Blog Posts About: data

New Video: Spreadsheets Explained

Because data is becoming a pervasive part of everyday life, spreadsheets are a key skill for the 21st century. Unfortunately, spreadsheets can feel a bit overwhelming and can be difficult to understand for the novice. This video explains the basics and why spreadsheets are useful in organizing and calculating data.

This video, our 109th title, was suggested by members and is now available in the Common Craft video library.

What it Teaches:

This video uses an example of a snack bar to show how a spreadsheet can help the snack bar owner organize his sales numbers and plan for the future. It teaches:

  • Why spreadsheets are organized into rows, columns, cells, and locations
  • How to tell the difference between data, cell, and location
  • How spreadsheets are used to organize and calculate data
  • How spreadsheets automatically recalculate data when numbers changes
  • How spreadsheets can be used in large organizations with large data sets

Watch the Video

Note: Each Common Craft video comes with a lesson plan that makes teaching easier. Curious? Download the lesson plan for the video above (PDF).

 

Recent Common Craft Videos

We now have 109 explainer videos in our library. Each video is designed to explain a subject so you don't have to. Common Craft videos can help save time in your classroom, course, training session or presentation. Here are the most recent additions:

Ready to use Common Craft in your teaching? Download our video files, embed the videos or display them in your classroom.

Study Data on Videos in Education

The use of videos in education is growing along with the "flipped classroom". A new report by Kaltura helps to put some data behind what many in education are seeing today. Via ReelSEO, here are a few of the highlights of the report:

  • 90% of respondents believe that video improves the learning experience, with even basic video tools having a significant impact.
  • 57% of respondents agree that flipped classrooms will become a standard teaching method in higher education, with 48% saying that their institutions already practice such.
  • 52% of respondents state that video use has been driven from the ‘bottom up’ by faculty.
  • 57% of respondents estimate that more than a quarter of their classes already incorporate video content created by faculty.
  • 49% of respondents estimate that a typical student watches six to twenty education videos per month.
 
It also includes interesting data about the impact of videos across specific goals:
Video and Student Goals
 
As ReelSEO points out:
 
...only 47% of respondents are measuring the ROI in video which may indicate a lack of consensus or understanding on how to measure appropriate metrics.
 
The report was based on 550 respondents in the first quarter of 2014 and includes all sectors of the education industry. You can download the full report here.  

Antidotes for Information Overload

Later this spring I will be speaking at an event for institutional researchers called the AIR Forum ("AIR" is the Association for Institutional Research). In speaking with the organizers, I've learned that the audience is very data-oriented and sometimes find it difficult to make their findings understandable to others. It will be my challenge to help them become better explainers. 

In preparation for the event, I wrote an article that was recently published in their newsletter that focuses on antidotes for information overload. 

Here are a couple of excerpts from the article:

On the diminishing returns of more data:

From the perspective of a researcher, the truth is in the data. By sharing the details of the data and accounting for exceptions and confounders, for example, researchers can present accurate and useful information that stands up to the questions and analyses of their peers.
 
Within the insulated world of research, this can work and can be rewarded. But outside of the research world, a different perspective is required. The audience is typically not in a position to poke holes in your assumptions. They don’t necessarily care about the exceptions. They only want to understand why they should care. Details won’t help this audience.
 
Ask yourself this question when you’re communicating data: Is this information for my peers or for another audience? If it’s another audience, you must switch gears and realize that more details and data come with diminishing returns. Different audiences have different needs.
 

On the imprecise, but effective nature of analogies:

Sigmund Freud famously said, “It is true, analogies decide nothing, but they make one feel more at home.” I love that quote because it recognizes the inherent problem with analogies—they are imprecise. It is rarely possible to find an analogy that stands up to the impeccable standards of many researchers. But are they useful and powerful in relating ideas? I think so.
 
Consider some of the great scientific discoveries, like Einstein’s theory of relativity. In my experience, there are two ways to understand it. The first is to have an education in physics. With the proper training, we can see the theory’s details at work. For physicists, this is likely the most powerful way to understand it. But everyone else requires something different—the details don’t work.
 
