Discussion Feedback

The goal here is to give you an idea of what our expectations for discussion answers are, but also to give you a sense of the range of “right” answers.

In terms of evaluation: Canvas gives you the point if you turn anything in - we didn’t take it away for this one.

Generic comments (applies to End of Week Surveys, Online Discussions, and Seek and Finds)

We also looked at things more carefully. We keep score separately (we haven’t decided how to return the individual feedback to you, yet). Expect a number and (possibly) a brief comment.

The “scale” will be:

• 0 = meets our high expectations of CS grad students (roughly an AB) - or, hasn’t been determined otherwise (*)
• +1 = exceeds our high expectations
• +2 = really exceptional and notable (we don’t expect to give too many of these)
• -1 = does not meet expectations
• -2 = unacceptable; generally we will leave this as 0 and take away the “credit” for doing the assignment

Because this is subjective, and because we don’t have the resources to “grade” everything carefully, the “0” score is kindof stochastic: you might get a zero because we missed checking carefully. If you consistently exceed expectations, than these random factors will average out. And that’s what matters for Grading. At the end, we’ll look at the numbers but also look back at what you wrote over the whole semester (this applies to online discussions and seek and finds).

We’ll gather all of this up and use it to dertermine grades.

Comments on Discussion Answers (Generic)

The point of Discussion is to have you critically think about the material that week, share your thoughts, and engage with your peers in meaningful dialogue. As for what we are specifically looking for in terms of evaluation, we wanted to provide you with some high level guidance.

The best discussion posts engage in synthesis, meaning that they bring new insight or information to the subject at hand. This is what we want everyone to shoot for and engaging in this will potentially earn you a +1 or a +2. To be more specific, synthesis could entail you: incorperating some personal experiences or outside information into your post, critically comparing and contrasting multiple sources, and, more generally, providing interesting analysis and novel thoughts related to the material. Additionally, many of these posts inspire follow up discussion or propose interesting and insightful questions for your peers to think about.

Our baseline expectation though is not synthesis, but rather discussion. This involves you demonstrating that you have read and comprehended the materials that week, which can be done in a myriad of ways, but primarily by citing and discussing/applying different concepts/topics from them. This is the category that most discussion posts fall into and, accordingly, they recieve a ‘meets expectations’ or a ‘0’ mark.

Finally, disucssion posts which are little more than commenting on the material are considered to not be sufficient. These posts are either lacking in substance (think posts that are little more than ‘I agree with/liked this reading or that point you made’ without mentioning anything of substance about the concept or explaining why you liked/agree) or contain enough vague or incorrect references to the material that cast doubt on if you actually read/understood them. Posts in this tier will recieve -1 or -2.

Example Discussion Posts

Synthesis

Novel Thoughts: I always thought visualizations were visual representations designed to aid in learning or to convey a message. I never considered the idea that a good visualization should be designed specifically to “help a user carry out a task” (as described in Munzer’s book as well as in class). This is a lot more generic than my definition of a visualization coming into this class and exmaples like that picture of the professor’s suon on a ski mountain really illustrated to me that the definition is not only broad but flexible. This got me thinking, the definition in class specifically says that a visualization must be a “picture”, which I’m not entirely convinced of - where do you draw the line? For example, a dance teacher in real life can demonstrate a dance move, which visualizes the textual description of the movement, or what about incorperating multiple modalities (sound, movement, light), would something like that still be considered a visualization? Regardless of the specifics though, I think these broader definitions of visualizations that have been proposed in class and some of the readings, specifically the “help a user carry out a task” component will help me better apply the principles of visualization to many different areas in my life and work and to be a tad bit more critical when looking at other things through the lens of visualization principles.

Discussion

Baseline: Most of the information fromt eh readings lined up with what I initially thought about visualization: a good visualization effectively conveys information and a poor one either conveys the wrong information, or makes it hard to interpret the correct information. However, one aspect data visualization that hadn’t occured to me until now, and that repeatedly showed up in the lecture and readings was the concept of ’tasks’. I am beginning to understand that when creating a visualiztion I should decide upon a concrete task that I want to accopmlish with the visualization and make conscious design choices that will best guide me to meeting that goal. I can see now that the charts I have considered effective in the past were a result of effective design choices about how to best draw out and display the qualities and stories of that data that they wanted to share. Along those lines, the “Why, What, How” inspired frameworks from the professor and Munzer both helped me better conceptualize what a task is and, although they are fairly general, provided me some concrete frameworks in which I can identify/select my tasks and design my visualizations accordingly, something that I plan to start doing with regards to my work today!

Commenting

Uncertain You Did the Readings: I always thought the point of visualizations was to graph the data, but after the readings I now know it is ‘a picture that helps someone do something’.

Lacking in Substance: I liked Munzer’s definition of what a visualization was the best, it helped me get a better understanding of how to make visualizations compared to what I previously thought about visualizations. I realized that good visualization must intuitively present some relevant aspects of the data.