SMS texting in questions during a lecture and then analysing them via a word cloud
"I've been having a bit of a debate with someone from Computer Science here who think that voting systems are a waste of time, as they are limited to closed answer questions. I know there are more advanced technologies available, but did you ever get far with texting? The problems for me include the delay in getting the responses, and the difficulty in quickly aggregating free text responses. Have you come across anything that could turn a string of received text messages into an rss feed to display in the VLE? Something that could also create a word cloud from the responses might also be useful."
Well, a solution that does work is as follows. A Bath we are starting to use a EduText to provide an SMS service, we have also paid for an inbound number. Therefore, we'd include this number at the bottom of all our slides and encourage people to text questions.
At the end of the session I access the SMS inbox via the website. This means I can quickly scan them and answer a few.
However, for later analysis I might want to create a word (tag) cloud view, which gives me a representation of the word frequencies. This is incredibly easy from the SMS text messages I have received. To do this, in the EduText web application, access your inbox. Select the relevant texts, then click on download these as a csv. Then open the file, and copy the message column. Then in a web browser access http://tagcrowd.com/ - this is a free service which will create a word (frequency) cloud from text you paste in or a file. The final step is to paste in your SMS texts, select the appropriate settings and generate. When I use this from survey data for my reports / presentations then I simply capture the image using Snag-It.
The above is really, really simple and very, very quick. It also suits one offs, as the results are not stored so you’ll need to generate them again.
We used exactly this approached last year as part of a set of blended
learning activities we designed for our Undergraduate students studying in
the Department of Education (University of Bath). It was very successful.
The resulting tag clouds were added to the student's Moodle course after we
had discussed them in the face to face session. I used this site
http://www.artviper.net/texttagcloud/ to create the clouds because you can
choose for words to appear in different colours although it doesn't let you
exclude words etc. I also looked at this http://www.tocloud.com/ service.
Could the aggregation of questions also be accomplished with Twitter?
Hi - yes it could be achieved using twitter. People update their twitter
accounts, using an agreed #tag (or equivalent) then you can take the rss of
this into the word cloud generator. This would work nicely. My main concern
would be that people would need a twitter account, and they would have to
follow a naming convention for the RSS pull. In large groups it might be
simpler to use the edutext tool.