Dear friends, Alberto here.
Today we’re launching the 14th course in the Open Visualization Academy, ‘Learning Objectives for Communicative Visualization’ by Elsie Lee-Robbins and Eytan Adar. Beginning today, the OVA is going to take a break until early September, when we’ll resume posting in this newsletter and releasing new material.
If you’ve watched my own intro course in the OVA, you’ve heard that I’m a fan of Elsie’s and Eytan’s research. It clarified vague intuitions I had had for a long time: communicative visualization can be conceptualized as a learning problem and, as a consequence, you, the designer, can imagine yourself as a teacher with something to show or explain. Your audience is your students.
Elsie’s and Eytan’s taxonomy to construct learning objectives
In their multiple papers about this topic, Eytan and Elsie borrow from the academic literature on education to propose a framework, a cognitive taxonomy that designers can use to think in a structured manner about intent, goals, and possible outcomes.
To make proper design decisions in visualization, it helps to define goals with sentences such as “The viewer will [verb] [noun]”. These are your learning objectives. For example, “The viewer will notice [verb] the strong correlation between two quantitative variables, A and B [noun]” could lead you to consider a scatter plot to represent the data.
Defining your learning objectives can later help you assess the success of your visualization, by comparing what you intended to communicate to what your viewers got from your chart.
These are just the basics. Elsie’s and Eytan’s OVA course covers this and much more, so don’t miss it.
We’ll see you again in early September!
