Friday, September 19, 2014

Technology's growing impact on education towards a more electronic school experience

The Student Cyborg & How Technology is Facilitating Education  Infographic

This is a very good visualization that shows the increasing use of technology and its impact on education. The visual is engaging with different colors and different shades of those colors; percentages, data plots, and graphics; and even a timeline at the end to really show the progression of technological developments.The visual starts out at the top with it's title, "The Student Cyborg*," and below that has their definition of a student cyborg. An element of humor is added, where the definition states, "...dependent on a mechanical or electronic devicw." "Devicw" is shown corrected to "device," indicating the heavy reliance on technology in this day and age. The visual is divided into four sections: social media, online learning, educational tools, and history. Next to each section header there is a little icon included, and throughout that entire section different shades of that icon's color are used. For example the first social media section has a green Messenger icon next to it. Then for that entire section different shades of green are used, to make it easier to differentiate between different sections. Also it looks very nice without looking overdone and cluttered. This visual really did a great job of expressing and presenting their data in different ways.Through percentages, stacked bar graphs, line graphs, statistic tables, graphics of a smart phone and laptop, and a timeline, it engages the viewer on many different levels and is easy to understand. Also there is not much writing on this visualization, which is good because sometimes if there is too much text on a visual the viewer can get lost and confused. However there are still a couple things that could be improved about this visual. The first thing I noticed was that although it was nice that they used different shades of each color for each section, some shades were so light that they were hard to see. And it is not good to have parts of the visual that cannot even be seen well. And for the educational tools section, the bar graph should have some more data like specific numbers to give the viewer a better idea of what the scope of those bars mean. All in all I think this is still a very effective and aesthetically pleasing visual. The data is clearly presented and easy to understand to the viewer. 

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