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Gather.Town
Gather.Town, 2020/10/08

During our Town Hall today we tried out an application called Gather.Town - the idea is that it puts you on a map as an icon, and as you walk around the map, it shows your video and opens your audio to those people around you. And you see theirs. It was one of those experiences where we spent the period playing with the new toy; maybe in future uses we would be more deliberate. For me, it felt like informal gatherings everywhere, except without the wine glass - random encounters, not really knowing what to say, etc. I guess this is good for extroverts, but for someone like me, it's not as good as a more structured interaction.

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Emotion in Learning Experience Design - Norman's 3 facets; Visceral, Behavioural and Reflective...
Donald Clark, Donald Clark Plan B, 2020/10/08

This is a nice outline of Donald Norman's theory of Emotional Design. As Clark notes, Norman breaks emotional design down into three components: visceral (appearance), behavioural (performance), and reflective (memories and experience). This sort of classification exercise is a favourite among education researchers, and of course the work never ends (Clark notes that "beyond Norman, there are also other cognitive feelings around aesthetics, beauty, layout, space, colour and simplicity in design, that also count"). The structure is a nice framework for discussion, but we shouldn't confuse it with an actual theory of, or explanation of, the nature and role of emotion in learning. The discussion reduces in one place to Gestalt theory and in another to brain-as-computer analogies, as evidenced by concepts like 'cognitive effort' and Kahneman's account of the machinery of thought. Image: Norman, 2006.

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Data literacy competencies
Statistics Canada, 2020/10/08

I've been working on data literacy reecently. I'll have much more to say, but I wanted to pass this along without delay. This is part of a larger training package on data literacies. It is a set of 19 competencies that Statistics Canada feels comprises the definition of data literacy. Its overall definition is, "Data literacy is the ability to derive meaningful information from data. It focuses on the competencies involved in working with data including the knowledge and skills to read, analyze, interpret, visualize and communicate data as well as understand the use of data in decision-making. Data literacy also means having the knowledge and skills to be a good data steward including the ability to assess the quality of data, protect and secure data, and their responsible and ethical use." The competencies can also be understood from the perspective of a data journey (pictured).

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