Fun on Friday #26: Twittersheep

Know who your friends are...

Twittersheep produces a word cloud based on the bios of the people following you (or anyone else for that matter) on Twitter. For example, here's mine:

Not surprisingly, teacher features strongly as does education and learning. Compare with Stephen Fry's flock (or at least the part that I could fit on one screen):

Interesting how strongly geeks and students feature! According to the Guardian's April Fool:

Currently, 17.8% of all Twitter traffic in the United Kingdom consists of status updates from Stephen Fry, whose reliably jolly tone, whether trapped in a lift or eating a scrumptious tart, has won him thousands of fans. A further 11% is made up of his 363,000 followers replying "@stephenfry LOL!", "@stephenfry EXACTLY the same thing happened to me", and "@stephenfry Meanwhile, I am making myself an omelette! Delicious!"

Perhaps not my most useful post but I think it counts as Fun on Friday. |:-)

CAL 2009: Using tag clouds

Captured live at #cal09, posted late.

Getting our heads out of the clouds: Using tag clouds to reflect on the emphasis of materials presented in powerpoint slides Damian T. Gordon*, Deirdre M. Lawless Dublin Institute of Technology, Ireland

Started with a description/definition of a tag clouds and produced a tag cloud of the CAL website. Learning was the dominant word. Moved onto talk about knowledge management. Three aspects identified:

1. Process
2. Technology
3. People

Most of the effort has to go into the People part. Researcher suggested that most students only read lecture notes the night before the exam, so we have to make sure our notes are good! Tag clouds may be a tool to help focus lecturers minds. Showed tag clouds of a set of his notes/powerpoint slides on research methods. Showed for example how "Research" featured strongly in first three lectures but hardly at all in his lecture on statistics. This shows some of the (perhaps unintended) messages given in the lecture. Also showed how you can see the major word, say "research", and then take it out of the cloud to see what other words come to the fore.

Went on to show a comparison of tag cloud for lecture notes with tag cloud of learning outcomes. Or compare with assessment. For a more student centred approach, a student could compare a tag cloud of an assignment with a tag cloud of their submission. Could help them reflect on their response and perhaps help them with a redraft.

Tag clouds could be used as an introduction to a topic or as a revision of a previous topic. Tag clouds give semantic and syntactic view but present it in a visually stimulating way. Presenting the information in multiple ways can help the learner.

Two useful tools are Convert Powerpoint {can't find this... maybe I wrote it down wrong. - DM} and Wordle.