Serendipity and Sue Waters: Benefits of Being Connected.

A stream. A real time, flowing, dynamic stream of information — that we as users and participants can dip in and out of and whether we participate in them or simply observe, we are a part of this flow.

John Borthwick As quoted here.

That’s a quote from 2009 and I don’t think the stream metaphor is big enough anymore. A river? An ocean current? Maybe solar winds? Sorry, I digress into earth science easily… The point is that social media, and especially Twitter, is massive and can be intimidating. That’s probably why only 218 million of the 1 billion registered users of Twitter are active. Continue reading

This is what we are talking about.

After watching Darren Kuropatwa’s #WhileWalking 66  posted by Amy Burvall in Google+, I started thinking about tags as a part of digital literacy. I am not a very good user of tags.  I have been struggling with choosing consistent, clear tags since Delicious switched away from stacks.

“Blogging tips” websites indicate that you should do some research to find the most commonly used terms in your field.  However, finding a list of keywords or tags for Educational Technology through a Google search is an exercise in futility since all sites include the word “tag”. Instead I did a very haphazard, non-academic search of tags people are using on their blogs  to find the most common. Using Tagxedo, I found the top 100 tag words look like this (see below for how this image was made):

Since Tagxedo only uses individual words, the compound word tags are not shown, but this image does give an overview of what we are talking about. As I make my tags in the future, I will endeavour to use these words alone or in combination in addition to my own idiosyncrasies.
Out of curiosity, I fed the ETMOOC blog feed into Wordle and this is the image created. It will be interesting to see what will change as we move into Digital Literacy.
How I made the Tagxedo:
I thought that I would be able to see tags on other people’s blogs. This turns out to be more difficult than it sounds since many blogs do not list their tags. Visiting at least 100, I copied the tag lists  from 33 blogs  into a Word document. To choose the blogs, I started with the current postings (on Feb. 17, 2013)  in the ETMOOC blog hub feed. Then I looked through all the blogs from James Dykstra’s  (@mrpuffin) Twitter list of Canadian Educational Folk. I also added a few blogs from people I follow. Once I felt I had enough “data”, I copied the full Word document into Tagxedo. The application automatically choose the most frequently used words.
The blogs I used to make this tag cloud of tag cloud words:
http://sharingourblessings.wordpress.com
http://misslwholebrainteaching.blogspot.ca
http://amysmooc.wordpress.com
http://bigreturns.posterous.com/
http://ewithersict.blogspot.ca/
http://jennyluca.com/
http://coolcatteacher.blogspot.ca/
http://shawetmooc.wordpress.com
http://danielschristian.com
http://www.peternewbury.org
http://allmoocs.wordpress.com
http://cinisetfavilla.blogspot.ca
http://juliebalen.weebly.com
http://prairieinspiration.wordpress.com
http://adifference.blogspot.ca/
http://dbarker.edublogs.org/
http://www.teachandlearn.ca/blog/
http://lifelonglearnerrhonda.wordpress.com/
http://www.newmediaworkshops.com/telblog/
http://educationaltechnologyguy.blogspot.ca
http://jamespatrickjensen.com
http://abbtechtuesday.edublogs.org
http://mrsdkrebs.edublogs.org
http://somewherefromhere.edublogs.org
http://blogs.ubc.ca/chendricks
http://buildingcreativebridges.wordpress.com
http://intedanddevelopment.blogspot.ca
http://openphd.blogspot.ca
http://www.kleinspiration.com/
http://krebs.edublogs.org/
http://margaret-powers.com
http://cpbwsk.edublogs.org/
http://makeitinteresting.blogspot.ca/