Dragster activity “word cloud”
In my recent demonstration of Dragster 3 at ALT-C 2009 I encountered an unforeseen issue which has led me to develop a new activity results viewing facility. I’ve called this a “word cloud” (the best I can come up with for now… suggestions welcome!) as it closely resembles a tag cloud, only the words displayed aren’t tags in the normal sense.
The issue
The third activity demonstrated at ALT-C 2009 involved a brainstorm where participants individually identified applications of blogs in teaching and positioned these on a matrix (akin to a virtual post-it note adding activity). The Webducate results recording system then allowed me to show the combined results of this activity back to the audience.
I must admit that I hadn’t anticipated how effective this activity was going to be in generating and collating ideas from the audience. With 24 activity responses, consisting of four applications each, the resulting collation shows approximately 96 applications. When viewing this number of labels (virtual post-its) simultaneously it is difficult to quickly identify any emerging themes or focus on any particularly interesting items (see the screenshot above).
The word cloud
So following several days of reflection on this issue, I came up with the idea of a “word cloud”. This facility displays the most commonly used words in the collated entries, in the manner of a tag cloud. This clearly identifies the emerging themes and makes each word into a link to a view of the recorded results that include just those labels that contain the selected word. (View an example word cloud)
An activity word cloud is now available for all brainstorming style Dragster 3 activities and how this works can be seen in the example shown below (this is the word cloud generated by the ALT-C 2009 demo activity)
This word cloud highlights the concepts of feedback, reflection, students, sharing, knowledge and collaboration from the 96 responses recorded during the demonstration. Clicking on the reflection link displays the screen shown below.
Here I have spread out the over-lapping reflection labels. This word related view allows the statements incorporating this term and their positions to be quickly viewed. In this case it shows reflection being most commonly associated with the activity of student writing blogs, but with one contribution considering reflection as an appropriate use for staff in reading the blogs of peers.
As with all Webducate results pages, these various views are available to the activity author and can be shared with participants via the share URL. In a classroom response setting, these views can be displayed back to the audience to facilitate related discussion and analysis.
And finally…
This facility is very much a work in progress and I welcome feedback. Please let me know what you think!
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