For anyone with similar RSS feeds to mine, you’ve probably seen a fair few of these tag clouds from Wordle recently. I thought I’d have a play myself and you can see my del.icio.us tags in the tag cloud below (click for larger image at Wordle):

Although Wordle appealed to me, I hadn’t really thought beyond the fact that it’s an interesting way to display del.icio.us tags or a block of text, but then I read Sarah Faye Cohen’s blog post with her thoughts about possible uses for Wordle and it got me thinking. Her idea of getting students to use Wordle to help them understand what an article is about is a very interesting concept, and I particularly like the idea of using text from a discussion to identify main themes. This could be really interesting as an extension to forum posts on a VLE. Over at the School Library Journal there are some other interesting ideas.

Then I began thinking about wider applications. Wouldn’t it be great if we could ask our users for feedback and combined it all into a huge tag cloud to see what they are saying about our services? We could display it on our webpages and on displays around the learning centres. Or we could use material we create about the services to get a snapshot of what we do. I’m sure that would be a very interesting (and quick!) way to show what we’re about to new students.

Anyone else any other ideas of how Wordle could be used?

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Interesting video on the way information is categorised in the physical world and the digital world. David Weinberger (author of Everything is Miscellaneous) talks about the limitations of physical categorisation systems such as Dewey Decimal Classification (e.g. things can only have one place) and the advantages of digital categorisation (e.g. hyperlinks, tagging etc.). One of the many tools of the web which is really becoming utilised.

[googlevideo]http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2159021324062223592&q=%22everything+is+miscellaneous%22&hl=en[/googlevideo]

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