Is the Fourth Paradigm Really New?

Posted: Oct 20 2012 by Kim Kastens

I have a long-standing interest in the use of data in education, so I've been reading with interest several articles and a book concerned with the so-called "Fourth Paradigm" of science, in which insights are wrested from vast troves of existing data. The Fourth Paradigm is envisioned as a new method of pushing forward the frontiers of knowledge, enabled by new technologies for gathering, manipulating, analyzing and displaying data. The term seems to have originated with Jim Gray, a Technical Fellow and visionary at Microsoft's eScience group, who was lost at sea in 2007. The first three paradigms, in this view, would be empirical observation and experimentation, analytical or theoretical approaches, and computational science or simulation. Earth and Environmental Sciences are well represented in the book, with essays on data-rich ecological science, ocean science, and space science.

I am finding these readings very stimulating and worthwhile. But I question whether this way of making meaning from the complexity of nature is really so new. More

Comments (2)

Too Fast to Measure

Posted: Jul 10 2012 by Kim Kastens

I'm thrilled to report that the book that grew out of the Synthesis project, the parent project of this blog, is now out: Earth & Mind II: A Synthesis of Research on Thinking and Learning in the Geosciences, Geological Society of America Special Publication 486, edited by Cathy Manduca and myself. It's available from the Geological Society of America bookstore

However, having shared my thrill at holding the book in my hands, I have to admit that there are some ideas in the book that I have already outgrown during the months that the book has been in production. More

"Some Students Will..."

Posted: Apr 21 2012 by Kim Kastens

Recently my "Teaching & Learning Concepts In Earth Sciences" students and I renovated one of my old data-using lab activities, from the days when I used to teach "Planet Earth" to non-science majors. The old version of the activity led students step-by-step through a series of manipulations of an on-line global data base, using a professional data visualization tool. The old directions provided a lot of scaffolding for how to make data displays of ocean salinity in and around the Mediterranean Sea, but little support for how to extract insights about earth processes from those displays. The new version assumes that students are already pretty adept at getting computer apps to do what they want, and refocuses the scaffolding on how to think like a geoscientist, how to think about the meaning of the data. More

A more nuanced view of Concept-driven versus Data-driven visualizations

Posted: Mar 12 2012 by Kim Kastens In several previous posts, I explored how Clark & Weibe's (2000) idea of data-driven versus concept-driven visualizations plays out in geosciences and how this distinction could be important as we help students learn to learn from visualizations. This semester, in my course on "Teaching & Learning Concepts in Earth Sciences," students found and documented visualizations that afford insights via spatial thinking about a topic they are working on for a semester long project. Applying the idea of data-driven versus concept-driven visualizations to this image collection surfaced several additional nuances to the categorization schema. More

Turning Nature Into Categories

Posted: Feb 13 2012 by Kim Kastens

Two years ago in this space, I wrote about "Turning Nature into Numbers," humanity's accomplishment of developing instruments and methodologies that can turn the fleeting qualitative impressions that we have of our surroundings into quantitative values--numbers--which can be readily stored, shared, transmitted and compared.

Numbers are great, but it seems to me that for developing an opinion or making a decision, humans often want categories rather than numbers. More