Tag Clouds and student assignments
Well I felt I had to do a bit more digging with regards to using tag clouds in education (and general) and I found this post by Pedagogical Gregory (what a name!) Basically he created a tag cloud In order to locate some connections/ patterns in the works of his students. “I randomly selected half of the submissions for an assignment, removed any names, and then pasted them into a giant document. Next, I pasted this into TagCrowd.”
The assignment was a 300 word summary of Kreiser’s “The Enemy Within,” (about the Spanish Flu of 1918). He selected the top 50 words. The resulting cloud can be seen here.
What’s interesting is that he is not analysing the content of one students’ effort but in fact is analysing the aggregated content produced by the class.
Here’s another example which uses a tag cloud to visualise the Homeric epic, (ideally it should have been filtered for ‘footnote’), (view cloud).
I suspect I have only scraped the surface.
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