Home » Workshop report…Datasets on the web: a resource for teaching Statistics? Jointly organised by the Maths, Stats & OR Network and the Department of Statistics, The University of Glasgow, 25th March, 2010
Workshop report…Datasets on the web: a resource for teaching Statistics? Jointly organised by the Maths, Stats & OR Network and the Department of Statistics, The University of Glasgow, 25th March, 2010
Statistics is taught in many academic disciplines. It can be taught in a theoretical way (as with courses in mathematical statistics) and it can be taught in an applied way (as happens in most other courses). Quite what is meant by applied varies from course to course, not only in the area of applications (psychological examples may not be as attractive to geography students as they are to psychology students), but also in what is meant by applied. When the author of this report first learnt statistics, examples often amounted to little more than calculations with a few numbers. Sometimes the numbers were even embellished with fictional background (“Factory A produces...”). Real examples became more common over the years, though they were often overused - the iris dataset being a prime example. Thanks to the internet, there are now many more opportunities for finding interesting, up-to-date, understandable examples with real data. The purpose of the workshop was to discuss this new resource in terms of some basic questions:
1. Is it a good idea to use real datasets in statistics teaching?
2. What are the advantages and disadvantages?
3. What web resources are there?
Additionally, we were interested in how applications involving statistics are discussed on the web. There are plenty of examples of discussions of data, which would benefit from a statistical contribution. Should statisticians get more involved? Or should we just be pleased that discussions of data are taking place at all and hope that this open-ended discussion will lead to general, if slow, progress?
Statistics is taught in many academic disciplines. It can be taught in a theoretical way (as with courses in mathematical statistics) and it can be taught in an applied way (as happens in most other courses). Quite what is meant by applied varies from course to course, not only in the area of applications (psychological examples may not be as attractive to geography students as they are to psychology students), but also in what is meant by applied. When the author of this report first learnt statistics, examples often amounted to little more than calculations with a few numbers. Sometimes the numbers were even embellished with fictional background (“Factory A produces...”). Real examples became more common over the years, though they were often overused - the iris dataset being a prime example. Thanks to the internet, there are now many more opportunities for finding interesting, up-to-date, understandable examples with real data. The purpose of the workshop was to discuss this new resource in terms of some basic questions:
Is it a good idea to use real datasets in statistics teaching?
What are the advantages and disadvantages?
What web resources are there?
Additionally, we were interested in how applications involving statistics are discussed on the web. There are plenty of examples of discussions of data, which would benefit from a statistical contribution. Should statisticians get more involved? Or should we just be pleased that discussions of data are taking place at all and hope that this open-ended discussion will lead to general, if slow, progress?
datasets, teaching, learning, data sources, stats, statistics, University of Glasgow, workshop, event, 2010, 25 Mar 2010, government, public body, commercial, academic, data visualisation, blogs, excellent teaching, MSOR Connections Dec 2010 Vol 10 No 3
