All professors need to need to adopt. It’s a key tenet in my teaching philosophy. It’s incumbent upon us to keep up with important developments our classes.

Case in point: With its latest release, Tableau now includes the ability to include animations in its visualizations.

Here’s a simple bump chart that I created a while back. I inserted a quick animation. Now, by clicking on the filters on the right, you can see the animations in action on Tableau Public. Here’s a screenshot of one of them:

Lest I overwhelm students with all of this sophisticated Tableau functionality from day one,¹ I recorded a quick video this morning for students in my forthcoming dataviz class:

Simon Says: A new software feature is an opportunity to tweak assignments. 

To be sure, adding this exciting new Tableau feature isn’t imperative. At the same time, though, why not tweak last semester’s assignments for the better? No, students in the course won’t learn all things Tableau in CIS310, never mind become Zen Masters. Still, why not let them leave the course with one more arrow in their quivers?

Apropos of nothing, it’s important to animate …