Overview:
Through effective use of social media, data can be efficiently sourced from large groups that can in turn be visualized in creative ways to tell effective news stories. This lesson was designed to provide students with first-hand experience in both crowdsourcing data and its subsequent visualization.
Work description:
Complete lesson design including social bookmarking of relevant examples, survey development, data scrubbing, word cloud creation and voicethread implementation.
Learner target:
College undergraduates in a multimedia journalism course
Technology employed:
Pearltrees, Google+ Community, Tagxedo, Typeform, VoiceThread, Flipboard
Theoretical foundations:
This lesson, and others that I helped design for Visualizing Information, shared a similar arc reflecting progression through Bloom’s taxonomy from knowledge to evaluation. Best in class examples of crowdsourcing were discussed and analyzed. Application was then demonstrated via a class crowdsourcing initiative that everyone participated in and reflected upon. Finally, learners synthesized their new knowledge by creating their own artifacts. Typically, learners would also help evaluate and critique one another’s work (though not in this lesson).
