Dreams and data from all over the world

Earlier I have written about open data or visualizations as I think is a better word for it and last time I wrote about Gapminder. 

This time I wish to tell you about a part of Gapminder that is fairly new and is called  Dollar Street where you can see how people live all over the world. The tool is constructed as a street at the top of the page where you can choose from the poorest to the richest families who participated in their work collecting data from them to show how we live in different parts of the world. To be able to gather this data from all over the world they visited no less than 264 families from 50 countries all over the world and got back with over 30 000 pictures. All th epictures is sorted under a hundred headlines. THere are a number of different ways to search for material and connect different materials to each other. What they want to show on Gapminder is what lif looks like behind the statistics. Everything is sorted in pictures and you can for instance choose to see what a toilet looks like around the world, what tools are the most favorite ones, pets, how we sleep and so on. The purpose of the tool is as much as it shows our differences it even more shows what we have in common. We all have the same needs but our solutions to fulfill them are different. This is an interesting way of looking at things and many thoughts and discussions are surfacing. What is the background? Whay does it differ? Why is it the same? What does our surroundings look like? How do we influence our each other? There is also one final message implemented in the tool: Money is not everything! Learn more about how families all over the wolrd live and most of all about their dreams by clicking the pictures. what can you see? What do we and others dream about? This is a thorough material ready for you to use, to spread and most of all; for your students to use!