Every class usually starts with a classic, 'Let's go around the room and have everyone introduce themselves and tell a little about yourself' kind of exercise. These are pretty standard, sometimes a bit dull. In a class that is offered completely online, these introductions take the form of forum discussion posts, that have to be read one after another and can be very flat and non-illuminating.
But how about viewing the content of a series of student intoductions like this:
This is a 'word cloud', generated by a cool service called Wordle, that helps illuminate and give some life to a series of introductory posts. What kind of class do we have, based on the word cloud?
I think tools like these can help give some perspective and help you look at raw text data in a new way.