Wordles
Posted by Kristin Payne on Friday, December 11, 2009 2:30 PM
Jennie (from the library) and I have recently been playing around with wordles. What's a wordle, you wonder? Well, it's basically a tool on the internet that generates word clouds. Word cloud? What's that? It's an image that is formed around text that you provide; words that are frequently used in the text are bigger than words that are used less often. The graphic image they produce offers a different perspective you might not otherwise see by just reading the text.
For example, Jennie and I each blogged about the GusDay 10 conference and then created wordles. It's interesting to see what words were prominent in Jennie's blog and in mine — same conference, slightly different perspective.
Jennie's Wordle:
My Wordle:
This tool could be useful in courses too. Does your discussion post differ visually from your fellow students'? What might that add to the discussion? How does one week's assignment compare to the next? Or what about those synoptic gospel passages? What if you "wordled" the same passage from different gospels — what would that look like?
This Blog's Wordle:
