The wonder of Wordle

I’m guessing that my fellow moocers in #change11, #cck12 and #ds106 are already familiar with the word clouds generated by Wordle.  Admittedly, they are starting to be overused in PowerPoints and can be an eyesore if done poorly.  However, I found a legitimate business reason to turn to Wordle yesterday.

I was analysing the client service competency profiles of two dozen public service organizations this week, trying to find some commonalities.  I copied and pasted the relevant sections of their websites into a word document, thinking that I would boil it all down somehow.  Then it struck me: could I copy about 20 pages of text into Wordle and see what happens?

Sure enough, a cloud of 150 words was born.  Though it’s not perfect (it treats service and services as two separate terms), I was able to pick out from this cloud a handful of common actions, concepts and descriptors that I could offer to my clients as starting points for instructional design.  It only took a few minutes to transform mounds of raw data into a useful little summary.  How cool is that?

 

 

Actions
advocating	anticipating	building	delivering	developing	discovering
focusing	following	improving	knowing	listening	maintaining
managing	meeting	responding	providing	supporting	understanding

 

 

Components and descriptors
assistance	awareness	commitment	complaints	concerns	continuous
excellence	expectations	flexibility	feedback	impact	information
innovative	leadership	opportunities	outcomes	partners	pressures
quality	questions	relationships	resources	results	satisfaction
stakeholders	standards	strategic	team	time	value

 

About these ads