I think tonight's blog might be of interest to those of us who often teach first-year-composition and who are always looking for new and interesting ways to challenge our students in both their writing and critical thinking. Some of you might read a line or two and go "Oh that, that is old news", but many others of you might find Madeleine Sorapure's article "Information Visualization, Web 2.0, and Teaching of Writing" as interesting as I did. (After the last three blog post, I had to lighten the mood a bit and get the spot light off of me!!)
So, infovis is information visualization, and it is a way to re-conceptualize "things'. One might re-conceptualize a piece of writing they or someone else has done, or they may take data from their personal life and represent it visually. They might also, according to Sorapure, analyze and visualize "data related to a social or global issue" (67). Her article list all of the popular Web 2.0 sites for accomplishing these three tasks, and she gives some examples from her own classes. It is all quite compelling, and something I think I might attempt in my next writing class, especially taking a piece of writing they have done and creating a word cloud using a site like Wordle (something Joe Harris introduced me to this week at DMAC) as suggested by Sorapure. In fact, I might even take several of my blog post and run them through a few of these Web 2.0 applications and see what I come up with.
To give you a bit of a rundown though, for text visualization, Sorapure recommends Wordle (http://www.wordle.net/), Many Eyes (http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/), and TAPoR (http://portal.tapor.ca/portal/portal). When I ran this site through TAPoR (not knowing exactly what I'm doing of course) I got these results for a concordance:
Report on the Text
As a wrap up, because I have already made this post far to long, this might be one interesting way of performing remix assignments in the classroom. More and more teachers/instructors are requiring their students to somehow visually represent their written concepts, and this might just be another way of doing this.
So, infovis is information visualization, and it is a way to re-conceptualize "things'. One might re-conceptualize a piece of writing they or someone else has done, or they may take data from their personal life and represent it visually. They might also, according to Sorapure, analyze and visualize "data related to a social or global issue" (67). Her article list all of the popular Web 2.0 sites for accomplishing these three tasks, and she gives some examples from her own classes. It is all quite compelling, and something I think I might attempt in my next writing class, especially taking a piece of writing they have done and creating a word cloud using a site like Wordle (something Joe Harris introduced me to this week at DMAC) as suggested by Sorapure. In fact, I might even take several of my blog post and run them through a few of these Web 2.0 applications and see what I come up with.
To give you a bit of a rundown though, for text visualization, Sorapure recommends Wordle (http://www.wordle.net/), Many Eyes (http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/), and TAPoR (http://portal.tapor.ca/portal/portal). When I ran this site through TAPoR (not knowing exactly what I'm doing of course) I got these results for a concordance:
Report on the Text
- Text Source: http://260days.weeble.com
- Text Title: Children Toys
- Language of text: Other / Unspecified
- Total words (tokens): 109
- Unique words (types): 72
- Highest word frequency: 13
- Average word frequency: 1.51
- Standard Deviation of word frequencies: 1.60
- Average word length: 5.15
- Standard Deviation of word lengths: 2.36
- Number of sentences: 3
- Average words per sentence: 36.3
- Number of paragraphs: 20
- Average words per paragraph: 5.5
As a wrap up, because I have already made this post far to long, this might be one interesting way of performing remix assignments in the classroom. More and more teachers/instructors are requiring their students to somehow visually represent their written concepts, and this might just be another way of doing this.
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