A Wordle moment

This week, Tony produced a really nice Wordle of the criteria for evaluation an elearning innovation that we've been discussion in our forum - a really nice way of visualising the big themes and issues.

Inspired by Tony, and remembering that I used to enjoy Wordles in this blog back when studying H808, I fed Wordle the current RSS feed for Allies in eLearning...

Wordle for this blog (5 - November)

For a moment's relief from struggling through the mire of reflecting on our group collaboration for TMA02, I've turned to the delightful Wordle.

Here's the image created from November's posts.

Key features of eportfolio systems

Core activity 3.1 involved the comparison by each student of two (or more) eportfolio systems on about six of the features which they considered to be key. By aggregating the features selected by each student we can see which features (in our opinions at least) really are key.

Wordle gives a lovely visual representation of this.

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This post also demonstrates how a multimedia item may be used as an item of evidence of thinking (and technical skills) for an eportfolio (core activity 4.1).

Wordle for this blog (4)

Unit 3 (part 1): ePortfolio systems is now done, and so it's time for the weekly Wordle.



System appears to be the dominant word this week, closely followed by systems, able, activity, eportfolio, evidence and use. Given the unit title, I'm quite happy with these as the key features, and it's interesting that they remain dominant despite one of the core activities being only a link to a Google Doc, rather than a full post in itself.

The terms activity, evidence, able and use seem likely to be a result of my reflection on the collation of artefacts and creation of evidence within the framework provided for the course - and remind me that I must post to the tutor group about my uncertainties (a bit nervous about that one).

None of these terms seem particularly aligned with the tag cloud of labels for my posts. I may need to keep an eye on this to ensure that I'm using useful tags, or it may be that the tags I've chosen are suitable summary words for the type of content that is showing up in the Wordle.

One more thing I'm curious about, and that's exactly what Wordle looks at when it creates its cloud. I provide the URL for the RSS feed of the blog, but I wonder how far back in the blog's history it goes... all the way I'm assuming, since that's what you get on the feed URL page. I wonder if there's any difference if I only feed it with the blog URL - does it then just do a screen-scrape of the text, or does it find the associated RSS feed?

Wordle for this blog (3)

This week's Unit 2 (part 2) title was Reflection and Learning. Here's this week's Wordle, which shows that, happily, I seem to blogging on the same themes! Eportfolios are still fairly dominant in the image... I'd be interested to know how far into the history of a blog's RSS feed Wordle goes when it creates the image.

Wordle for this blog (2)

Just about to go away for a long weekend - a lovely bright early autumnal forecast, and I look forward to lots of camping, walking, climbing and kayaking... but I'll actually miss the course working and thinking!

Before I go, here's the Wordle which has developed. It's clear that there's been a rather increased focus on ePortfolios! To be expected given the course I suppose - but I've surprised myself in how often I keep wanting to post here!

Wordle for this blog (1)

An H808 course colleague (Sirin) recently posted a fantastic list of favourite web 2.0 toys and tools for learning. One of them, Wordle, really caught my imagination. For those who don't know, "Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends" [wordle.net]

I thought I would post a Wordle of this blog, and update it every now and then as the blog develops. So here's what this blog 'looks like' at the moment.



Images of Wordles are licensed .