Blogging

I’ve just discovered Wordle, a web application that creates word clouds from any body of text. Word clouds, like tag clouds, are a collection of individual words whose text size reflects the frequency of occurrence in a given body of text. Wordle has some nice layout tools to help you create beautiful word clouds. It’s easy to make your own. Here’s a word map from my weblog’s RSS feed. It’s easy to see the emphasis of words in my recent blog posts.

In the past I’ve used a more formal version of this kind of approach in the battle against plagiarism. For my module’s assessment I get students to write a dissertation and occasionally one student tries to pass someone else’s work off as their own. There are a number of applications that compare text from one source against another to look for blatant copying, but another approach is to use textural analysis that compares the linguistic style and word count of one section of a piece of work with that of another section. If you suspect a student of incorporating someone else’s work you can use this approach to spot a change a style from one chapter to another. This is a useful approach when the plagiarised source cannot be identified.

Anyway, for fun I thought I’d use Wordle to compare the word maps from the recent blog posts of three leading learning technologists. It’s interesting to see the different word emphasis. Can you guess which map belongs to Josie Fraser, Scott Wilson and Stephen Downes?

Go find: copycatch, plagiarism detection, word clouds

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Word clouds with Wordle

First post from the new iPhone WordPress application. Looks like a nice little app.

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WordPress on my iPhone

Yesterday I was in Nottingham with my friend Kwansuree to attend a public session of teachings from the Dalai Lama. The theme was ‘Bringing Meaning to Our Lives’. His Holiness is in the UK to hold a series of meetings with political and spiritual leaders, and to bring a simple message of hope and the achievement happiness through compassion and understanding for all human beings. For these public teachings he warned the audience that if our motivation to attend was because of wanting to witness the cult of the Dalai Lama, or to receive his wisdom and solutions to our problems, then we were certain to be disappointed, ‘I am just a simple monk’, he told us at the start. That said, there is no doubt that many of the 10,000 or so in the audience, myself included, came because of the tremendous warmth and charm of the 14th Dalai Lama that adds considerable substance to his simple message.

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Dalai Lama Bringing Meaning to Our Lives

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If your hot beverage of choice is tea rather than coffee then head on over to the Rare Tea Company. Henrietta Lovell, the proprietor sells the most amazing teas and she’s a jolly nice person to boot, happy to chat about her selection of teas to help you make a choice. I can recommend them all but particularly special are the Jasmine Silver Tip and Oolong tea. For the single tea drinker I can also recommend buying the White porcelain tea pot and tea cup.

While you’re at it head on over to the testimonials on the web site. Yours truly somehow managed to enthuse about Henrietta’s tea right next to Angelica Huston. So you’ll be in good company for your next cuppa!

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Fancy a cuppa?