Wordle, Take 2

I discovered Wordle at Educause last fall, where it was demonstrated in a session that covered a smattering of helpful websites all at one time. I was immediately fascinated by it, and after playing with it on my own for a while, decided to throw it in my English 101 courses as a self-evaluation tool.

Wordle generates "word clouds" based on text you feed it, and the words appear larger the more frequently they show up in the text. (By default, it ignores "common" words--otherwise it would just be a giant "AND" and "THE" and that's about all.) In English 101, I ask students to run their final drafts of Essay 1 through it. The essays are Evaluation essays, where they study one of a list of a websites I give them and analyze how well that given site meets the needs of its intended audience.


Here's one I found particularly charming from my summer section:

http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/2215844/Evaluation_Essay

I ask students to share their word clouds with one another in a discussion, and then offer commentary on what they see. In a discussion post, Saylor shared her thoughts on the image she created:


"I really like my word cloud. It looks like a brain to me. The funniest part of that is that it looks like my brain felt while writing this essay. It is very colorful and clustered. The words seem almost disconnected from each other. Yet they all come together to make up a description of this one, very diverse website. I love that news is the largest word and that the smallest words are all adjectives that were used to describe the site. I think it is a very fair depiction of my writing style."


I just love the thought of this being an x-ray scan, so to speak, of the writing brain!


This activity tends to get a lot of positive response from my students, regardless of whether they're happy with what the word cloud shows them. It's a fun break for all of us, because who doesn't welcome an online version of coloring after just completely stressing over drafting (and in my case, grading)?


I've since learned of a website that actually does build clouds in specific shapes...Tagxedo. That might be overly deterministic for my purposes in English 101, so I'll stick with Wordle there. I'm ready to play with the shapes for my own blog and website, though--you are warned.


And, just for giggles, here's a Wordle reflecting all of the posted content of my blog thus far. I'm pleased to see that "students" gets primary billing, since that's what this whole venture is all about.

http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/2276121/TLP_v._2