Do you speak my language: a summary using a word cloud

Over the last few weeks I have written an A-Z of computing terms that I think have some relevance to online learning. My primary aim was to try and demystify the jargon surrounding the use of computers, and to try and show how some simple computing ideas can be put in to practice to improve the experience of students, and help ease the workload on educators.

I have just spent the last few minutes looking over the posts, and being the scientist I am I had to do some analysis!

So...

There were 26 posts (no surprise there, as it was an A-Z).
I used over 17,400 words.
There were 76 'internal' links between the posts (i.e. where one post contained a link to another).
There were 26 images of proteins (and there is a connection between the proteins used...)

Anyway, using a fun and free tool over at http://www.wordle.net/ it is possible to produce a word cloud, from the "Do you speak my language" posts, that shows the frequency with which I used certain words (admittedly I did edit the text I used to exclude weblinks as this tended to skew the results). Well, when I did the analysis I got the following:

Does it tell me anything? Not really, but it does look pretty! I am pleased to see some of the key terms popping through and making it in to the image. I am slightly concerned that 'see' is the most frequently used word, but it was good to see teaching, student(s) and eLearning stand out.

Can this sort of analysis be used in teaching? Well, I would argue it can be used to get a 'feel' for feedback from students (although not as an excuse to not read the feedback), and I recently used the 'word cloud' approach for a quick analysis of feedback from over 600 students who answered a survey on the use of VLEs (see Do you speak my language: V is for Volume, Vapourware, Virus, VoIP, VNC, VPN, VLE, Virtual Campus). When I carried out the analysis of the VLE feedback I found the word cloud certainly gave me a favour of the feedback, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that when I read all the feedback that the word cloud did indeed mirror what was being expressed by the students.

So, word clouds.... a handy tool for the quick analysis of text.

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