Teaching about operationalization with dataset archives

I've noticed that students have a really hard time moving from the idea they might have for a project to identifying a dataset that they can actually use. On Wednesday I'm going to experiment with how best to guide students through this transition from idea to empirical data that actually exists.

One point I would like to make with the students is that they should be browsing datasets while they refine research question. This means they have to begin looking at codebooks early on. The easier it is for students to gain access to codebooks, the better, so I would recommend the following data archives: CPANDA and ARDA.

The picture to the right gives you a sense of what you can see if you use CPANDA's "browse study questions" option. The fact that the students can immediately access the questions, without having to register and download a pdf or Word document is a huge plus!

Region specific data

In a class offered this semester at Trinity, students will be asked to experiment with data visualization (read: Edward Tufte). Since the students will be working with the Hispanic Health Council here in Hartford, they are going to need health data--specifically on cancer rates for Hispanics--in the Hartford region.

I have found that getting regional data of this sort can be complicated, so it's worth documented what I found to be useful for the kind of basic charts and tables these students may be making...

• the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System allows you to sort look at preventative behaviors, sorted by state and ethnicity
• the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System allows you to do something similar for adults
• the National Women's Health Indicators Database, despite its name, gives detailed data for women and men, sorted by state, county, ethnicity, and type of cancer (bladder, breast, etc.)
  

Trinity folks hard at work, even during break

Dan, Devlin and I presented on our Invisible-Cities-Google-maps-mash-up work at a faculty development workshop the other day. If you look behind us, you can see a map. I think it's the one on problem properties. Look how happy we look...

Of course, the workshop was not all about maps. The first speaker was Tom Deans, from UCONN's Writing Center. He spoke about the classes he teaches where he has students write about/for/with community groups. The distinction between about/for/with is an interesting one, particularly when applied to our cases with google maps. The maps we made in our class were certainly about the community (abandoned properties), for the community in that we hoped people would use the map as a basis for action, and with the community, in that a local organization requested exactly this map!

Minding the gap

Gapminder may be one of the coolest new teaching tools around. Use it to quickly show scatterplots, where each point is a different country plotted on three dimensions (two are whatever you would like: mortality, income, education, etc., and the third is time). These plots are interacting and show the shape of cross-national human development over time...

Places to visit when learning about Google maps mash-ups

There are some must-sees for individuals who haven't had much contact with Google maps mash-ups:

• Google maps mania's fifty things to do with a mash-up: nice overview for thinking of these maps as tools that people can use to accomplish some sort of goal
• Chicago crime: considered the mother of all mash-ups
• Gmaps pedometer: gives a sense of what is to come with mash-ups, because of its topographical features
  

Our project:

• The final result
• Our two tools: YourGMaps and Zeemaps
• The project's aftermath: Jack Dougherty's map for Cities, Suburbs, and Schools and Devlin Hughes' Single Parent Resources in Hartford

Other educational examples:

• Blue Puddle
  

we've been covered

People still remember and notice work our Invisible Cities students conducted over eight months ago. A recent post in the Undercurrents Blog cites our food resources map.

the children of invisible cities

Since we taught Invisible Cities in during the Spring 2006 semester, Google maps mash-up fever spread. We now have a few examples of mash-ups created here at Trinity outside of class that we taught last year. See here, here, and here.