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Vis, The Next Generation: Teaching Across the Researcher-Practitioner Gap
Marti A. Hearst (organizer), Eytan Adar (organizer), Robert Kosara, Tamara Munzner, Jon Schwabish, Ben Shneiderman

Information visualization has escaped the research lab and is now widely used by practitioners across a wide spectrum of fields. New software tools and programming frameworks appear on a monthly basis. New design paradigms are rapidly gaining acceptance and evolving. At the same time, methods for teaching in the classroom and beyond are being challenged and influenced by online offerings such as Khan Academy and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), the adoption of flipped classrooms, and the adaptation of instructional environments used in other communities. Pedagogy geared towards mastery learning that makes use of active learning and peer learning are being introduced in more and more contexts, reflecting the results of decades of research showing the benefits of these techniques, as well as their suitability for today's connected students who expect a more interactive learning experience. As the role of information visualization grows and changes in the world of practice, new methods are needed to teach this dynamic topic. This panel brings together experts with different perspectives to talk about how they are rising to the challenge to teach information visualization in this new world. They are asked to take into account specifically:

  • Practice vs research (infoviz is now huge in the "real world")
  • Distracted students, need active learning
  • Many software tools and frameworks that instructors should build on
and address the question of how we incorporate and balance these issues into modern infoviz courses? This panel asks instructors who teach across the spectrum from purely research-oriented courses to more applied courses, and with a wide range of styles, how they meet these challenges. Two panelists teach in Computer Science departments, two teach in interdisciplinary Schools of Information, and one is a senior research associate in a non-profit policy center. The moderator is a former academic and practitioner thought-leader who now leads innovation at a leading software developer of visualization tools.


PDF of our longer abstract/statements: PDF, Panel at IEEE VisWeek'15,

My slides: in PPT or PDF; Marti Hearst's slides (PDF); Tamara Munzner's slides (PDF)

The (incredibly awesome) first bit of my presentation is due entirely to Andy Kirk's post