools like this will help tremendously. We've come a long way from the day that I "ooed" over a pie chart created with some numbers I put into Excel.

[A. Mercer]

7.

Last night on Women of Web 2.0 had a speaker focusing on visualizing information and data, and had this link to ManyEyes (http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/app), an IBM project on data visualization. I think it would be fun to upload NAEP data or the recently published data techonology in schools?

The only current data in there is from someone I would call a "closet eugenecist" extrapolating future IQ levels from current NAEP Math scores.

[Jennifer Dorman]

8.

Shout out to Scott on Cyber Compliment Day for inspiring and teaching so many through his blog.

http://cliotech.blogspot.com/2007/04/cybercompliment-day-april-6th.html