Thankfully, Einstein often used an analogy that provided a layperson an imprecise, yet useful way to see the big picture of relativity. The most famous is likely the train analogy, where relativity and simultaneous events are explained using people, lightning, and trains—all real and familiar things. This provides a way for non-physicists to develop a basic, yet imprecise understanding that could lead to more learning.
 
While you may not need to explain relativity, you may find that simple, familiar examples and analogies can be used to help your audience see why data matter and why they should care.  

Read the entire article here.

Do you have ideas for avoiding information overload? Leave comment - we'd love to hear from you...

NOTE: If you're interested in learning in-depth about the skill of explanation and how to make Common Craft Style videos, check out our online courses at the Explainer Academy.

So, How's The Book Doing?

Art of ExplanationAbout 6 months ago, my first book was published: The Art of Explanation. Being my first, I didn’t know what to expect from the process, the reviews, the sales, the marketing. Thankfully I found my way through and now have some information on how it’s been received.

First, let me start by offering a HUGE thanks to all the people who have purchased the book. You rock. I wish I could thank you more personally. I hope it has helped you think differently about how you communicate.
 
So how IS the book doing?
 
A few factors helped me get some sense of how the book has been received since it was published:
 
First is Amazon’s Best Seller’s Rank. This rank changes hourly and ranks all books on Amazon based on sales. The Art of Explanation has consistently ranked in the top 5000 books and has reached into the top 1000 a couple of times that I’ve seen. It is often in the top 20 of all business communication books.  
 
Second are reviews on Amazon.  Some will tell you that reviews don’t matter, but for me, they really do. They are a very public representation of the experience. To date, the book has been reviewed 48 times on Amazon.com and has an average score of 4.6 out of 5 stars. 
 
Here’s an example of a 5 star review:
 
As a professional presenter and demonstrator I figured I knew it all. This book schooled me and changed my perspective of every client interaction. Now I am more effective at getting my message across.
 
Teachers, Sales Leaders and Sales Engineers - read this.
 
And of course, they aren’t all positive. Here’s a 1 star review:
 
I found this book infuriatingly wordy.
 
Part 1: Plan has four chapters, the first three all seem to be an attempt to explain what explanation is, and ironically the book lost my interest right here. The fourth chapter - Planning Your Explanations talks about 'explanation problems' and introduces the 'explanation scale' and tells a long and involved story about 'Andre' who "... graduated from Stanford University a few years ago with a degree in computer science and is now focused on the company he started that he hopes will change the world." but it does little to help me think through how to plan an explanation of my product. There are useful questions buried within the text but they take up half a Kindle page of a 18 Kindle page chapter. [...]
 
On the whole, I think the negative reviews have merit and are helpful. Sure, they sting a little, but as I’ve said multiple times recently - you can’t publish a book without being judged.  
 
I’m also happy that the book is being translated into a number of languages. They are: Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Russian and Hungarian, so far. I understand it will be a while before they’re available, but I’m excited about their releases all the same.
 
I also recently learned that the book is on it’s third printing. Book industry people tell me that this is an important milestone.  
 
So to answer the question - I think the book is doing better than expected.  Of course, in book terms it’s still very early and it may take a year or more to have a true feel for how it’s doing.
 
Again, a big thanks to each of you who have read it, and for those who would like to learn more, here are some purchase options.

QR Codes in Books - Do They Work?

QR codes often get a bad rap these days. The ugly little boxes appear everywhere and to many, they seem to be a waste of time and space.  But the reality of QR codes is like any tool - the value is determined by how it’s used. When used effectively, QR codes bridge online and offline worlds by making it easier to use a mobile phone to visit a webpage, for example. 

QR Codes in Books - Why?

My book The Art of Explanation recently hit the shelves. It is based on our work at Common Craft and throughout it I reference specific Common Craft videos as examples. The question became: how do we make it easy to watch the video instead of just reading about it in the paperback version?  Our answer: QR Codes.  By including QR codes along with references to videos, we could give readers an option to point their mobile phone at a printed page and watch a video on the Common Craft website within seconds.
 
