A quick Google search for "word cloud generator" or "create word cloud" will produce varying results of free online word or tag cloud makers. I personally think the best of these is Wordle.net. Wordle allows you to quickly create a visual representation of keywords and their frequency. The below is one I generated from my own Curriculum Vitae or CV [PDF]:
 RSOE EDIS - Emergency and Disaster Havaria Information Service - AlertMap: http://hisz.rsoe.hu/alertmap/index.php?lang=eng |
 Rich Internet Applications for Language Learning: http://clear.msu.edu/teaching/online/ria/RIAs are web pages with multimedia interactivity embedded into them. CLEAR's RIA can be created with no programming at all. |
 Interactive Map: http://www.cer.jhu.edu/index.cfm?pageID=351The Interactive Map Tool is loosely based on a map metaphor, but isn’t bound to just creating maps. It allows the user to create a hierarchical structure of informational pages that can be nested. Nested pages can include anything from plain images to video and audio files, all with accompanying description text. The sites created in the Interactive Map Tool helps students understand the connections between concepts and spatial context in a way unlike any other. The Interactive Map Tool is loosely based on a map metaphor, but isn’t bound to just creating maps. It allows the user to create a hierarchical structure of informational pages that can be nested. Nested pages can include anything from plain images to video and audio files, all with accompanying description text. The sites created in the Interactive Map Tool helps students understand the connections between concepts and spatial context in a way unlike any other. |
 MIIM Project: http://maps.umn.edu/Open Source Web Mapping in K-16 Education. MIIM is a web-based application that introduces K-12 and post-secondary students to principles of geography and GIS. MIIM makes use of several open-source projects, including Mapbender, MapServer, and PostgreSQL. |
 Tracing the Visitor's Eye: http://www.girardin.org/fabien/tracing/So far the investigation of spatio-temporal patterns of people mainly rendered a quantitative understanding of the city. In our study, we intend to leverage implicit spatio-temporal data (i.e. latitude, longitude and timestamp) with the richness of people-generated information. Our approach is to consider that uploading, tagging and disclosing the location of a photo can be interpreted as an act of communication rather than a pure implicit history of physical presence. For this purpose, we retrieved from Flickr, large amounts of photo taken by thousands of users in the world’s most photographed cities. Based on the time, explicit location and people’s description of their photos, we design geovisualizations. They reveal patterns of tourists and citizens consuming a city, such as the flow of people between city attractions (see figures below), the monuments areas of influence or what is happening with day/night and working/weekend periodicity. |
Professors on YouTube, Take 2: http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/2704/professors-on-youtube-take-2
Face Research: http://www.faceresearch.org/
Per the website:
FaceResearch.org allows you to participate in short online psychology experiments looking at the traits people find attractive in faces and voices. Register to participate in experiments if this is your first time at FaceResearch.org or login if you have been here before.
Make your own average faces with our new interactive demos!
In addition to participating in facial attractiveness experiments, you can also complete lifestyle and personality questionnaires about characteristics that may be associated with face and voice preferences and see how you compare to others. We post all our study results after we have finished collecting data.
You can also learn about our computer-graphic technology and read about some of the findings of our previous studies.
Take part in an online questionnaire about Drinking Water and Soft Drinks by Moira Cruickshank, a student who is learning to program online experiments with us.
Crazy Egg – visualize your visitors
This is quite possibly one of the coolest ways to "see" your website as your users actually see and use your website. VERY USEFUL tool for anyone having to do some kind of web design/development!
I don't know if this is true or not, but it's a fun little thing to try out. Here is a little test to see if you are a right-brain or left-brain thinker. Here is what you do.
FYI: I’m a right-brain thinker, apparently. That actually surprised me, but then I thought about how I approach a lot of problems and it suddenly seemed very plausible.
I went ahead and stared at it for another 30 seconds--BINGO!--I got it moving in the other direction. It really reminded me of those autostereograms that were so popular back in the 90's; you really have to relax your mind and visual to allow for that switch to take place.
