Text response questions were the very first to be released by Xorro, and have always been the quickest to impress. However, their usefulness in large groups has been limited due to the difficulty of instantly extracting value from high volumes of text responses. This week audience wordclouds are made possible by new visualisations in Xorro-Q’s text response questions.
Wordclouds are familiar visualisations of keywords hidden in masses of text. They’ve been in common use for a few years. Now, Xorro-Q makes it possible to create a wordcloud on the fly from a live audience’s text contributions to your question.
Xorro-Q’s wordcloud algorithm filters for the most relevant content, and scales this to reflect frequency of use within the audience. Words are then assessed for size and fit, and positioned dynamically on the wordcloud. The cloud recalculates every few seconds, resulting in a dynamic, visually exciting output which responds instantly to audience feedback.
Imagine the applications: Brainstorming, opinion gathering, prior knowledge assessment…
To try this for yourself:
- Run an activity as usual from the QF site (wordclouds are not yet available from Q-Launcher).
- Ask a text response question in the usual way.
- Note in the upper right corner, the offer to switch the usual “stream” view for “cloud”. If you click on “cloud”, the wordcloud appears in place of the usual text message stream.
- To return to the message stream view, just click “stream”.
