Despite having felt "internet savvy" for a while, after doing some student teaching it became incredibly clear that the generation below me has a much better grasp on whats out there. Students talked about sporcle.com and tumblr.com and all these other sites that I was completely oblivious to. One website that they turned me on to was wordle. It's this website where you can either enter text, a URL to a blog or blog feed, or a del.icio.ous user name to create a jumbled mass of words to create an amorphic shape. From there, you can adjust the color palette, shape, font, etc. It really becomes a quite poetic experiment and unites both visual art and literature. There's something intentional yet spontaneous about the whole project. On the website, there's a gallery of users. I think this could be incorporated into an English classroom (or any classroom) to be a fun excercise in wordchoice, poetry, or just an interesting art project. As for me, I did a series based on a coversation between one of my friends and I via e-mail. (Feel free to click on any of the images to enlarge).
I find this particular experiment interesting because you can
draw out words that are similar in each piece...you can
see topics that were passed back and forth.Even though all
the words are there, the complete idea that was originally
transmitted via e-mail is completely lost. It's truly an
aesthetically intriguing,yet poetically engaging experience.
If you want to play with Wordle click here.
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