It’s just neat brain candy is all. I’m reasonably certain that not many English teachers have opinions ranging much deeper than that.

Wordle could be useful in the classroom with some poems. For example, what is the importance of the word “We” in the poem, We Real Cool, by Gwendolyn Brooks?
http://wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/118049/We_Real_Cool

First, we would read the poem outloud a few times, then put this Wordle up on the overhead. In this poem the word “We” obviously stands out, and it’s definitely on purpose. The visual would be a helpful guide to get students thinking about the meaning, or theme of the poem. However, this wouldn’t work with all poems, but certainly with some.

Chris, isn’t it also good for a really long and verbose document (like a state of the union) where it is impossible to discern meaning just listening to it.

Dan, in the right hands Wordle can be a decent tool, I think better in most cases than Animoto, which is too rigid for learning, imho. Other times, it will just be a light fun activity to play with words. It’s all in your learning objective and whether (a) the objective is any good, and (b) Wordle is a good tool to meet the objective.

I think you’re mistaking low-level creation with low-level analysis. The level of analysis comes from the mind producing it, not the thing causing it.

The usefulness here isn’t in letting the students copy and paste text into the site and create the image (that’s what the teacher should do well before class even begins), but in using the image to reach conclusions about the text. The repetition of words actually has a lot to do with meaning. It’s not low-level analysis, at all. It’s low level to only discuss the numbers. To invest those numbers with meaning, to talk about why it’s important that “Daisy,” “yellow,” and “money” are the most frequent words in this story, how those repeated words have anything to do with the meaning of the piece, that’s every bit as important as discussing why these are the ten most important quotations from The Great Gatsby.

If nothing else, this is a different way of looking at a text. If we come to find out that “people” is the most frequently repeated word in, say, the Declaration of Independence, what might that say about the mindset of the authors? How might that influence our understanding of the text? Now what if the most frequent word ended up being “He” (which, through reading, we know is in reference to King George)? How does that make a difference? We launch into a discussion of how word choice matters, how frequency of words says something about the author’s intent, and how we can support those conclusions by specific textual references.

There are all kinds of ways to use this in the class. It’s certainly not the best thing ever, but it’s different and “‘different’ is, in a serious way, its own payoff”.

I think Todd’s dead on.

Dan, your question would be the way I’d probably approach it with students-
“What – if anything – does this Wordle say about The Raven?”

That’d be a useful discussion.

-Tom

I’m going to lean towards 3 things after letting this Wordle convo thread muddle around in my grey matter for a few days:

1. I don’t sense anyone suggesting it be used ‘regularly’ (other than perhaps an over-excited Wordle intern trying to position herself for a promotion). Any such folks that can be named are more conversational strawmen than effective change agent on the collective whole. As some state/imply above, once (maybe less than the # of a fingers in one hand if you’re really feeling the groove?) to create ‘new’ eyes would be quite enough. Get in, get out. Done.

2. Much of the networked enthusiasm — I suspect — comes from a) what-if discovery, b) wanting to share such enthusiasm as a blogger (this has more to do with the solo-blogger-as-media-outlet-ego effect than the actual toy/tool/tech, I suspect), and c) wondering out-loud (in an implied manner) if the tool/idea has ‘legs’ in a classroom setting after one’s downstream network kicks it around a bit. While a few folks (we may be able to point to a few who are suggesting that national curriculum standards include a “Wordle” component before a student receives his/her high school diploma), the vast majority of edu-bloggers most likely see it for what it is: tangential eye candy that might be a cute (and potentially provocative) short-term ‘share’ piece with their students…perhaps even with some “What could this lead us to see about our own writing/ideas or the text we just read?”

3. As an English teacher h-e-double-hockey-sticks-bent on providing an insane # of writing assignments that require relentless draft-upon-draft follow-through from Sept to May — (demanding 1-on-1 time with me outside the 5 class periods each week, which I get away with by teaching at a college-prep independent school where this sort of teacher/student conferencing is the norm), I do sense potential in copying/pasting a student’s own writing (drafts and final copies alike) into the Wordle meatgrinder simply to foster a conversation re: a) repetition of certain types of words (to our advantage and to our disadvantage, as writers), b) language variety in terms of nuance and execution, and c) the consideration of what our audience might intuitively sense about the depth of our vocabulary reservoir as they read our in-process and final work.

Beyond that, I’m not sure that a) defending or b) attacking Wordle offers much more than a very niche semantic battle that is a strawman for something else entirely.

