Multilitteratus Incognitus

Continuing with my exploration of DALMOOC, we've reached the end of Week 2 (only a few days late ;-)  ).  I've been playing with Tableau, which I can describe as Pivot Tables on steroids.  I briefly explored the idea of getting some IPEDS data to mess around with, however that proved to be a bit more challenging than I had anticipated. So, I ended up using the sample data of course evaluations to figure out how to work Tableau.  The following are some interesting visualizations of the data that I had: The one thing I realized, as I was playing around with the data, is that it's really important to really know what your data means.  I thought I knew what the categories meant, because I thought that institutions of higher education used similar lingo.  The more I played with the data, the more I realized that some things weren't what I was expecting them to be.  Thus, in order to know what is being described and portrayed through the visualiza...

This is it! The last topic in #ioe12 - Open Policy ! To be honest, there is almost nothing new to see here, if you've been following along with #ioe12 week-by-week.  All of the previous 11 topics do connect with one another, and policy issues  have  come up in the past, we just didn't cover them specifically. The crux of this topic is that anything that is publicly funded should be open.  For instance, for all federal grants, the research produced by these grants should  be under some sort of open license so the individuals who paid for it (the people of a give country, and heck  the people of the world) should be able to use it for free. In my own experience, having lived and gone to school in Greece K-8, I know that there is a national textbook publisher in Greece. These textbooks are free  to children who go to school.  These books aren't free as in "I am loaning this book to you for free", but rather " here is a free copy, do with it as you ...