#el30: A Communal Experience

This is my community experience for #el30, in which Stephen asks us to "create an assignment the completion of which denotes being a member of the community."

I am still focused on text, so I took one post that mentioned community in either the title or the text from the following #el30 blogs:

• Geoff Cain - Brainstorm in Progress
• Kevin Hodgson - Kevin's Meandering Mind
• Roland Legrand - Learning with MOOCs
• Keith Lyons - Clyde Street
• Jenny Mackness - Jenny Connected
• Matthias Melcher - x28's new Blog
• Davey Moloney - Davey Moloney: Grasping Reality
• Frank Polster - DOIN' STUFF
• Laura Ritchie - lauraritchie.com
• Mark Corbett Wilson - My Portfolio of Self-Directed Learning

I then entered each link into a new analysis space at Voyant-tools to create a collection of #el30 posts about community. For the sake of this particular analysis, I removed the names of months from the word cloud as they were clouding (pun intended) the results. Voyant generated the following word cloud:

The word cloud presents the most common nouns and verbs from all of the posts; however, the word cloud is live, which means you can change it. Click on the Scale drop down in the lower left corner to select a specific post, and slide the Terms slider to include more or fewer words. Your assignment is to play with the various posts and collections of terms to create different word clouds and to see if any meaning emerges for you. Then leave a comment on this post to tell the rest of us what you learned.

My failure to post most weeks during the MOOC does not reflect my interest; rather, I'm at the end of my school term, in the middle of some vexing family issues, and about to leave for two weeks in the Bahamas (so don't feel sorry for me). I just couldn't focus on writing, but I did much of the reading and watched most of the videos. I'll carry this conversation forward for the next half year, I suspect.

Thanks to Stephen and all for doing this.