Clearly Dan uses this example to successfully ferret out the worthless “shiny new 2.0 toy” syndrome that does indeed inflict much of the edu-blog banter at times. I’ll raise my hand for putting my life reputation behind some dang widget or another during some late night blog post benders over the years. It ain’t pretty, but hey, I never took Edu-Blogging 101 as an undergrad. Even Columbus had to deal with scurvy on his way to a new world. Dan’s underlying argument is definitely worthwhile, but I’m not sure the horizon shot for any of us will remain focused on the tool or not to tool argument for much longer, IMHO.

A related but admittedly tangential note:

I’m waiting for a few/some of ‘us’ (who’ve been edu-blogging or reading edu-blogs for at least a year+ now) to begin objectively analyzing the very ‘mindset’ of our tiny edu/blog-niche population a) as it has evolved over the last few years (for better or worse) and b) continues to evolve (for better or worse). Easy to see it as static. Easy also to go at this like middle schoolers still sizing up who the popular kids are at the dance long after the Led Zep stopped singing about stairways and slumber party carpooling came-n-went.

The on-going friction between those who value Wordle — for example — as a piece of a larger puzzle in engaging students vs. those who see it as nearly worthless in a legit academic setting might be jumping the shark as of late. Same with so many of the PC vs. Mac, or Twitter vs. Plurk, or Flock of Seagulls vs. Ah-Ha [note: that last one might just be in my head] debates that trip the light fantastic each day.

Sometimes it just feels like outtakes from “High Frequency” where record shop employees wage war over LP collections in lieu of actually focusing on what may be of shared value between various groups, various disciplines, various professional roles, various student contexts. I can’t help but wonder how we’ll collectively served by such debates being the norm for much longer. This has nothing to do with Dan; this is looking a chapter or two ahead after letting this all wander around my brain as summer comes to an end and I put all of my (supposedly best) teaching ideas in the “will it matter?” microwave before the opening bell sounds next week.

Don’t get me wrong. Clearly folks have solid arguments/instincts related to the “W” (and so many other shiny new 2.0 tools). And I’m gaining from the way folks are slicing and dicing in terms of rhetorical stepping stones.

But the real conversation — buried between the comment thread layers — has much more to do with why an individual cares enough to even begin to add something new to their teaching tool kit.

Frankly, I have no problem supporting someone who takes a flying leap of faith on the Wordle express train for one class conversation (as long as they quickly question its value/R.O.I. once its been in play with real students in a real class) vs. kick the obvious 2.0 puppy over and over just because it can’t hang with Plato and his allegorical cave or standard 6.227.77a as test day looms near.

And I unapologetically want to spend the rest of my teaching career side-by-side with folks who are willing to push hard on any tool — elegant or tacky — just to find the one that might be a hard-core dragon slayer over the long-haul.

Wordle will be next year’s parachute pants.

And so will the yeah vs. nay debate that hangs in its shadow.

But the principle of looking at something with sincerely fresh eyes — for just a few moments — becomes hard currency over time where it matters most for both students and teaching colleagues alike.

***

P.S. I’ll hook you all up with my all-school Wordle Poetry Slam rubric and collaborative curriculum calendar as soon as I figure out how to UStream it. Updates will also be added to the wiki and Ning I just set up, although the RSS announcement might be just as convenient for others who are too busy to remember to log-in. And when all is said and done, I’m hoping that you’ll all join my Death by Bullet Points VoiceThread after-party where we’re gonna get mad crazy with our fav del.icio.us word tags and Creative Commons light sabers.

And I thought that clawing around in a beat-up box of nearly gone Krispy Kreme donuts seconds before day two of my school’s all-faculty staff meeting this morning was going to be my focus in these early morning hours.

Turns out that it is the following:

“It excludes conjunctions, articles, and prepositions from its results which is fine for a fun toy but seems like an oversight in a composition tool.”

Amen on throwing in that comment, Dan. This is where the criticism begins to serve everyone involved…and offers a realistic lens to begin evaluating other such widget-y tools.

I do want to suggest — as a writing instructor — that the lack of such items is not necessarily a weakness in terms of the larger lesson I’d offer a student using this tool in a one-off sort of way.

All but the most poorly executed articles, conjunctions, or prepositions require tag teaming inside the arc of the more fundamental language engines: nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc. This doesn’t entirely remove the option to criticize Wordle, but it does allow a teacher to consider what his/her specific goals might be in deploying the tool in a larger analytical process.

