The PICOL Project

What happens when educators allow students to use their varying creative talents in producing unique works in order to meet course expectations?

The PICOL project is one example, that might herald the creation of a new open source visual language. The interview below gives you some insight into how Melih Bilgil created an original icon set that has the potential for changing the way we communicate ideas in digital media.



The video Melih produced to demonstrate the potential for the PICOL project, is outstanding start to his e-portfolio! After learning more about this story, maybe you'll join me in recommending that this project be showcased at TED?

Top 20 Uses for Wordle

Wordle Wordle is a free 'word art' tool that crunches any chunk of text in the production of a visual representation of the content. The resulting graphic emphasizes the most common words by amplifying their size based on frequency. Originally designed to give pleasure, Wordle is being used in interesting ways to provide compelling summaries of political speeches, blog posts, twitter feeds, news articles and more, but there are additional educational uses worth considering.

A few ideas:

1] Convert a sonnet or Shakespearean play; or children's book (Dr. Seuss anyone?);

2] Paste the contents of an online discussion to coalesce the main ideas;

3] Combine student 'Who Are You?' introductions, or 'Superhero
Traits' to develop a class composite;

4] Condense survey data by dumping content of questionnaire responses into the Wordle engine;

5] Combine news articles or RSS feeds on a given topic;

6] Turn an essay into a poster;

7] Combine blog posts over time into a simplified represetation or use it to compare the ideas of competing ideas;

8] Use font, colour and arrangement strategies to appropriately represent content;

9] Automate the creation of word poetry;

10] As an introduction to a unit or course, combine key words; themes; curriculum expectations to provide learners with a visual overview of content;

11] Convert nutritional content of one's weekly diet or of a group's menu preferences;

12] Condense a Wikipedia article into it's essence;

13] Paste the results of a Google search (Can you guess the keywords I used?);

14] Convert social bookmark tags;

15] Enter keywords from weekly weather reports to obtain a seasonal picture;

16] Distill song lyrics like "Stairway to Heaven";

17] Find out what you've been up to by summarizing To-Do lists;

18] Represent the results of a brainstorming session or the minutes of a meeting visually;

19] Show "Today in History" stories in a new way;

20] Convert past or current email messages into a composite of your correspondence;


Do you use Wordle? Have you considered using Wordle with students? If so, what other strategies would you recommend?

5 Visual Search Tools + 1

The Web has been text oriented for so long, that many may not realize that it can be searched visually. Google's efficiency in search is due in large part to the fact its menu is simple, and almost exclusively text-based. Can searches that rely on eye-candy compete? You be the judge.

1] Search Me: A graphical search that emulates the Apple scrolling image interface, complete with reflections. Are the results more relevant? This site makes the claim.

2] Boolify: A graphical representation of the boolean search. This could be a good tool for teaching simple search skills.

3] Viewzi: Although I'm not crazy about their expanatory video that borrows it's format from CommonCraft, this viewable search allows you to select a page style based on the content you're after.

4] Kartoo: Using this search engine is an interactive experience. Hovering on search results leads you to refine your search by highlighting relationships among results with links and keywords.

5] ManagedQ: Screenshot previews allow the visually oriented to quickly locate relevant search results from a menu of pages.

The extra visual search tool I'd like to share, is Quintura, uses interactive 'keyword clouds' to help users narrow their search. As a bonus, this search tool can be embedded on your site. Try it out by hovering on a keyword below...