Task 9

This task was quite a doozy for me. I will be honest, I had no idea what I was doing or even looking at. It took me an entire morning to even figure out how to use the program and then find where my name was grouped. So here I go.  I am thinking that group 4 (which I was grouped in) is together because these are pieces of music that are the most familiar to people.  The music we listed in our golden record are more popular than the other choices.  I know when I created my list I went for songs that I have heard before and ones that I remember hearing the artists name before.  These songs would defiantly showcase humanity and what we represent as humans if found by aliens.

Here is a screen shot of group 4.  Looking at it, one could simply say we were classified together because we all picked the same songs? I really have no clue now. One thing I don’t understand is why some songs are stretched far away? Maybe only one of us selected those songs?  After playing around in the program I learned you could in fact move the songs around and people so I am not sure if they have any special meaning or not being stretched out.   This is still puzzling to me. I am thinking that perhaps Margret, Robin and myself selected the same piece of music for #1? Johnny B. Goode seems to be the center of our web, that could play a factor.

After playing around with the program some more I went back to the beginning before stretching and realized the input generated a different picture of the group. Some of the songs were not even connected meaning we probably didn’t pick the same songs.  Maybe we are linked because all three of us had two songs that nobody else picked?  As you can see in the picture, we each have two branches that are not connected to anyone but ourselves. Could I be on to something? I do not know. I do know that this type of information is useful in the world to see how things like common words are used and how often.  I do not think I would do something like this in my primary class since this seems to be way over my head I can’t imagine how to explain it to my students. I have used a program called Wordle before.  This program takes all words and makes a scramble of them in an artistic way.  The students love that.