Geography and all that Jazz

"I've got the whole WORDLE in my hands..." Rob Chambers has been at it again, and launched a new blog looking at Cross Curricular uses of ICT One tool which has obvious use for this, but has plenty of geographical use, is Wordle , and Rob has provided a link to an excellent presentation on how to use this tool. This is well worth referring students to.... | View | Upload your own Show me what you manage to produce with WORDLE. ..

It's Christmastime.... Walk into any city centre shop and the usual Christmas music is playing on repeat... A superb idea was added to the SLN Geography Forum earlier today by Andrew Boardman . It's to take the lyrics of Band Aid : Do they know it's Christmas ? , and to reappraise them, and assess their accuracy to what 'Africa' is actually like... Will there really be "no snow in Africa this Christmas" ? or "no water flowing" ? The original single was released in 1984, with another version Band Aid 20 in 2004: 20 years on. Were the lyrics of the remake any better ? The original video can be seen here, thanks to YouTube.... The World Development Movement have already criticised the lyrics (some years ago now) for their portrayal of African communities, and the apparent 'reasons' for poverty. This is a nice way in to the portrayal of places in the media, and how the choice of images can influence opinion: something that OSOCIO is always...

Do you Wordle ? The CLEVER SHEEP blog of Rodd Lucier has a great post with 20 IDEAS FOR WORDLE.

Thanks to Tony , via Noel , via Wordle. Wordle is produced by Jonathan Feinberg, and is a toy for generating WORD CLOUDS from text that you provide, that can be pasted into a box. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends. M y del.icio.us tags... 2 obvious preoccupations of Geography and Resources, with a sideline in Google Earth and Blogging... Even a bit of teaching in there ;) I like this site WORDLE a lot, and it has some potential I think for representing in graphical format the key points in a passage of text and giving a textual, albeit graphic, representation of a textual landscape (or something...) In other words, it can give a new view on a dense passage of text. For example, here's a...