Borrowing and Sharing

In the Spring 2020 semester, I'm teaching a special topics course here at Whitman College called Data Analysis and Visualization. The course will be somewhat different from a traditional class in our department. My hope is to have students grappling with real datasets while we learn the content of the course. Students will almost always be working in groups. In addition to my in-class presentation, students will be enrolled in a free class courtesy of DataCamp and will complete relevant modules from the DataCamp curriculum. They will also be free to search the web (and encouraged) to find examples and other tutorials to help them along their way.

To emphasize that the web is a two-way street, I'm having students keep activity logs on publicly accessible platforms (like Blogger). Not only are the logs a way of helping students to organize the new information, ideas and skills they are acquiring from the class, the logs are also a way of giving back to the web examples, ideas and roadmaps that might help other learners.

To model this activity, I have started this blog. Here I will log and share my own activities as I prepare and develop the course.

I've been prepping this course for a while now and only decided to log my activities today. Many decisions about the course are already set.

• A required text is Python for Data Analysis by Wes McKinney. It's relatively inexpensive and is situated in Python which is a prerequisite for the course. I'll track the content of this book for a few weeks in class.
• A second required text is Python Data Visualization Cookbook by Igor Milovanović, Dimitry Foures, and Giuseppe Vettigli. This text is also relatively inexpensive and will largely be used as a reference for students as they engage in various data visualization activities.

As I mentioned, I will supplement my instruction with modules from DataCamp. The DataCamp For The Classroom program provides teachers and their students free access to all of the DataCamp modules and allows instructors to organize students into classrooms and to assign modules to students. I have recently applied for and been approved for a DataCamp class for my students called Data Analytics and Visualization.Today I spent some time choosing DataCamp modules to assign to my students. Over the past year, I completed a number of DataCamp classes and took notes on the content of each class. That work helped me to become familiar with the teaching style of DataCamp classes and to have a better idea of which courses to assign to my students.