Tag/Word clouds

Took a break from grading to see if I could figure out how to make tag clouds. These are neat graphical ways to highlight what things are prominent within a set of words - these words could be on a web page, a journal article, or whatever text you want to supply. In my case I wanted to see if this would accurately represent to the students what my course was about.

A quick search pulled up a number of free online tools to do this. I randomly chose http://www.tagxedo.com/.  I literally copied and pasted all of my notes into the entry box, chose a color scheme, and then chose the shape of my cloud (bacterial-shaped of course). Here's what I got for the lecture and the lab. 

Tag/Word cloud for my lab: 

 Tag/Word cloud for my lecture:

Pretty cool and honestly not a bad representation of the lab and lecture parts of the course. Basically it uses an algorithm to weight the font size by the frequency of the word, then fits the words into the shape. 

Actually I could see this being a neat way to show microbial community composition too. Tried it with Ben's fungi data from the Elon Forest. Added a new twist to - instead of capturing an image here is an iFrame of it so that it can be dynamic (see earlier post on Widgets). Scroll over the names to see the magic. Note that the shape is a nice oaklike tree - nice little touch although why can't they supply a fungus icon for us? 

Early view of next Moodle version

Recently I was able to sit in on a Webinar where they talked about the next version of Moodle that is coming our way (I believe in the next month or so). In the rush of finals I unfortunately lost my notes but here are a few notable things I remember

• file management looks like it will be a lot easier AND it will be much more straightforward to organize and share documents across courses and course sections. I see this as being great for some of our multisection courses where we tend to use the same documents - Sr Sem, Bio113, Bio102, etc.  Equally important will be that updating everyone's file on their page will be as simple as replacing the document that is in the main folder. For example, let's take Bio113. All base lab handouts are held in one folder that the lab coordinator maintains. All the sections essentially build aliases (links) to each file. If the coordinator updates the main file, everyone is automatically updated. 

• currently when you set up an assignment you have to wade through a myriad of options, often times only to figure out later it was the wrong option. Now the assignments will all be under one "set up assignment" feature where you can then customize it - I think that will be much easier than the current setup. 

• while it is not new, the personalized learning designer was being pushed as something that doesn't get used enough. I can't claim to have explored this much but I liked the automated messages that you can set up that will get sent to students who meet some condition like having low grades, or who haven't logged in in a while. I can see where this would be a good push for certain students.

link to the 2.0 version manual: http://manuals.moodlerooms.com/display/JOULE2/Teacher+Manual