Comments on: Who are your sheep

By: 20+ Must Read Education Technology Blogs for Teachers, Students, and e-Learners | Online Schools and Degree Programs

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 15:43:28 +0000

[...] Who are your sheep [...]

By: Angela

Angela — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 17:56:36 +0000

This is a cool idea. The ‘lover’ part, BTW, is probably my fault, as part of my Twitter profile says ‘lover of the pithy and sarcastic tweet’. At least now you know it’s not anything inappropriate. ;-)

By: Who are your TwitterSheep? « Kristina Dimini’s Blog

Who are your TwitterSheep? « Kristina Dimini’s Blog — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 18:44:23 +0000

[...] I was browsing through my GoogleReader and I came across David Warlick’s post on Who are your Sheep. I thought it would be interesting to see who my ‘flock’ of followers were. [...]

By: David Warlick

David Warlick — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 11:18:17 +0000

Warrick, It's possible that a better too for this is TagCrowd [http://tagcrowd.com/]. Wordle is good and I use it a lot. But it's main value is it's prettiness. If you really want to analyze the words, something a little more straight forward may be better. Here is the word cloud I got for Pride and Prejudice. I just pasted in the URL of the book from the Gutenberg Project [http://www.gutenberg.org/].

By: Warrick Wynne

Warrick Wynne — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 03:21:54 +0000

I teach English and Literature and see some potential in Wordle clouds of books too. I tried a chapter of Orwell’s “1984″ and was surprised at the results: lots more words about the body than I thought. Have experimented too with putting a text version of the WHOLE novel into Wordle! http://learningau.wordpress.com/2008/06/17/wordle/

By: David Muir

David Muir — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 22:39:59 +0000

I’m glad you enjoyed Twittersheep. I thought was interesting.

The first time I saw word clouds (such as those produced by Wordle) I thought thy were pretty but didn’t see much educational potential. However, at a conference recently I heard a chap get quite excited about the possibilities:

http://edcompblog.blogspot.com/2009/03/cal-2009-using-tag-clouds.html

I’m keen to suggest the assignment rubric compared with the students’ response idea next time an assessment is issued.

By: Craig McDonald

Craig McDonald — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 19:08:00 +0000

This is something I'm very interested in, a very visual approach to text that can help learners identify the key ideas in a text. I blogged a few weeks ago at webb-ed feet about how we could use Wordle (which has been around for a while now) in current events analysis, and also in using it in spelling/word study, to select good authentic vocabulary without the students losing themselves in low-frequency words. Lots of possibilities here!

By: Jo-Anne Gibson

Jo-Anne Gibson — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 17:01:11 +0000

Thanks for sharing the Twittersheep link. I think it’s a great way to demonstrate the learning potential of Twitter to my administrator and fellow teachers.

By: Karyn Romeis

Karyn Romeis — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 16:46:46 +0000

The ‘dozen or so people’ who follow you are somewhere in the region of 4.5K, just by the way. There was a conversation about it on Twitter just this morning. Apparently you have about the highest ratio of followers to followees of the edublogging community. I am flattered to be one of the handful you follow. People were speculating about the choices that are behind the ratio of follower:followee.

I dislike the term Twittersheep, I have to say. I wouldn’t follow anyone I considered a sheep, and would hope that anyone with a sheep-like mentality would quickly tire of the lack of shepherding I offer and wander off elsewhere.

Nevertheless, the cloud is very interesting! The word that jumps out in mine is learning, I’m pleased to say. Behind that comes technology, then teacher, elearning and education.

One of the smaller words that tells me I follow a lot more Americans that I do Brits, is ‘Mom’. If there were more Brits in my flock, it would be ‘Mum’.