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Data Analytics and Packaging Digital Information for Enhanced Learning and Analysis

Benefits of the Next Big Advance in Technology

By IGI Global on Jul 29, 2013

Contributed by Kristen Stauffer, Discipline Manager

Dr. Shalin Hai-Jew, an instructional designer at Kansas State University (K-State), focuses on data visualization, social media platform data, and the information that can be gleaned from analyzing this data. She will be giving two presentations at the Colleague 2 Colleague Summer Institute on Distance Learning and Instructional Technology (SIDLIT) conference on Aug. 1-2 at Johnson County Community College in Overland Park, KS, entitled: “Extracting and Analyzing Social Media Platform Data using NodeXL” and “Data Visualization: Drawing with Data, Concepts, and Rules”: two research topics she is quite passionate about.

Other presentations focus on social learning, interactive online learning platforms, eTextbook adoption, and more, as seen in a PowToon promotional video created by a fellow presenter.

Now Dr. Hai-Jew’s latest title, Packaging Digital Information for Enhanced Learning and Analysis: Data Visualization, Spatialization, and Multidimensionality, which will release in August, focuses on the fact that higher education is turning towards data analytics as the next big advance in technology, and why it is important to look at how information is gathered and visualized for accurate comprehension, analysis, and decision-making.

Dr. Hai-Jew recently shared more about her work with us, as well as the connection between her research, her teaching, and what’s next:

IGI Global: What makes Packaging Digital Information for Enhanced Learning and Analysis: Data Visualization, Spatialization, and Multidimensionality relevant to the field of education?

Dr. Hai-Jew: One aspect of education involves enabling people to benefit from the learning in our era of “big data.” There is so much out there on the Web that enable ways to capture, design, and conceptualize information: mapping and other ways to show spatialized data, movement-based trend representations over time, social network presentations, and interactive simulations. There’s computational journalism that uses complex data visualizations. To actually be able to capitalize on these resources and large data sets, it’s important to understand how data visualizations work. It’s important to know where the information comes from. As part of today’s media literacy, it’s important to understand how data is packaged visually and what is gained and what is lost in that visualization.

Packaging Digital Information offers a range of perspectives on data visualization. There are chapters on how data visualizations may be designed to enhance learning, on a range of dimensions. One work describes the use of augmented reality visualizations to enhance library information searches. Another shows the packaging of information on a structured wiki for a remote training application. Yet another describes how to extract social network data from social media platforms and display the information in dazzling graphs, using an open-source tool. A related chapter shows how visualizations are used to depict network ties on the Internet. Another examines the capturing of presential information in video and the uses of these videos for teaching and learning. One chapter looks at packaging information as an online course based on an ill-defined emergent topic. Another chapter brings in learning using analog-based tactual objects, but with potential for digital augmentation. There is a work that looks at using digital visualizations for children’s knowledge acquisition. All of the works in this book deal with how visual information is strategically shaped for human perception, cognition, learning, and retention.

What attracted you to this specific topic?

I have always been enamored of data and knowing and how people know. That has been expressed in decades of conducting different types of education-based research. Corollary to this has been the representation of information in visual form—for publications, for teaching and learning, for presentations, and other workplace applications. I’ve also adored various authoring tools and software programs—for as long as I can remember. Even though I was a tenured professor at Shoreline Community College (where I’d been for six years), I took a pretty big leap into instructional design after I earned my doctorate…to explore these long-running curiosities.

So, in the past seven and a half years that I’ve been an instructional designer at Kansas State University, I have worked on numerous projects that involved the capturing and representation of data in various contexts. The challenges of these various visualizations are myriad. Every year, I am acquiring 2-3 new software technology skillsets…and recently, they have included a range of data visualization tools.

How has your research for this book influenced your teaching?

For now, I mostly teach online out-of-state. My current workplace agreed to this setup when I arrived here because I took a pay cut (and left tenure and went from a 9-month to a 12-month contract) in order to work as an instructional designer. I do use some limited visualizations in my teaching, but I need to update various learning contents. I teach writing, research, literature, and other topics—and these are not as conducive as other topics to the integration of visuals.

Every semester, I take a graduate-level course for fun. It’s a fabulous perk of my job. I am using what I learned in this book to analyze how other faculty use data visualizations.

What do you want readers to ultimately take away from the book?

A book, even if its 16 chapters, is a limited “package” of information. My goal is to raise people’s interest in the topic and add to their knowledge base and skill set. Data visualizations aid big data analysis; they are aesthetically deeply appealing; they contain information that may not be seen in the cells and cells of numbers; they augment and complement text beautifully.

Data drawing is a wonderful way to spark different thoughts and expressions. They really do aid in discovery, in the way free-writing and freehand drafting might.

Do you have any upcoming research plans? If so, could you tell us a little bit about them?

Thanks for asking. I just finished analyzing the data and writing up research from a modified e-Delphi study on Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). That writing involved using a data structure visualization (created with NVivo). That work will be forthcoming in publication later this year. I have been researching the design of online policy-compliance trainings. There are a few other projects. Enough of that, though.

I am wrapping up “Remote Workforce Training: Effective Technologies and Strategies,” which will be coming out later this year, also with IGI Global. I have a call out for a new edited text entitled Enhancing Qualitative and Mixed Methods Research with Technology. I really would welcome anyone who might want to write a chapter on this topic to email me: haijes@gmail.com.

To read more about data analytics and its influence on educational technologies, check out this link to a wide variety of scholarship and research available on InfoSci®-OnDemand. IGI Global's InfoSci®-OnDemand allows full-text searching through our entire collection of affordable research articles, book chapters, and teaching cases. Start your search today.

Shalin Hai-Jew works as an instructional designer at Kansas State University (K-State); she teaches for WashingtonOnline (WAOL). She has taught at the university and college levels for many years, and reviews for several publications—Educause Quarterly and MERLOT’s Journal of Online Learning and Teaching. Dr. Hai-Jew was born in Huntsville, Alabama, USA.

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