Many thanks to Ryan Bretag for the link to this little mind bender.
UPDATE: Newsmap is back and as good as new! Hooray!
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http://newsmap.blogspot.com/
A catastrophe happened! I went to check the news at my favorite news site: Newsmap and discovered that it was no longer there! Nooooooooooo!
I visited the blog listed in it's stead and learned that something Google has done has disabled Newsmap from being the fantastic resource that it was.
Please, if you're familiar with Newsmap, contact Google or show support for its continuation. I'd hate the easy-to-see-and-use world news of our lives go away.
AirSet is social networking for the busy and techno-savvy family and school.
http://www.airset.com/AirSet.jsp#app.Home_p.home
I'm impressed that it sychronizes with both Palm Desktop/PDAs and MS Outlook. I may switch to it if I could get my friends and family on board. Hmmmmmmmmmmm.
Vicki Davis does another great job of hashing out the pros and cons of AirSet.
Mashable: 30+ Mind Mapping Tools
An excellent collection of free and for-pay mind mapping tools. These are always useful to help you organize your thoughts and to help with brainstorming.
What am I going to use and survey in class? Some--but not likely all--of the below.
"Pre-Homework"
This week, I'm presenting a workshop for FDI at Virginia Tech called, "A Survey of Emerging Web 2.0 Technologies: Engaging Students with Technology to Build a Community of Practice". (Twelve academics are enrolled.)
What gets me is that no matter how many of the Web 2.0 technologies I actually use (MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Google Apps, etc.), I cannot believe how much more 2.0 stuff there is out there in the world. How does one cover the daily new ones (like Daylert and Microsoft Office Live), let alone existing ones? At best, I can only present a smattering of them ... thank goodness for the Go2Web20.net page.Gapminder World 2006 is what everyone at TED was talking about. It's not the actual talk about "3rd world countries" that got everyone excited, it was the use of animated, visual data that got all the attention. To be clear, the software in question is not called Gapminder; Gapminder Foundation is the Swedish company that started this. What powers this kind of data mashup is the Trendalyzer software (acquired by Google in March 2007) that enables Gapminder to do what it's doing with the data, but really, you're not interested in all of that. You just want to see it working for yourself to understand that you want it.
About this Talk
You've never seen data presented like this. With the drama and urgency of a sportscaster, Hans Rosling debunks myths about the so-called "developing world" using extraordinary animation software developed by his Gapminder Foundation. The Trendalyzer software (recently acquired by Google) turns complex global trends into lively animations, making decades of data pop. Asian countries, as colorful bubbles, float across the grid -- toward better national health and wealth. Animated bell curves representing national income distribution squish and flatten. In Rosling's hands, global trends -- life expectancy, child mortality, poverty rates -- become clear, intuitive and even playful. NEW: Download this talk in full SD resolution >>
There's a slew of them. Little bubbles of thoughts and words strung together through their associations, interactions, and connections to one another. They're the newest form of visual display for search engines: Quintura, Visuwords, TouchGraph, and KartOO (to name only a few). What are they? A quick breakdown is as follows:
TouchGraph: Oh, this is cool. Using Java and the Google APIs, you can create a visual display map to show the connections between related websites. As they define it, "The TouchGraph Google Browser reveals the network of connectivity between websites, as reported by Google's database of related sites." Check it out and see who and what ties into the things you looked into.
KartOO: A bit like TouchGraph, KartOO let's you search for keyword(s) and returns your data as visual associations to others. As they define it, "KartOO is a metasearch engine with visual display interfaces. When you click on OK, KartOO launches the query to a set of search engines, gathers the results, compiles them and represents them in a series of interactive maps through a proprietary algorithm."
SlideShare.net offers something of interest. It's a slideshow sharing site, like Flick'r or YouTube, where you can upload your PowerPoint, Keynote, or other slides to share with others. Upload the slides, tag them with keywords, and open them up to be viewed (and used) by others.
SlideShare describes itself as a "a cool place to host and share presentations. Upload all your slide decks, and find / download interesting presentations."
