Visualizing My Connectivism Learning So Far

Prompted my Michele Martin’s Web 2.0 Wednesday task for this week, I decided to do a Wordle tag cloud of my blog.

Learning is the top word in my cloud, followed by connectivism. Think, information, and networks are all prominent. Growing and grow are both more prominent than build–an interesting observation after my post about whether learning grows or is built.

Although Michele’s task was originally about personal branding, I was hoping to get a better grasp of the discussions about learning and our metaphors for it. Sometimes I just need to look at it a different way to start making the connections and seeing the patterns.

Here’s a different version of the tag cloud, this time with just my post on learning and the comments (all 12 of them, at current count):

Learning, Growing, and Connecting tag cloud

The discussion has been great, but I need some more time to process it all and figure out where I want to go next with these ideas. I’m not used to such deep philosophical discussions.

4 thoughts on “Visualizing My Connectivism Learning So Far

  1. This post comes just as I have been transcribing interviews. What is the connection you might ask (besides a break from the mind numbing work?). I seem to get caught up sometimes on specific words. While I have the idea, I will recognize that something is wrong with what I am hearing and what I am typing.

    Just before I logged on to this post, I was trying to figure out why I will get a certain word in my head, which I know is not what I am hearing, but “just fits”.

    (So now the connection to your visual). It appears to me that you are expanding your “words” to use through the connectivism course. I feel we get in a rut and associate certain words and word patterns with certain ideas. We don’t really think of them differently because we have already “set” the word. However, the tag clouds can demonstrate how learning can expand your vocabulary and ideas. To me this demonstrates how your growing cognitive flexibility. I find these philosophical discussions makes me more aware of what is around me (a very constructivist attitude, I know) so I learn more.

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