Word Cloud Summary

According to CIO magazine, Oscar Wilde said: "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness” (Leggat, 2017). As you can see from my word cloud above, I am the mediocre one, tons of people summarize things with a word cloud, but I was so impressed with the idea of a word cloud to visualize our class discussion that I wanted to try my own this week when I'm the summarizing.  

From this word cloud I tried to use the font size and position to create a concept map as well. I tried to use the size of the words (which in the word cloud denotes the number of times the word was used) to place primary and subsidiary concepts into an order. I struggled at first with the nexus as the word "social" . . . while the next level  . . . "capital" was left without the adjective. Might make more sense if it was "social capital" but I was trying to stay true to the word cloud data. 

Naturally, I like the fact that "community" is listed in a larger font. I think community is an integral part of helping to distribute social capital across workers/students/people et al. I also like that social capital leads to "access" and "resources." That's something that I've seen in real life in our own learning community and organization. I enjoy the fact that the concept map shows that the "community" is a source of "support" and can lead to "progress." 

Finally, as a VP of learning, I gravitated to making "education" a second level of the concept map with "adult", "learning", and "students" all leading or cascading from it and that learning can lead to a career. If there was a way to link "career" back to "social capital," "access," and "class," I think I might have included a dotted line. 

Sadly, I haven't found the concept map as revealing of our discussion as I hoped, I actually think the word cloud to be more useful as a schematic of what words were most used in our discussion. As a summary of our week, I think the word cloud leads to greater insight, but putting the terms we used over the past week into a spatial context with relationships of higher and lower orders, might be revelatory to others so perhaps the exercise will yield fruit for others.

Reference

Leggat, S. (2017, June 27). Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. CIO. https://www.cio.com/article/230274/imitation-is-the-sincerest-form-of-flattery.html