Wordle,

Wordle is a is a fun thing. Its a reading tool, well a visual reading tool. You can enter a body of writing or link it to a site with an rss or other feed and have the content presented back to you as a text based graphic. We use it sometimes at work to get a feel for a body of writing, to check that we are writing about what we think we are .. and I have students use it as a tool to summarize wordy things - especially when they are stuck. I've just come back from a session in 'embedding literacy' - and it was dense, good but dense. The session left me wanting to play, to work with tools that encourage students to think about meaning in writing rather than think about verbs and nowns and pronunciation. In Wordles words it 'is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text'
When I Wordle my Knitknitfrog blog the result looks like this (I just pasted in the url link). Right click the Wordle-image to open it in a new tab or view it larger here. Apparently I have to attribute the image I made using my own writing in my blog to http://www.wordle.net/ by including it here - so legal stuff considered done.


It is very comforting to see the largest word is Knitting, followed closely by Socks and Sock. What is surprising is make, and start and think, and last, and week and now and done, all feature. Lathe and wood are in there - but I'd expect that, my lathe is a new toy and new toys tend to occupy my mind. Learning, yarn, and family are there ... I like this tool, like it a lot, it is easy to use and the results are either comforting or they make me think (in a good way) about what I'm doing or what I've done.

Try it - with something you like, or something you have written.
My next post will have actual images of knitting - not be a distracted side post.
na Stella