Wordling conference and chat tweets

When I was browsing through Twitter the weekend before Thanksgiving, I was surprised at how quickly Gardner Campbell summarized key points in presentations at the 2009 Lilly International Conference into a steady stream of meaningful tweets. Relatively new to Wordle, (but not to word frequency analyses, which have fascinated me ever since my students used statistical tests of authorship in determining whether Quintus Curtius Snodgrass was really Mark Twain - he almost certainly was not) I decided to create a word cloud of his tweets based on the hashtag #lilly09. The process involved:

• Copying all the tweets from Gardner's Twitter page during the time period of the conference


• Pasting the results into Word and applying a find-replace to surround #lilly09 with tab characters


• Copying and pasting the Word text into Excel for quick column manipulation, including sorting and removing the conference hashtag and unrelated tweets


• Copying the text-only results into Wordle and creating the final word cloud, which is posted on Gardner's blog post: Extreme Tweeting Yields Wordle: More on Lilly 2009

The algorithm was relatively straightforward but there were too many steps to generate the final results. Hopefully tools such as Wordle and Tweet Cloud will evolve by providing options to generate word clouds from filtered tweets using search terms such as hashtags.

I applied a similar technique to create a word cloud of the December 16 Edchat session on assessment and sent this tweet: "http://twitpic.com/ttvn2 - Wordle of Formative and Summative Assessments transcript #edchat". Almost immediately a response tweet correctly pointed out that the Wordle missed the conversation (and follow-up reflections such as Greg Thompson Thoughts on Assessment: A Conversation). A quick look at the cloud shows RT as the "word" most often used and a LOT of @user replies. There were approximately 1068 replies and 699 retweets in the session's 1181 tweets - that is indeed conversation!

Created with http://wordle.net

Practical and Educational Uses of Wordle

Since Wordle was introduced in 2008, there has been no shortage of educational uses of creating word clouds. Below is a list of recent and popular blogs that have published their favorite uses of Wordle in the classroom. If you are new to Wordle, refer to the section below "What is Wordle?" and the useful frequently asked questions page maintained by creator Jonathan Feinberg.

• ProfHacker published an article on Using Wordle in the classroom to analyze poetic diction.
• The SlideShare slideshow Forty-Three Interesting Ways to use Wordle in the Classroom includes a wealth of ideas for teaching. One of my favorites is Guess the French fairytale.
• Rodd Lucier summarizes a few of his clever ideas in the Top 20 Uses for Wordle, including condensing survey response data into a word cloud.
• Jennifer Wagner hosts a Monday-Friday Daily Guess the Wordle.
• Bill Wolff's Teaching Students How to Write Meaningful Tags explains strategies that help students break down blog posts to write more descriptive tags.
• Jamie Keddie describes A Really Useful Wordle Trick on how to include phrases such as "once a upon a time".
• Author Scott Westerfeld's interesting blog on eliminating overused words includes a word cloud of his novel Leviathan after the first draft.
• Wordle creator Feinberg uses statistical analysis to generate word cloud visualizations comparing Presidential Inaugural Addresses.
• Keri-Lee Beasley describes a simple but clever use of Wordle in first-grade poetry writing with a summary of what students learned.
• I published a post on Wordling Conference and Chat Tweets.

Wordle Nonsense

Despite many possible educational uses, it is still important to ask why Wordle should be used in the classroom and what are the expected goals for students. Without carefully defining these expectations, Wordle can end up being a new technology toy, resulting in generating nonsensical data without a purpose. What better way to demonstrate Wordle nonsense than creating a word cloud of a passage generated with a Lorem Ipsum generator as shown below?!

Created with Wordle.net

What is Wordle?

With Wordle you can easily create a visual word-frequency cloud of any copied text, blog site, or tags from a Delicious site. In a matter of seconds your beautiful graph can provide information that is educational or useless, but regardless of the result it is fun and quite stunning to look at. Below is a Wordle of President Obama's speech on racism.

Created with http://wordle.net