Database Reference
In-Depth Information
4 Personal Perspectives
In this section, three of the workshop attendees provide their own unique per-
spective on teaching InfoVis and InfoVis-related topics.
4.1 John T. Stasko, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA
I have been teaching a graduate course on Information Visualization at Georgia
Tech since 1999. My university changed from a quarter system to a semester
system then and I decided to create a course for this area that was becoming my
research focus and growing in interest worldwide. Over the years I have thought
of this course not merely as a teaching assignment but as a fundamental part
of my academic portfolio and research mission. The course provides training for
students to learn about the area and do subsequent research with me, or simply
to apply their knowledge in business or government. Also, the course has directly
led to a number of the research contributions made by students in the course
and by my research group. Student projects from the course have won major
contests [20, 54] or led to research papers [12]. Additionally, my dissatisfaction
with the state of knowledge and background articles on particular course topics
led to projects undertaken by my research group in those areas (i.e., analytic
goals [3], user tasks [1], and interaction [73]). Below I will provide more details
about the course and the projects that have resulted from it.
The Information Visualization course (CS 7450) is usually offered in the
Spring semester each year. At Georgia Tech, semesters are 15 weeks long and and
my course meets for 1.5 hours twice a week. The web pages for the most recent
course offering can be found at http://www.cc.gatech.edu/ ~ stasko/7450 .
Human-computer interaction (HCI) is an important area of research in my
home School—we have both a Masters degree in HCI and a doctorate in Human-
Centered Computing (HCC), in addition to our undergraduate and graduate
degrees in computer science. Students are drawn to the HCI and HCC degree
programs from a variety of undergraduate majors, so many do not have formal
computer science training. I made a conscious decision to designate the graduate
HCI course as the only prerequisite for Information Visualization in order to
encourage students from a wide variety of disciplines to enroll. Consequently,
many students who do not have a strong background in programming typically
take Information Visualization.
This fact has implications on the way that I teach the course. I do not use
homework assignments in which the students must implement a visualization
technique or system. Instead, assignments are more oriented toward design, cri-
tiquing and evaluation. I employ a group project where I do require that some
type of software system be built, but the course demographics allow there to be
at least one or two team members who are experienced programmers.
My high-level goal for the course is to have students learn the different infor-
mation visualization techniques that have been created including the strengths
and weaknesses of each, and to have the students become better critics of infor-
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