Teaching a data-driven journalism course to English majors can be a curse or a blessing, or a little bit a both. The presentation will reflect upon the presenter's experience in teaching "Big Data Storytelling" under a renovated journalism curriculum in a liberal arts college. The presentation will be three-fold. It will first discuss learning goals/outcomes and describe the pedagogical preparation necessary to embark on the journey. Second, the presenter will case-study students' writings throughout the course and picture patterns of learning and growth. Third, a discussion will demonstrate various pedagogical strategies that have contributed to a successful learning trajectory, from rejection to acceptance, from curiosity to excitement, and from hesitation to embracement.
The presenter will share a variety of tools, resources, assignments and assessment instruments used in a comprehensive training package including (but not limited) to the following topics:
- data hunting with training in FIOA
- data scraping
- data cleaning fundamental statistics with Excel
- introductory inferential statistics
- data pivoting and unpivoting
- exploratory data analysis and the art of interview
- relational database and SQL with SQLite
- principles of information visualization with Tableau
- ethics of data-driven storytelling
In the end, the presenter will share tips on what instructors of similar courses can do to stay ahead of the game. The course may also lend instructors the opportunity to grow their scholarly research and teaching in a symbiotic way.
