JSM 2017 is almost here. I just landed in Maryland, and I finally managed to finish combing through the entire program. What a packed schedule! I like writing an itinerary post each year, mainly so I can come back to it during and after the event. I obviously won’t make it to all sessions listed for each time slot below, but my decision for which one(s) to attend during any time period will likely depend on proximity to previous session, and potentially also proximity to childcare area.
Of the many provocative and exciting discussions at this year’s Statistics Research Teaching and Learning conference in Rotarua, NZ, one that has stuck in my mind is from Lucia Zapata-Cardona, from the Universidad de Antioquia in Columbia. Lucia discussed data from her classroom observations of a teacher at a middle school (ages 12-13) in a “Northwest Columbian city”. The class was exciting for many reasons, but the reason that I want to write about it here is because of the fact that the teacher had the students structure and store their own data.
One of the many nice things about summer is the time and space it allows for blogging. And, after a very stimulating SRTL conference (Statistics Reasoning, Teaching and Learning) in Rotorua, New Zealand, there’s lots to blog about.
Let’s begin with a provocative posting by fellow SRTL-er Tim Erickson at his excellent blog A Best Case Scenario. I’ve known Tim for quite awhile, and have enjoyed many interesting and challenging discussions.
This last weekend I helped Danny Kaplan and Kathryn Kozak (Coconino Community College) put on a StatPREP workshop. We were also joined by Amelia McNamara (Smith College) and Joe Roith (St. Catherine’s University). The idea behind StatPREP is to work directly with college-level instructors, through online and in community-based workshops, to develop the understanding and skills needed to work and teach with modern data.
Danny Kaplan ponders at #StatPREP
One of the most interesting aspects of these workshops were the tutorials and exercises that the participants worked on.
Citizen Statistician’s very own Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel gave one of the keynote addresses at USCOTS 2017.
The abstract for her talk, Teaching Data Science and Statistical Computation to Undergraduates, is given below.
What draws students to statistics? For some, the answer is mathematics, and for those a course in probability theory might be an attractive entry point. For others, their first exposure to statistics might be an applied introductory statistics course that focuses on methodology.
Part of the reason why we have been somewhat silent at Citizen Statistician is that it’s DataFest season, and that means a few weeks (months?) of all consuming organization followed by a weekend of super fun data immersion and exhaustion… Each year that I organize DataFest I tell myself “next year, I’ll do [blah] to make my life easier”. This year I finally did it! Read about how I’ve been streamlining the process of registrations, registration confirmations, and dissemination of information prior to the event on my post titled “Organizing DataFest the tidy way” on the R Views blog.
After reading this review of a Theaster Gates show at Regan Projects, in L.A., I hurried to see the show before it closed. Inspired by sociologist and civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois, Gates created artistic interpretations of statistical graphics that Du Bois had produced for an exhibition in Paris in 1900. Coincidentally, I had just heard about these graphics the previous week at the Data Science Education Technology conference while evesdropping on a conversation Andy Zieffler was having with someone else.
