No (reflection without) Your Meme

QuickMeme (www.quickmeme.com)

After a challenging project, or during the composition of a prolonged communication product, I often ask my students to reflect on their thoughts and concerns about the process of communicating with others. My usual approach is using a freewrite assignment that they can complete during a few minutes of class time.

While these reflections are informative and can help me as I revise my assignments, the writing is very private by nature. It's handwritten on paper and written primarily for me. This semester I attempted something different. Instead of the standard hand-written-words-on-paper reflection, I had them create a meme (pronounced "meem") to explain their feelings about the assignments and/or share their thoughts about the end of the semester.

Emily recommend I use quickmeme.com, and the class really seemed to find the program accessible. As it turned out, no one in my class had created a meme although they had all seen them on their social networking sites. They had 10 minutes to find a picture, add the words to created their meme, and post their memes on our Facebook group.

The result was lots of fun and some compelling class discussion. As memes were posted on Facebook, I would project the image. While some of the memes were more effective than others, the class learned how to create a meme, and I learned what they were going through during these last few weeks of the semester.

Most importantly, the class learned they were not alone. We are all feeling stressed and overwhelmed at the end of the semester. Instructors and technology associates included. Now...I need to get some grading done.

Can you see me now? Visualizing thesis topics on Many Eyes.

Many Eyes (http://www-958.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/manyeyes/)

This IBM experiment has quite a few fun options for visualizing data, and Emily and I have enjoyed playing with different ways to "see" numbers. Like most of the other sites listed on this blog, Many Eyes is free and cloud based. All you do is upload a excel-style spreadsheet, enter data by hand, or pick a data set that someone else uploaded. While interesting, I haven't used this website in class and haven't blogged about it because I don't do a ton of work with hard data. That changed with the President's State of the Union.

I was speaking with a class of ESL students about graphs and pulled up Many Eyes. We started looking at the variety of visualization possibilities and discussing what visualization would work best for what kind of data set. From scatter point charts to word clouds, the range of possibilities is stunning, but we noticed, pretty quickly, that someone had uploaded the President's speech. The class was interested in seeing what topics were of concern to the President in his speech, so we started to explore.

We opened the already-created word cloud and saw some words were clearly larger, indicating that these were spoken frequently.

Right away we noticed "jobs," "energy," and "tax" as we discussed the cloud in class. Under the cloud we found a link to the actual data file--basically the speech in a text document. Once we were there, we clicked on the visualization link below the speech and were offered a wide range of new charts to visualize the speech. We selected "word tree" and entered the word "jobs" in the search bar. This is what we found:

From this visualization we could easily see in what context the word "jobs" was being used in the speech. It occurred to me then, that this website would be an excellent way to find topics for research. Students could upload a text document, visualize the data, and figure out different approaches to the text.

Whether you use this website in class or not, I would encourage you to have fun and play with this site. If you are working with information by state or country, I would highly encourage you to see what Many Eyes can do to help you visualize and share information with others.