I am planning activities for my "Sex, Money and Pop Culture" LA cluster that I will be co- teaching this spring, my component being statistics.
Today I was exited by the instant gratification offered by Ngram text analyses tool and am thinking of ways to incorporate it into statistics activities.
Here is one thing I came up with that throws Ngram into what I do already as an ice breaking activity.
I give each student a shortlist of "most important things" such as " sex,money,love, knowledge etc
Then I ask each student to put these in order of personal importance.
The data is compiled and summarized on the spot with standard stats tools, such as SPSS to obtain a class profile.
And here is where Ngram may come in. Our list of "important things" gets fed into Ngram, and assuming frequency of usage indicates cultural importance, we can compare our group ( a sample) to whatever population google books corps used by Ngram repesents. ( we can vary populations by choosing parameters such as language)
This can lead to a discussion of population, samples, representation, frequency analyses, statistical variables, descriptive and inferential statistics process, and most importantly for the cluster, how statistical methods are used explicitly and implicitly to gain and process, assimilate and synthesize information/knowledge.
As a follow up, students may creat their own short lists of important things, create surveys to piazza to offer to classmates and broader community, analyse data and use Ngram as a point of comparision.
