Monday, January 15, 2007

Online Data Collaboration


I learned from Emily Chang's blog about a new online data analysis/visualization web application called Swivel. I loaded some fake student performance data to see how usefull this might be to teachers. If you want to see the datasets I loaded search for "millerjtx".

Swivel has potential, but is too early in development to be truly useful to the time-crunched classroom teacher. However, the potential for collaborative exchange and discussion of data and visualization is encouraging.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi There,

I took a look at your data. Swivel did not interpret it very well. For example it thought student #s were metrics instead of realizing they were labels for individual students.

We want to make sure that Swivel is useful for you. If you have ideas for which graphs Swivel should have created, or ideas for what might be valuable for you to see for this data, I would love to hear them.

BTW, some other folks have thought Swivel might be useful for education too:
Bionic Teaching
BI Is for Everyone: Pass It On
Thanks for the post about Swivel.

Brian Mulloy
CEO & Cofounder
www.swivel.com

Joseph Miller said...

Thanks Brian. I appreciate the opportunity to be a product tester for Swivel. No doubt with the continued buzz on swivel your product will be pushed for some additions.

One change I would definitely request is that the frequency distribution not always be ordered by number. This should be controlled by the user. Also, a greater selection of graphs would be nice. (I suppose that is coming out with the premium version?)

Anyway, I think the product is great and has particular potential for use with students in the classroom.

J