Wordle: using cool gadgets for education

Bush's Speech on Afghanistan
Obama's Afghanistan Speech

I got this idea from another blog, Moving at the Speed of Creativity. The idea was to take Obama's latest speech on Afganistan and imput into the fancy Wordle program to visual annalyize the speech. Wordle takes text and transforms it into a word graphic, with the text size increasing with the amount of times each word is shown (Jane showed us this tool last year).

I never really put too much thought into how to use the tool, aside from making a fun logo for my myspace account or whatnot. But after reading that blog, I realized that it can be a wonderful annalyitical tool for large amounts of text. I took it a step further and entered in Bush's speech about Afganistan from 2001. Comparing the two speeches using the Worldle designs makes a large visual impact.

In Bush's 2001 speech, 'military' is the big stand alone. In Obama's 2009 speech, 'Afganistan' dwarfs the other words. 'America' is far more present in Bush's speech than Obama's. Obama's visual speech has 'people' in large print, whereas Bush's visual depiction shows many synonyms for 'terrorist' and 'outlaw' verses 'friends' and 'children'. Does this mean Bush is a more creative speech writer? Does it mean Obama sees all people more equally? You cannot tell from the visual graphics a lone. But, using these tools in conjuncture to reading the full text will allow students to gather a better understanding and perhaps an insight into 'reading between the lines'.

And just out of pure curiosity, here is a Wordle of my blog :)