 

Priority on Mobile 

A couple of things made this work. First, the Common Craft website has a “responsive” design. This means that it automatically reacts to different screen sizes and makes for a more usable experience on a mobile phone.  Second, our videos are designed to play reliably on mobile devices. Getting this right was key - the mobile experience had to work well.
 

Did it work?

Yes, readers are using the QR codes. Over the last three months (Oct. 6th - Jan 6th) we’ve seen over 600 unique visitors, 1200 total visits and 1900 pageviews via QR codes. I don’t know what we should expect, but I’m happy with the results so far (more data below).

How Do We Know?

A problem with QR codes is that they make it difficult to collect data.  When someone visits our website from a phone, Google Analytics can track that a phone was used - but it doesn’t know what actions the user took to make that happen. We don’t know if they typed a URL or scanned a code. QR code use is hidden.
 
Thankfully there is a workaround that involves creating trackable URLs, which I detailed in this post.  The idea is to assign the QR code a URL that gives Google Analytics data it can can use. Here’s an example with the "source" indicator highlighted:
 
 
Because I used these URLs, I can simply filter Google Analytics by the “book” source and see data on visitors from QR codes. Here’s a summary of what we know, again Oct 6 - Jan 6th:

Traffic:

Total Pageviews: 1,900+
Total Visits: 1,200+
Total Unique Visitors: 600+

Top 5 Devices in visits (iPhone wins by a mile): 

iPhone: 800 visits
iPad:  68 visits
(not set): 35 visits
Samsung Galaxy Note:  28 visits
Motorola Droid:  20 visits

Visit Duration by Devices (iPhone users stick around):

iPhone: 09:54:06
iPad: 03:23:13
(not set): 00:27:45
Samsung Galaxy Note: 00:48:18
Motorola Droid:  00:23:44

Top 5 Videos in page views (Generally follows order in the book):

QR Codes 426
Plagiarism 174
Twitter 133
Dropbox 100
Stock Markets 72
 
Unfortunately my data are limited to visits and not actual video views  - I don’t know who came from the book and clicked “play”.  However, I do think it’s valuable to know that people are indeed using the QR codes and visiting the Common Craft website.  In the end, that’s what we wanted - to create a useful experience for the reader and give them a reason to visit our site.
 
A Final Note: We also have an “enhanced” ebook that has the videos embedded directly in the book. Both the enhanced ebook and QR codes are fairly new to publishers and there are some wrinkles. For instance - how do you account for a normal (e-ink) Kindle book that's not able to play videos? It seems strange to have QR codes in an e-reader, but the fact is that many of the e-readers can't handle multimedia - yet. I proposed making the QR codes clickable image files so the option was there to click-through, but it didn't work out.  While QR codes are great for now, what has me really excited is the future of enhanced ebooks - more on that later.

New Video - Big Data Explained by Common Craft

Today we’re announcing a new video explanation: Big Data - Explained by Common Craft

Big Data - Common Craft
 
What it Teaches:
Incredible amounts of data are produced every day, so much that we can’t use it all.  Big data is a term used to describe the tools and processes that seek to make this data useful and productive.  This video uses the example of traffic data to teach:
  • Where big data comes from and how it’s collected
  • Why special tools are required to use it
  • The three big challenges: Volume, Variability and Velocity
  • The potential of big data across multiple industries
 
New Website Design:
 
We recently updated the design of the Common Craft website to make it easier to navigate and find videos. Some changes are still underway (pardon our dust) and this is just the beginning.  Soon we’ll be announcing new features, tools and membership plans.  More on that with the next newsletter.
 
Book Update:
 
Just recently I asked my editor make a small change to something in the book and she replied saying that the book had been sent to the printer and no changes were possible. I guess that means it’s done!  Phew.  
 
The full Art of Explanation website is now up and includes the book’s introduction, table of contents, etc.  We made a book trailer in Common Craft style, of course. Did I mention that it is now available for pre-order? 

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