Greetings! Thank you for visiting our video. On behalf of the Ocean Tracks team, I hope that you enjoy it! We look forward to receiving your comments and questions, and will be doing our best to respond right away.

Best wishes,

Randy

 

Dr. Randy Kochevar

Director, Oceans of Data Institute, EDC

 Hello Randy and Ocean Tracks visitors,

Exploring Ocean Tracks and seeing the ocean through the eyes of its inhabitants via Tagging of Pacific Predators (TOPP) is clearly an engaging way to introduce learners to the value of using big data sets to make new discoveries and ask new questions about our planet. Exciting work! Donna asks some great questions above. Related, I noticed with interest your recent Faculty Workshop on your oceansofdata.org linked site. Can you share some of your current thinking or next steps that emerged from the session?

There is much to explore via the links you share on the right-hand navigation bar. I’m sure others will have questions as well. Thank you for sharing your work, I look forward to hearing more visitors questions and further comments!

 

Erin,

So glad that I asked! The upcoming blog stories should be terrific. I wonder if your description of your upcoming work here opens up more questions and connections from our visitors...please chime in!

Ocean Tracks is an intriguing way to visualize some large data sets. I've seen similar models in other content areas and am curious what your experience has been in how teachers and students have taken up the tool. For instance, I initially wonder what the connection between the library and the map is meant to be. Often there's a tension between data and ease-of-use in UI/UX design, so I'm interested to know whether there's training or other resources that teachers need before implementation. I see the blog is coming, but I'd also like to hear some stories of how this has been used in classrooms. And/or ideas from some current practitioners and how they might envision using it.

Hi Breanne,

Thank you for your questions. There is a lot of ground to cover here, so I'll take a first stab at it, and will welcome additional thoughts from my co-presenters! Also - feel free to ask follow-ups if I'm not getting to the things you're most interested in.

Regarding the library - As we were starting to test Ocean Tracks in some high school classrooms, we realized that there a lots of background questions that would fall outside of most teachers' experience, like "How do the electronic tags work?" "Why do we care about chlorophyll-a?" and "What the heck is 'Curviness?'" So we created the library from scratch, specifically to address those kinds of basic background questions that students (and teachers!) are bound to ask sooner or later. There are some resources in the library which are linked directly from content in the map, but I think the more typical use case is that students are directed to read about something in the library as part of the learning modules (which can be found under the "Curriculum" tab).

Regarding the tension between data and ease-of-use in UI/UX design -- This is indeed a challenge, and I'd say that it's especially daunting when you're trying to design a Web-based experience that can be used on a wide range of computers, in settings where the wireless connection is less-than-optimal! With Ocean Tracks, we tried to provide enough data through the interface so students could make meaningful comparisons (e.g., among different species, or among different seasons or years), without providing so much data that they'd be likely to "bury themselves" when they (inevitably) try to turn on all the tracks and all of the environmental layers at once. 

Regarding teacher training - In each round of classroom testing, we've spent a bit of time with teachers orienting them to the various features in the interface, and walking them through the curriculum materials, prior to the beginning of each term. Because these have been relatively small trials (9 undergraduate classrooms in the most recent test), we have also been available to answer questions and to help troubleshoot technical issues as they have arisen. However, we realize that that is not a viable solution for dozens or hundreds of classrooms - so we are now seeking funding to develop the materials and training that instructors will need to implement Ocean Tracks in their own classrooms, without in-person intervention from us!

Regarding how Ocean Tracks has been used in classrooms - We've now tested Ocean Tracks in high school and undergraduate classrooms, in courses including high school biology and environmental science, undergraduate marine biology for non-majors, introductory oceanography, and some upper-division oceanography courses. It has been exciting to see that instructors have found relevant and useful applications in such a wide variety of settings - and we've been surprised to discover how readily it has been adapted at both the high school and college levels.

With that said, the Ocean Tracks materials are designed to be used in a very inquiry-driven setting - which is not necessarily "the norm" in all classrooms. Furthermore, the integration of data visualization and analysis skills - which have often been relegated to statistics classrooms - into science classrooms, has occasionally pushed instructors into unfamiliar territory; although most of them have worked extensively with data (especially at the undergraduate level), many of them have never actually taught with data. I think that developing the methods for effectively teaching these skills, including the critical and analytical thinking skills that data literacy requires, is the next great hurdle we need to overcome.

I'm sorry for the long-winded answer, and I hope it was helpful! I'd welcome others to jump in on this as well!

Great conversation on this project already!  I'm really intrigued by the "big data" component of the project--where the video started...Although not an expert, I see big data as both 'awe-some" and "awe-ful!"  Helping students and teachers understand the capacities/possibilities/flaws of big data tools may be one of the most important things we can do for the generation progressing through our education system right now.  their world will be so much different from ours--and the greater their understanding of how these data are generated, collected, analyzed, used, etc, the safer we will all be!

Are you finding ways to bring high school teachers into this work?  Are you working with teacher ed programs?  or focusing more on in-service training for teachers?  or are you not ready to go there yet?  It seems to me that once you figure out how to work with Ocean Tracks, it's a short hop to using many other Nat Geo, NOAA, and NASA tracking information to challenge students (and teachers) to "think big!" 

Hi Nancy! Thanks for your note!

I agree that "big data" is changing our lives in countless ways - both as consumers and as producers of data. And if we are teaching students to be successful citizens in this data-intensive world, we need to be giving them the skills required to navigate this ever-growing ocean of data.

With the Ocean Tracks project we focused on datasets that are Complex, Large, Interactively-accessed, and Professionally collected (or CLIP data):

• Complex – includes different types of data, collected different ways
• Large – there are more data than you need to answer any particular question
• Interactive – you are able to explore the data interactively, comparing different sets of data via a variety of data visualizations
• Professionally-collected – data were collected by “others” (not the student)

Although we recognize that, in the world of "big data," there are datasets orders of magnitude larger than what we are using in Ocean Tracks, we think that these four characteristics provide a strong foundation from which to start building those skills required to work with "big data."

The teachers we've worked with thus far have been recruited at various conferences and through some of the professional networks in which we've been involved. However, as we transition into this next phase of the project, we will definitely be exploring all of the kinds of options that you mention as ways of engaging new instructors into using Ocean Tracks with their students, as well as seeking and developing partnerships to help us succeed in this work!

CLIP--nice!  That's a new acronym for me, and I'll use it!  Meanwhile, I'm wondering if you have an advisory board or external council of experts who help you network?  the beauty of the data you are working with is that it can be used even by land-locked teachers and students anywhere!  Good luck on the next phase!

Thanks so much, Nancy! We did have an excellent advisory board for the initial Ocean Tracks project, where we were focused specifically on interface development; and the Oceans of Data Institute has done ongoing work with panels of experts from many different disciplines. We are finding that, because the world of "big data" is evolving so rapidly, it is critical that we stay current in our own understanding of where the field is moving, so we can help provide students with the knowledge, skills and behaviors they'll need to be successful!