“A tag cloud or word cloud… is a visual depiction of user-generated tags, or simply the word content of a site, used typically to describe the content of web sites.”

The more frequently a word is used in a piece of text, or on a web page, the more emphasis is placed on a word (or tag) visually. You may have seen them on blogs and similar places all over the web, and a reasonable example is on the Using Moodle course on Moodle.org. (There’s a LOT of examples and good practice over at smashingmagazine.com.)

Wordle - www.wordle.net - makes making word clouds simplicity.  It uses Java in your browser for quick results, but with the option of saving your creation to an online gallery if you like.

Firstly, find some words. Hint: these are words!  Not just any words though, and not a word list either.  Copy the content of a web page, a document or even an email, paste it into the Wordle window and click Generate, and then wait a few seconds…

Click thumbnail below for full-screen goodness. Seriously, the thumbnail doesn’t do what this app can do justice.

That was, and is, Jabberwocky, as cut-and-pasted from Wikipedia into Wordle. This example is one I have created and saved earlier, however if you create one now, you can alter the settings which define how it is created. Because the program arranges the words randomly (more or less) no two Wordles will ever be the same, even if created with the exact same text. Go on, give it a go!

Here’s another example: I Wordled the BBC News page this morning:

There is a gallery of other user-created word clouds, have a look through to see what can be achieved. But more importantly, have a go yourself. All you need is Java installed and an appropriate source of words. Here’s my Jabberwocky saved as a PNG (I did that bit myself but check out the site’s FAQ) with the link back to the website to comply with the Creative Commons license (click for 1680×1050 goodness):

Wordle example using Lewis Carroll

Edit: I Wordled this website just after posting this entry, and this was the result after tinkering with the font, layout, colours…

Work bought in some training resources, and one such resource was a large number of IT-related (mostly MS Office related, like OpenOffice.org doesn’t exist!) quiz questions, a grand total of over 550. I dutifully exported the text from Word (I’ll leave the questions with images for another day) and used some hastily cobbled-together regex to search-and-replace unwanted text for the correct GIFT formatting. (Thank goodness for Notepad2.)

I’m listing here some of the resources I had to locate from around the Web, in the hope that it will help someone else.

• gift_reference.pdf - A useful PDF document which outlines most of the GIFT format.
• docs.moodle.org/en/GIFT - Main Moodle Docs page on the GIFT format, not that useful in itself but check out the links to 1) the above PDF document, and 2) a sample GIFT formatted text file (ZIP download).
• moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=99214 - Brief Moodle forums discussion about using HTML to include images into a GIFT format file. Basically, have the files within your Moodle course already, and hard-code the path to the images into the question. Can probably achieve the same with Markdown.

Some Quick Tips:

• Use \ to escape GIFT control characters.
• Use $CATEGORY: mycategory to categorise your questions.
• Use $CATEGORY: mycategory\mysubcategory\anothersubcategory to sub-categorise your questions.
• Probably a good idea to check your questions have the correct answers listed as being correct! (Quite frankly I’d expect better considering how much was paid for these resources…) ASYMMETRIC Digital Subscriber Line my ar$e.

I wanted to add feedback to my questions, which is quite easy to do, but with over 550 it seems like WAY too much work for little gain.

Expect the same life, universe and everything topics (no reason why not) as well as a redoubled effort to get my digital SLR out and about to capture some award winning photographs, but also I’m now getting stuck into virtual learning environments, teaching and learning technologies, and Twitter. God, I love Twitter.

More soon.

~Vaughany.