Information Is Beautiful

Miscellaneous facts and ideas are interconnected and represented in a visual format, a "visual miscellaneum," which represents "a series of experiments in making information approachable and beautiful" -- from p.007

A fascinating and thoroughly modern glimpse of world knowledge. It offers a deeper, more ranging look at the world and its history, and an entirely democratic, global look at key issues bedded into the foundations of world knowledge - from questions and facts on history and politics to science, literature and more.

A visual guide to the way the world really works Every day, every hour, every minute we are bombarded by information - from television, from newspapers, from the internet, we're steeped in it, maybe even lost in it. We need a new way to relate to it, to discover the beauty and the fun of information for information's sake. No dry facts, theories or statistics. Instead, Information is Beautiful contains visually stunning displays of information that blend the facts with their connections, their context and their relationships - making information meaningful, entertaining and beautiful. This is information like you have never seen it before - keeping text to a minimum and using unique visuals that offer a blueprint of modern life - a map of beautiful colour illustrations that are tactile to hold and easy to flick through but intriguing and engaging enough to study for hours.

The amount and range of information available to today’s students—and indeed to all learners—is unprecedented. Phrases like “the information revolution”, “the information (or knowledge) society”, and “the knowledge economy” underscore the truism that our society has been transformed by virtually instantaneous access to virtually unlimited information. Thomas Friedman tells us that “The World Is Flat” and that we must devise new political and economic understandings based on the ceaseless communication of information from all corners of the world. The Bush administration tells us that information relating to the “war on terrorism” is so critical that we must allow new kinds of surveillance to keep society safe. Teenage subscribers to social-computing networks not only access information but enter text and video images and publish them widely—becoming the first adolescents in history to be creators as well as consumers of vast quantities of information. If the characteristics of “the information age” demand new conceptions of commerce, national security, and publishing—among other things—it is logical to assume that they carry implications for education as well. In fact, a good deal has been written over the last several decades about how education as a whole must transform its structure and curriculum to accommodate the possibilities offered by new technologies. Far less has been written, however, about how the specific affordances of these technologies—and the kinds of information they allow students to access and create—relate to the central purpose of education: learning. What does “learning” mean in an information-rich environment? What are its characteristics? What kinds of tasks should it involve? What concepts, strategies, attitudes, and skills do educators and students need to master if they are to learn effectively and efficiently in such an environment? How can researchers, theorists, and practitioners foster the well-founded and widespread development of such key elements of the learning process? This book explores these questions and suggests some tentative answers. Drawing from research and theory in three distinct but related fields—learning theory, instructional systems design, and information studies—it presents a way to think about learning that responds directly to the actualities of a world brimming with information. The book is grounded in the work of such key figures in learning theory as Bransford and Anderson & Krathwohl. It draws on such theorists of instructional design as Gagne, Mayer, and Merrill. From information studies, it uses ideas from Buckland, Marchionini, and Wilson (who is known for his pioneering work in “information behavior”—that is, the full range of information seeking and use). The book breaks new ground in bringing together ideas that have run in parallel for years but whose relationship has not been fully explored.

This visionary and thoroughly accessible book examines how digital environments and virtual reality have altered the ways historians think and communicate ideas and how the new language of visualization transforms our understanding of the past. Drawing on familiar graphic models--maps, flow charts, museum displays, films--the author shows how images can often convey ideas and information more efficiently and accurately than words. With emerging digital technology, these images will become more sophisticated, manipulable, and multidimensional, and provide historians with new tools and environments to construct historical narratives. Moving beyond the traditional book based on linear narrative, digital scholarship based on visualization and hypertext will offer multiple perspectives, dimensions, and experiences that transform the ways historians work and people imagine and learn about history. This second edition of Computers, Visualization, and History features expanded coverage of such topics as sequential narratives, 3-D modeling, simulation, and video games, as well as our theoretical understanding of space and immersive experience. The author has also added "Guidelines for Visual Composition in History" for history and social studies teachers who wish to use technology for student assignments. Also new to the second edition is a web link feature that users of the digital edition can use to enhance visualization within the text.

Presenting key examples and case studies of how design has responded to the pandemic, Design and Covid-19 offers lessons and approaches to design for future resilience. Design has a key role to play in not only creating products to ensure safety from the pandemic, but also in the creation of complex systems, new technologies and physical environments that enable us to carry out our lives and protect populations in the future. Design and Covid-19 identifies four key phases of the pandemic to examine how designers developed systems, services, communications and products as part of our response to the crisis, whether at an international, national or community level. Contributors report from a range of international contexts, including countries in Europe, Asia, Africa and Australasia, detailing how countries responded to the pandemic, introduced social distancing and lockdowns, developed test, track and trace systems, implemented new laws and how design and designers responded to the urgent new challenges that the pandemic created. They explore the adaptation of designs as communities searched for new ways of connecting and working through restrictions and social distancing measures, establishing local mutual aid groups and using social media to support each other through the pandemic, and go on to focus on recovery and resilience, analysing the deeper, systemic design response as industries emerge from lockdown. They explore the need to reflect on and investigate key issues in order to understand what we can learn personally, socially, economically and globally from this unprecedented crisis. Drawing upon the expertise of scholars from across the globe, Design and Covid-19 explores a wide range of design disciplines to address the complex societal and global issues highlighted throughout the pandemic, and to inform new ways of building human and planetary wellbeing.

Are you overwhelmed at the amount, contradictions, and craziness of all the information coming at you in this age of social media and twenty-four-hour news cycles? Fake News, Propaganda, and Plain Old Lies will show you how to identify deceptive information as well as how to seek out the most trustworthy information in order to inform decision making in your personal, academic, professional, and civic lives. • Learn how to identify the alarm bells that signal untrustworthy information. • Understand how to tell when statistics can be trusted and when they are being used to deceive. • Inoculate yourself against the logical fallacies that can mislead even the brightest among us. Donald A. Barclay, a career librarian who has spent decades teaching university students to become information literate scholars and citizens, takes an objective, non-partisan approach to the complex and nuanced topic of sorting deceptive information from trustworthy information.

The word 'revision' can strike fear into the heart of teachers and students alike! The exam cycle in today's modern education system can feel relentless, resulting in students suffering from information overload and exam fatigue. But it doesn't have to be like this! John Mitchell strongly believes that revision can be a opportunity to deepen students' understanding of a topic in an innovative, collaborative, and fun way - you just need to think outside the box! In this brilliant book, John Mitchell offers a diverse range of activities, games, tips and tricks that teachers can use in the classroom to help guide students through this stressful period. By combing theory with strategies tried and tested in the classroom, it will help teachers to create a culture where students are encouraged to review and reinforce their learning. This consistent approach means that revision becomes an everyday process rather that one that is just used in the run up to exams. From adaptations of well-known games, such as Connect Four and Runaround, to brand new activities, there are ideas that are suitable for very learning style and subject. 100 Ideas for Secondary Teachers: Revision will help you to prepare students for exams effectively, alleviate stress, and reintroduce fun into your revision sessions.