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Learning to Learn from Data

Posted: Feb 15 2011 by

Kim Kastens

Scientists learn from data. Learning to learn from data is obviously an essential aspect of the education of a future scientist.

These days, however, many other kinds of people also learn from data--including business people, investors, education leaders, and people who care about pollution, disease, or the quality of their local schools. My daily newspaper is rich in data-based graphs and maps--and so is the newsletter from my local library. These days, learning to learn from data is a necessary part of everyone's education.

However, learning to learn from data is not a typical part of everyone's education. This post explores what might be required to construct a thorough learning progression for learning from Earth Science data, beginning where a good elementary school leaves off and carrying on through to what an upper level college course or adult job might demand. More

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Projective Spatial Concept

Posted: Sep 23 2010 by Kim Kastens

One of the claims that geoscience educators make when defending our field as part of a liberal arts education is that students will have a better understanding of the Earth around them; they will see landscapes and earth processes differently, more profoundly, more insightfully.

My own foray into cognitive science seems to be having the same effect on me: on my various trips this summer, I caught myself looking at landscapes differently. But this was a different "different."

On a flight from Salt Lake City to Portland Oregon, I woke up from a nap and looked out the window to see a flat terrain speckled with discrete dark patches (click photo to enlarge). The patches had irregular edges and varied in size. More

J. Harlen Bretz, Spatial Thinker

Posted: Aug 25 2010 by Kim Kastens When my daughter Holly was little, she wanted me to tell her stories. I found it difficult to make up stories from scratch. Eventually, inspired by a book called The Tale of Chip the Teacup, we found a work-around. I would tell familiar stories from the point of view of an unexpected character: Beauty and the Beast from the point of view of the Beast; Snow White from the point of view of Grumpy, and so on. I found this sufficiently doable, and Holly found the stories sufficiently original.

At the recent Spatial Cognition 2010 conference, I found myself in an similar position, telling the familiar story of the geological history of the Pacific Northwest from the point of view of spatial cognition. More

The second law of thermodynamics as a unifying theme of geosciences

Posted: May 21 2010 by Kim Kastens

This post was triggered by an insight in Dave Mogk's Efficiency post: "A hurricane is an extremely efficient natural process that redistributes the thermal energy built up in tropical oceans by rapidly transferring this energy to colder, northerly latitudes."

It turns out that many Earth processes of global significance, in both solid and fluid earth, have this same effect of redistributing energy away from localities of high energy concentration towards localities of lower energy concentration. The net effect is a more dispersed spatial distribution of energy. More

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Visual Meme in Water Cycle Diagrams

Posted: Apr 28 2010 by Kim Kastens

(This post is adapted from a talk I gave on "Teaching Complex Earth Systems Using Visualization" at the Cutting Edge workshop on "Developing Student Understanding of Complex Systems in the Geociences." My powerpoint and those of the other speakers can be downloaded from the online program.)

In a previous post, Universal versus Conditional Truths, I made the case that concept-driven visualizations in earth sciences can lead students and other viewers to underappreciate how much variation there is in the earth system. The scientists and illustrators who create such diagrams must make many decisions about what to include and how to depict those feature that they do include. Of necessity they typically leave out more options than they include.

Today I would like to explore the possibility that the entire community of people who create concept-driven visualizations are collectively under-representing the range of possibilities in the earth system. More

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