Conferences

The students and teachers of today are living in an era of possibilities. Never before have the amount of data been richer, never before have the barriers for access to empirical data been lower and never before have the tools for processing data been more powerful.

But it is still difficult to be a student or a teacher. The student will always face the problem of how to utilise a dataset in a way that makes sense, and the teacher is obliged to lead the students on the path from ignorance to competence. These tasks can’t be solved by any external development: The students have to internalise facts and knowledge, and the teachers need to reflect upon how and where they would like to lead their students.

However, the recent technological development has made life easier for students and teachers. Several services on the Internet have been established to facilitate analysis of real world data. Some services offer just data, others have added texts and exercises and some have also included tools for data analysis. Compared to the old days, it ought to be possible to save a lot of time and effort in the process of data handling and analysis.

In this presentation, I would like to focus upon one of the services available on the Internet: European Social Survey Education Net, or ESS EduNet, http://essedunet.nsd.uib.no/.

ESS EduNet is a training resource mainly developed for use in higher education. The resource aims to be a social science laboratory where theoretical questions can be explored using high quality empirical data. The pedagogical idea is to create an interactive learning environment that combines the elements of social science to an integrated whole: theory, data and methodology.

Through this presentation, my objective is to give you some ideas regarding what kind of web site ESS EduNet is, about its contents and functionality, how it is designed it to make it appealing to the users, and finally about how it is to work with this site.