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One ongoing tension with the group project is simply when to begin the
assignment. By initiating the project early in the term, students have more
time to work on it and make better progress. However, at that early point,
students have engaged very little course material and so their understanding of
information visualization concepts and ideas is not as rich. I have found that the
simple topic chosen for the project can have a profound impact on the results,
and better knowledge of the information visualization area leads students to
make better choices in project topics. This has led me to wait until the midterm
point to distribute the project in some semesters, but then the students have
much less time to work on it.
Overall, the Information Visualization course has been valuable to me in
many different ways. Perhaps most importantly, the process of preparing lec-
tures and course material has made me reflect on the topics that I would be
discussing and question “accepted” knowledge in the domain. I believe that this
has made me a better researcher and it has generated ideas for new projects and
investigations.
4.2 Andreas Kerren, Vaxjo University, Sweden
My experiences in teaching Information Visualization go back to the year 2003.
At this time, I was a temporary assistant professor at the Institute of Com-
puter Graphics and Algorithms of the Vienna University of Technology, Austria.
The institute offered one course on InfoVis and several other related courses.
In this environment, I had the opportunity to give several lectures on Soft-
ware Visualization and domain-specific visualization, such as visualization in
Bioinformatics. In 2005, I moved to the University of Kaiserslautern in Ger-
many. There, I was responsible for the annual InfoVis courses. Based on my
experiences from Vienna and current flows in research, I designed a completely
new syllabus for this course. Originally, this syllabus provided 15 lectures (one
semester at TU Kaiserslautern) plus practical exercises for Masters level stu-
dents; each lecture took 1.5 hours once a week. As I have been appointed for a
faculty position at Vaxjo University (VXU), Sweden, in 2007, some modifications
were needed to address the different course and teaching system at this univer-
sity. Web pages (in English) for the most recent InfoVis courses at VXU can be
found at
http://cs.msi.vxu.se/isovis/courses/
. In this section however, I
will focus to my experiences with my courses given at TU Kaiserslautern from
2005-2007, because the details of my last course there (in the winter semester
2006/2007 (WS06/07)) reflect my particulars within the Dagstuhl survey.
My general learning aims for the course are more or less identical to John
Stasko's four learning outcomes at Page 76. Therefore, I don't want to repeat
them at this place. It was very important for me to give students the opportunity
for critical reflections and to show the newest directions in research. Furthermore,
my course covers basic principles from cognitive psychology that have influence
on InfoVis, such as human visual perception or Gestalt laws. As a result of this
position, each technical approach and tool was discussed with respect to its value
(please compare [17] in this topic), its usefulness, and—if existent—its usage in
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