Student Question Word Cloud

After reading how Obama’s health care policy team created a word cloud indicating the most frequently used words and phrases in comments they received about health care, I decided to do the same with the questions I received from students via e-mail and Meebo chat this semester. The results can be seen at http://www2.bc.edu/~lissk/wordcloudf08.html . It’s more an impressionistic view of my electronic interactions with comm majors than it is anything useful, but I thought it would be fun to share.

Among my favorite bits: One of the largest words in the cloud – along with find, research, paper, topic, articles, and class – is “wondering.” I hadn’t realized how often students say “I was wondering…”

Then there’s this inadvertent but oh so logical progression from good to bad among the alphabetical list of words and phrases:

good .good articles. .good sources. .good thanksgiving. great .great depression. .hard time. .hard time finding.