Rip.Mix.Feed – Reading

Hello, everyone!

First, thank you for your assistance with my project.  I know how valuable your time is and adding even one thing to your to-do list can be onerous.

After my video documentary on the origin of silent reading, I wanted to explore if there were differences in how we viewed reading, silent reading and reading with technology.

I used Google Forms to create a quick (9-question) survey to elicit one-word responses asking “What is the first thing you think of when I say ‘reading’?”  I opened it up for 3 words for each category: reading, silent reading, and reading with technology.  To increase the base of collaboration, I reached out to you all in Mattermost and then to the larger online population I am connected with on FaceBook.  I ended up with 65 responses in just a few days.

The results were interesting.  I expected to find much more tie-in between reading and silent reading.  As I explored in my documentary, to me they are so connected that I might have a hard time describing them with different words.  On final examination, ‘reading’ seemed to focus on enjoyment, ‘silent reading’ on the environment being read in, and ‘reading with technology’ on the tools we use to read and their frustrations and challenges.

Then, because I didn’t think it was fair to just post the clouds without explanation, I did the video above.  Here they are as a standalone item.  Zoom in and see what you think!

The learning curve for the tech on this project was bumpy.  My initial concept was to have an animated word cloud, morphing from one main idea to the other.  This turned out to be far more labour intensive than I was willing to invest.  In the end, Google Forms exported to Google Sheets, Google sheets cut and paste into WordClouds.com.  WordClouds exported to PowerPoint and I learned how to morph and spotlight in a presentation.  After that, it was back to my new friend, Camtasia for the final project.

My wonders include…

• How would the results change if the questions were asked in a different order?
• What if I had asked everyone to submit one picture instead of a word for each item?  That could be a beautiful gallery.

In the end, the results of this simple questionnaire have inspired me to begin my final project for the course.  I think further examining the results and tying them to our readings should align nicely with the course objectives.