For me, it still has game. Here’s why:

Rarely do I see a nomadic tribe of “the’s” or “and’s” running rampant in my student writing (save for poems which can either be e.e. cummings gold or fool’s gold depending on their talent) in such a way to think that Wordle’s lack of such articles/conjunctions would dramatically change the review/conversational game with my students. No tool does everything, nor does a single project, lesson plan, curriculum mapping meeting, or pedagogical debate. Sometimes a tool discriminates and openly ignores some potential data in order to isolate a single metaphor or frame a partial set of information in order to make a larger point.

I’m less eager to worry about the tool being perfect in terms of language/literary study. On the other hand, if it fosters a bit of early-year momentum to help my students begin to evaluate the frequency+quality spectrum of the adjectives they use early in the year vs. what they’re pulling out of their vocab holster in late spring…then this free and easy tool is going to get a seat at the table.

Going back to your response, I appreciate the following set-up:

“…but nine posts out of ten arise because I’m simply gobsmacked not by the enthusiasm, not by the hyper-modernism, not because I don’t like seeing people experiment or have fun, but by the absence of criticism.”

First, kudos re: gobsmacked.

I sense that it rarely gets the big font high-five in many Wordle images, so perhaps you’ll spark a widget-y revolution to keep this lovely Brit phrase alive and well on this side of the pond.

Second, “the absence of criticism” is the more important part of your reaction. And I agree.

The potential strawman temptation seems to lack this key characteristic, while pointing out the lack of prepositions drills down to the heart of why critical discussion is necessary whenever we brag about, blog-link to, analyze, or attack such tools. For what its worth, the tossing of tools like Wordle under the conversational bus grabs more blogging eyeballs, but once we get down to the literal specs (no conjunctions, for instance) we are finally freed up to honestly weigh the pro’s/con’s of any given tool. This allows us to then use them in more innovative ways to pull of more specific exercises in our classrooms. Or to appropriately kick ’em to the curb.

Third and finally (since my faculty meeting is going to be kicking off soon), you make a great point here:

“I’m still convinced that Wordle conflates quantity with meaning.”

Perhaps we can agree that Wordle (or whatever tool might be in our individual teacher box) is not the place where “meaning” will be found.

It is only the setting.

The real context — and ability to challenge/create it — exists inside the professional teacher’s mind while constructing authentic academic challenges, followed by the students’ own minds if we offer provisions for their rhetorical/reflective input as well.

Uh, I think all this critical commentary and analysis is great, but I rarely see you taking a swipe at text books which costs school districts money, and are often poorly aligned with:

1. State objectives (mine are completely out of whack with them to the point where a text designed for 5th and 6th graders is being used in fourth grade);

2. How students learn (http://mrpullen.wordpress.com/2008/07/07/everyday-math-and-spiraling/)

I have no issue with you asking how these Web 2.0 tools are being used in the classroom, THAT is a good conversation. What I have not seen is critical commentary on what we are given as text. I can recall one instance where you said something about your text being well aligned with standards.

Are you not having that conversation because it’s (a) too easy; (b) too Quixoti-esque, or a waste of time since you can’t fight city hall; (c) it’s better because it’s designed for it’s intended use? Or (d) is it just too boring to talk about? Inquiring minds want to know and all.

BTW: Many Eyes has added Wordle to it’s lineup. It already had a tag cloud that was being used not just to look at tag clouds, but also text. (http://flowingdata.com/2008/08/13/many-eyes-adds-wordle-to-its-visualization-toolbox/) so I think that Wordle and activities of this sort were getting the interest of stats and data design types.

Textbooks are slowly improving, the problem is teh state standards change pretty regularly, more often than schools can purchase textbooks.

I just got new ones for grade 8 history and the text/objectives were aligned perfectly with the state curriculum, so i’m excited to see the improvements.

Many times, it seems like a racket. Standards change, requiring the purchase of new textbooks, particularly in New York state with departments.

Dan, I understand, I just had to laugh when I saw your post on Animoto talking about the goals of educators in for-profit Internet providers colliding by accident, because frankly sometimes it doesn’t feel any better with the stuff that is MADE for educators.

I think basically if Larry F. can make a dancing elf work as an education tool, then *maybe* it’s less what the tool is than how it is used in the hands of a good teacher. I have a great new Wordle, YouTube, LitCrit lesson coming up that I think Christian will love (no telling how you’ll take it).

It’s interesting to me how much debate can occur over something so tiny! I’ve used Wordle – can I see myself using it daily? No! Can I see myself using it with students? Yes!

I just used Wordle to input my last set of report cards. the resulting glyph is here: http://tracevidence.edublogs.org/2008/08/23/the-wordle-debate-and-report-cards/

I found it interesting which words I repeated most often. I can see some areas where I’m going to need to change, to make the readability of my report cards a little better.