Some 700 delegates have braved the rain to gather at the University of Leeds for this year’s ALT conference, ALT-C.

First up, and high on my list of people I’ve wanted to see speak, is Hans Rosling, Professor at the Karolinska Insitutet in Stockholm and the brains behind gapminder.org (see him in action at TED a few years ago).

Prof. Rosling begins by demonstrating (as Jon Drori did in another TED talk I was watching yesterday) that students come with preconceived ideas, and an established view of the world that influences their perceptions. As an example, both students and their professors apply their preconceived notions to questions about child mortality, literacy etc… often (wrongly) assuming the poorer countries to perform least well. These preconceptions lead those thinking about the question to perform badly; often worse than a random selection of responses (as Rosling put it, chimps (who would choose randomly) are smarter than Swedish students).

The messages and examples here are similar to the ones he’s showed during his various appearances at TED, so you can get into some of the detail via those videos.

By clambering up a step ladder (yes, really) with a big stick and engaging directly with gapminder data projecting on the wall, Rosling makes the point that we need to engage with data… rather than simply display it.

I couldn’t agree more. And I’ve never (well, since I watched him do the TED presentation) seen an audience laugh so much during a presentation on demographics… By visualising the data, and engaging enthusiastically with it, those dry numbers come to life. Imagine the same, in a classroom…

“Students in Sweden have a world view shaped by the way the world was in the year that their teacher was born.”

Indeed. I wonder what the Swedish equivalent is of all those school atlases here, in which the world is (erroneously) still coloured red/pink ?

He’s also stressing the importance of making the data work, using animation and similar effects to allow the data to ’speak.’ These animations can, of course, be used to stress the interpretation of the data that a presenter wishes to convey… but his point remains valid.

The presentation is full of compelling statistics, such as (for example) removing the US farm subsidy for just ten days to double the global health aid budget. As Rosling says, “it’s a joke.” Indeed.

Moving on,

“the world is generating a lot of data… and we need to bring it back to the world”.

Showing a musical score [that few in the audience can recognise as Chopin], Rosling comments that;

“data is like [musical] notes. Very few can understand the numbers. We need instruments to make beautiful music.”

The TED talks I’ve mentioned shows some of what can be done. Videos and tools on the gapminder website show more… and allow anyone to try it for themselves.

He suggests that the videos on the site are most compelling, despite the availability of powerful and usable tools;

“The number of people who lean forward and click is one ten thousand times less than the people who lean back and watch.”

Did I mention the rain?