You could. I just think that if you’re getting informed feedback, it is quickly going to spiral back down to “What are you really trying to do with this unit?” “Why are you teaching statistics?” etc.

This is not to say that the project is impossible, but there has to be a clear point of view, and you have to be able to say to a contributor, “That’s an interesting way to take this, but we’re trying to do something else. Perhaps you’d like to start your own project to explore your ideas. If you need any advice getting started, let us know!”

On the other hand, Dy/Dan could become Bourbaki 2.0.

Dan, you’ve been intimating that this is what you’d like to see more of in the edutechyblogosphere, rather than look at my *insert hip web2.0 thingy here*.

How could we encourage it?

Is bouncing from blog to blog a good enough method (it could be), or do we need a more central place for this to happen?

Dan

Would the main street(s) be better to take or would side streets be better to take?

What if you don’t have the average travel time for five days?

What if it was left out until students asked for it?

What if all you had was a paper map?

What if you had to go one route to work and a different route to home?

What if you had to make errands to and from work?

What about travel time to go to lunch during your hour lunch?

What if . . .

What if not . . .

Because if there is no tolerance for being late, there is no reason to do any of the math. If one route has the potential to take 45 minutes, you would always have to leave 45 minutes and sit out your extra time in the parking lot. So your time spent commuting is always the highest number. Who cares what the mean or range is?

You’ve chosen a known situation, but a fairly risk free one.

You could imagine that the raw numbers could be a measure of how close you came to a perfect landing in a helicopter, for example. If “30” is a perfect landing, with every “5” measures of error meaning some additional injury. In that case, looking at the mean is not just an inconvenience, it could be deadly. In a riskier scenario, the ideas of margin of error and accuracy come in nicely.

And I wouldn’t skip teaching statistical range altogether. Mostly I was just grumping, because the of the holy quadfecta of standardized test statistical terms (mean, median, mode, range) one of them I have never seen in the wild, ever (mode) and another shows up far less often than other things the students could be learning instead (plus or minus error, for example).