Teaching Information Visualization - Information Visualization: Human-Centered Issues and Perspectives - page 71

Teaching Assistants (Q2d): More than the half of all instructors (58%) had
no teaching assistant (TA) to support their course. In these cases, we can assume
that instructors also supervised practical exercises which were offered in almost
all courses. Only two courses were supported by two TAs, and the rest had
one TA. These figures may be due to small classes that were reported in most
cases, but might be indicative of a lack of support for teaching and learning in
Information Visualization, which is a very practical activity. Any such trend may
be of concern to InfoVis educators.
2.3 Practical Exercises
Survey analysis showed that nearly all courses (95%) had practical exercises
or projects. However, a wide variety of different types of exercises were noted.
One of the most common practical exercises cited was to have students use
InfoVis tools and then critique them. For example, students may choose from
a set of provided interesting datasets (election results, finance data, etc.) and
then they examine the datasets using the different InfoVis systems to reason
about analytic questions or tasks provided by the instructor or generated by
the student. These exercises often conclude with a written report evaluating
the tools and their effectiveness for the analysis. Alternately, some instructors
give students freedom to choose/generate their own input data. From the survey
results, the tools used most in such exercises are as follows:
- Spotfire ,TIBCOSoftware,Inc.[63],
- TableLens , Inxight Software, Inc. [66],
- ILOG Visualization Suite ,ILOG,Inc.[26],
- Tableau Desktop , Tableau Software, Inc. [65],
- InfoZoom , humanIT Software GmbH [27], and
- KidPad , University of Maryland [38].
The KidPad tool provides a set of zooming user interface and visualization facil-
ities so it can be used to develop small stand-alone visualizations on individual
topics. Thus, students may be asked to build a visualization on the basis of self-
chosen or self-generated data sets together with some conditions, e.g., to think
about designing overviews or spatial layout.
Another common approach of practical exercises is based on the idea that
students should implement the fundamental idea of a research paper. As a first
step, students (typically groups of at most three students) choose a paper from
a list given by the instructor. Next, the students prepare a brief presentation to
explain the fundamental idea and to give an overview on the planned implemen-
tation. This presentation helps to minimize the danger that the students will
become too focused on low-level details. To conclude, the students present and
demonstrate their tools in the classroom.
A last example of a common practical exercise is based on a special type of
data in information visualization: graphs and networks. In order to help students
better appreciate the diculty of graph layout, the instructor has students draw
a small graph of 10-15 nodes based on only the connectivity of the graph's