Asia-Pacific Forum: Youth Action on Climate Change;Exploration through Cultural Expression

Wordle to Save the World

24-27 January 2011Bangkok, Thailand

Nurul Hussna A. Rahman Malaysia

• Introduction of Wordle

• How ‘Wordle to Save the World’ can inculcate awareness of climate change among youth

• Conclusion

Wordle

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. 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.

http://www.wordle.net/

Wordle

• A web-based tool for visualizing text.

• Wordle creates tag-cloud-like displays that give careful attention to typography, color, and composition.

• A kind of medium of expression.

• Wordles are close relatives of tag clouds, but look remarkably different they are striking graphic statements + different font sizes .

• Exciting way to display text as art.• A combination of graphic + words= trigger mind.• It sparks a sense of environmental knowledge aware

of what they should know and do in daily life save the ecosystem.

• E,g: ‘Wordle to Save the World’ in classroom has becomes a source of knowledge to students to understand the issue of climate change better.

• Words in the graphic is combined in creative manner to attract their eyes to gain clear understanding of the causes, effects and ways to overcome climate change.

• The beauty of the art will be captured in mind and later, will trigger inner sense to make them realise their roles to save the world.

Why wordle?

According to survey done by Jonathan Feinberg and his team, participants’ preference for Wordle can be broadly grouped into different categories:

• Emotional impact

• Attention-keeping visuals

Emotional impact

• Wordles have more emotional emphasis, colours and layout enhance the meaning.

• Wordles are colorful, more visually interesting, more of an emotional response and connection with the viewer than the tag clouds.

• Wordles are more engaging. The colours help your eyes to move around and take in different words. The design of Wordles gives them more visual and emotional impact.

Attention-keeping visuals

• Wordles are more effective because they are more attractive and interesting will be more inclined to read them.

• They are more visually engaging and stimulate further inspection. They are more interesting to look at, and therefore you will look at them longer/more closely.

• They look like art and make you look twice, then all of a sudden you are reading, thinking, feeling good and learning.

Feinberg. J., Wattenberg M., and Viegas F.B (2009) Participatory Visualization with Wordle.

Step 1. Go to http://www.wordle.net and click on “create.”

Step 2. Enter or paste text in the designated box.

Then click “go.”

Step 3. Your new word cloud will now appear. You may now change the font, size, color or layout of your word

cloud.

Step 4. Print your

word cloud or save it to the

shared gallery.

How to Use Wordle

Ways to Use Wordle

• Classroom – teacher, students

• Public art – youth, community

- t-shirt designs, logo, etc.

Whole-group discussion

Q+A = Discussion + responses to generate common themes

Example: Group leader can ask members a question and post their responses based on wordle shown. Then, begin a discussion on the topic.

Word Games Create sentences from the word clouds

Example: choose random word from wordle construct sentences focused on a specific topic.

Students’ reflection Reflect on concepts, text, or ideas learned

Example: New concepts are introduced You learn and reflect.

Words association Associated words of climate change

Example:

Source- Pollutants, Gases

Effects- Global warming, Acidic rain

Ways- 3R’s,Educate, Control

Key concepts Create visuals to study key concepts

Example- Global warming

Expanding talent Songs, poems, essays

Examples:

Based on Wordle Create songs/poems/essays about related topic.

Your task: Create a short poem based on the wordles shown.Good Luck!

Benefits

• Wordle is a very user-friendly application.

• Wordle has a variety of fonts, layouts and color schemes and users will find that there are many different uses for it. A lot of fun activities can be done!

• Wordle will present information in a way that will capture and keep readers’ interest and attention.

• Wordle, is a way to take a complex subject matter and break into smaller relevant pieces. Summary

Conclusion

‘Wordle to Save the World’ is believed to be such magical tool that leads to

meaningful understanding for our youth in order to realise that the issue of climate

change is not alien to us.

3Rs Song