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One of the most interesting people I met in Scotland, when I was there four years ago (Scottish Learning Festival), was David Muir. I’ve followed him since, and got caught up in today’s EdCompBlog post about Twittersheep. It’s probably not the first app that does this, but Twittersheep, with your Twitter login, captures the profiles of all of the Tweople who follow you and then generates a tag-cloud representing the most often used words in those profiles sized by frequency.
To the right, you see the tag-cloud representing the dozen or so people who follow me on Twitter. No real surprises here, lots of educator and technology types. I have to say that the “lover” reference bothers me a bit.
Stephen Downes pointed us to a fairly good rundown on text-based visualizations the other day, referring to a 17 March presentation delivered by Philippe Gambette and Jean Veronis, Visualising a text with a tree cloud. You can watch and listen to the presentation at Slideshare.
I can’t help but think that these tools, and what’s to come, might expand reading, that one way of reading the chapter of a text book might be to view and explore its tag cloud. Not that it would replace reading. Your visual representation of the text would simply be another way of looking at its contents, in the same way that a table of contents does.
Or, I could be wrong!
Tags: warlick, tagclouds, visualization
The ‘dozen or so people’ who follow you are somewhere in the region of 4.5K, just by the way. There was a conversation about it on Twitter just this morning. Apparently you have about the highest ratio of followers to followees of the edublogging community. I am flattered to be one of the handful you follow. People were speculating about the choices that are behind the ratio of follower:followee.
I dislike the term Twittersheep, I have to say. I wouldn’t follow anyone I considered a sheep, and would hope that anyone with a sheep-like mentality would quickly tire of the lack of shepherding I offer and wander off elsewhere.
Nevertheless, the cloud is very interesting! The word that jumps out in mine is learning, I’m pleased to say. Behind that comes technology, then teacher, elearning and education.
One of the smaller words that tells me I follow a lot more Americans that I do Brits, is ‘Mom’. If there were more Brits in my flock, it would be ‘Mum’.
Thanks for sharing the Twittersheep link. I think it’s a great way to demonstrate the learning potential of Twitter to my administrator and fellow teachers.
This is something I’m very interested in, a very visual approach to text that can help learners identify the key ideas in a text. I blogged a few weeks ago at webb-ed feet about how we could use Wordle (which has been around for a while now) in current events analysis, and also in using it in spelling/word study, to select good authentic vocabulary without the students losing themselves in low-frequency words.
Lots of possibilities here!
I’m glad you enjoyed Twittersheep. I thought was interesting.
The first time I saw word clouds (such as those produced by Wordle) I thought thy were pretty but didn’t see much educational potential. However, at a conference recently I heard a chap get quite excited about the possibilities:
http://edcompblog.blogspot.com/2009/03/cal-2009-using-tag-clouds.html
I’m keen to suggest the assignment rubric compared with the students’ response idea next time an assessment is issued.
I teach English and Literature and see some potential in Wordle clouds of books too. I tried a chapter of Orwell’s “1984” and was surprised at the results: lots more words about the body than I thought. Have experimented too with putting a text version of the WHOLE novel into Wordle! http://learningau.wordpress.com/2008/06/17/wordle/
It’s possible that a better too for this is TagCrowd [http://tagcrowd.com/]. Wordle is good and I use it a lot. But it’s main value is it’s prettiness. If you really want to analyze the words, something a little more straight forward may be better. Here is the word cloud I got for Pride and Prejudice. I just pasted in the URL of the book from the Gutenberg Project [http://www.gutenberg.org/].
This is a cool idea. The ‘lover’ part, BTW, is probably my fault, as part of my Twitter profile says ‘lover of the pithy and sarcastic tweet’. At least now you know it’s not anything inappropriate. 😉