Twenty-first century Junior Woodchuck Guidebook

I grew up reading Donald Duck comics. I love the Junior Woodchucks, and their Junior Woodchuck Guidebook. The Guidebook is a small paperback book, containing information on every conceivable subject, including geography, mythology, history, literature and the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.  In our family, when we want to know something or check some piece of information, we talk about consulting the Junior Woodchuck Guidebook. (Imagine my joy when I discovered that a woodchuck is another name for a groundhog, the star of my favourite movie!) What we are referring to is the internet, the source of all possible information! Thanks to search engines, there is very little we cannot find out on the internet. And very big thanks to Wikipedia, to which I make an annual financial contribution, as should all who use it and can afford to.
You can learn just about anything on the internet. Problem is, how do you know what is good? And how do you help students find good stuff? And how do you use the internet wisely? And how can it help us as learners and teachers of statistics and operations research? These questions will take more than my usual 1000 words, so I will break it up a bit. This post is about the ways the internet can help in teaching and learning. In a later post I will talk about evaluating resources, and in particular multimedia resources.

Context

Both the disciplines in which I am interested, statistics and operations research, apply mathematical and analytic methods to real-world problems. In statistics we are generally trying to find things out, and in operations research we are trying to make them better. Either way, the context is important. The internet enables students to find background knowledge regarding the context of the data or problem they are dealing with. It also enables instructors to write assessments and exercises that have a degree of veracity to them even if the actual raw data proves elusive. How I wish people would publish standard deviations as well as means when reporting results!

Data

Which brings us to the second use for on-line resources. Real problems with real data are much more meaningful for students, and totally possible now that we don’t need to calculate anything by hand. Sadly, it is more difficult than first appears to find good quality raw data to analyse, but there is some available. You can see some sources in a previous post and the helpful comments.

Explanations

If you are struggling to understand a concept, or to know how to teach or explain it, do a web search. I have found some great explanations, and diagrams especially, that have helped me. Or I have discovered a dearth of good diagrams, which has prompted me to make my own.

Video

Videos can help with background knowledge, with explanations, and with inspiring students with the worth of the discipline. The problem with videos is that it takes a long time to find good ones and weed out the others. One suggestion is to enlist the help of your students. They can each watch two or three videos and decide which are the most helpful. The teacher then watches the most popular ones to check for pedagogical value. It is great when you find a site that you can trust, but even then you can’t guarantee the approach will be compatible with your own.

Social support

I particularly love Twitter, from which I get connection with other teachers and learners, and ideas and links to blogs. I belong to a Facebook group for teachers of statistics in New Zealand, and another Facebook group called “I love Operations Research”. These wax and wane in activity, and can be very helpful at times. Students and teachers can gain a lot from social networking.

Software

There is good open-source software available, and 30-day trial versions for other software. Many schools in New Zealand use the R-based iNZight collection of programmes, which provide purpose-built means for timeseries analysis, bootstrapping and line fitting.

Answers to questions

The other day I lost the volume control off my toolbar. (Windows Vista, I’m embarrassed to admit). So I put in the search box “Lost my volume control” and was directed to a YouTube video that took me step-by-step through the convoluted process of reinstating my volume control! I was so grateful I made a donation. Just about any computer related question can be answered through a search.

Interactive demonstrations

I love these. There are two sites I have found great:
The National Library of Virtual Manipulatives, based in Utah.
NRich – It has some great ideas in the senior statistics area. From the UK.
A problem with some of these is the use of Flash, which does not play on all devices. And again – how do we decide if they are any good or not?

On-line textbooks

Why would you buy a textbook when you can get one on-line. I routinely directed my second-year statistical methods for business students to “Concepts and Applications of Inferential Statistics”. I’ve found it just the right level. Another source is Stattrek. I particularly like their short explanations of the different probability distributions.

Practice quizzes

There aren’t too many practice quizzes  around for free. Obviously, as a provider of statistical learning materials, I believe quizzes and exercises have merit for practice with immediate and focussed feedback. However, it can be very time-consuming to evaluate practice quizzes, and some just aren’t very good. On the other hand, some may argue that any time students spend learning is better than none.

Live help

There are some places that provide live, or slightly delayed help for students. I got hooked into a very fun site where you earned points by helping students. Sadly I can’t find it now, but as I was looking I found vast numbers of on-line help sites, often associated with public libraries. And there are commercial sites that provide some free help as an intro to their services. In New Zealand there is the StudyIt service, which helps students preparing for assessments in the senior high school years. At StatsLC we provide on-line help as part of our resources, and will be looking to develop this further. From time to time I get questions as a result of my YouTube videos, and enjoy answering them ,unless I am obviously doing someone’s homework! I also discovered “ShowMe” which looks like a great little iPad app, that I can use to help people more.
This has just been a quick guide to how useful the internet can be in teaching and learning. Next week I will address issues of quality and equity.