Educating Students in Official Statistics using Embedded Geovisual Analytics Storytelling Methods

Abstract

Official statistics such as demographics, environment, health, social-economy and education from national and sub-national sources are a rich and important source of information for many important aspects of life and should be considered to be more used and acknowledged in education. Educators and their students would be able to get informed and at the same time participate in increasing the knowledge on how life is lived and can be improved. A lot of this statistics information can be reached on the Internet. This is producing what is often called information overload and causing people to be increasingly faced with the problems of filtering and interpreting enormous quantities of information. We know that official statistics are used as a more or less important background for decisions especially in public planning and policy making. However, in education, official statistics are much less recognized and used than they ought to be and among the informed public they are even less used. Web-enabled GeoAnalytics is a technique that can help illustrating complex statistical data which for the eye are hard to uncover or even are not possible to perceive or interpret. In this paper, we introduce novel storytelling means for the author (educator) to 1) select any spatio-temporal and multidimensional national or sub-national statistical data, 2) explore and discern trends and patterns, 3) then orchestrate and describe metadata, 4) collaborate with colleagues to confirm and 5) finally publish essential gained insight and knowledge embedded as dynamic visualization Vislet in blogs or wikis with associate metadata. The author can guide the reader in the directions of both context and discovery while at the same time follow the analyst s way of logical reasoning. We are moving away from a clear distinction between authors and readers affecting the process through which knowledge is created and the traditional models which support editorial work. Value no longer relies solely on the content but also on the ability to access this information. Audiences are increasingly gathered around Web enabled technologies and this distribution channel is, more than ever, in control of the information value chain.