Over the festive break, I've been wading through sorting out my browser bookmarks. There must have been literally thousands of them built up over the years that I've saved, never to return to them and take another look. I'll share them through my Delicious page when they're all sorted out.
As I'm in the process of sorting out all of my data in order to make my on and offline operations a little smoother, it seemed like a good time to tackle this oversight. I'm also tantalisingly close to having my own personal website ready to launch and have needed to deal with this as part of the background work on that.
Whilst sifting through URLs, one of the little treats I came across was this site (click on the link and follow the instructions) that enables visitors to turn their Last.fm profiles into a Wordle image. What that means to those who have or have used neither is making a word picture from the music that I most listen to.
Last.fm 'scrobbles' (sends the data to your internet profile) the music that you play on your computer and builds a picture of your listening habits, enabling you to connect to other like-minded music fans. Wordle itself is a great tool for visualising texts, and is particularly effective and finding themes in longer pieces. It does this by taking the words that are used most often in a text and making them bigger than the other words that are used less often. It's a tool that I really ought to use more in the classroom, but like with so many more of the online tools available to all these days, have yet to sift through them fully enough and actually try and be innovative with them. Guess that's part of what my data sift is about too - might help me to become a better teacher.
Although I might contest the results, it seems that I'm STILL listening to The Beatles more than any other artist. Rhombus, a dub act from New Zealand that I came across in Tokyo, seem to come in second, which I'd probably agree with. I also apparently listen to a lot of Tom Waits and David Bowie, again something I'd agree with. One or two surprises there though. Didn't think that I listen to that much Mozart.
As I'm in the process of sorting out all of my data in order to make my on and offline operations a little smoother, it seemed like a good time to tackle this oversight. I'm also tantalisingly close to having my own personal website ready to launch and have needed to deal with this as part of the background work on that.
Whilst sifting through URLs, one of the little treats I came across was this site (click on the link and follow the instructions) that enables visitors to turn their Last.fm profiles into a Wordle image. What that means to those who have or have used neither is making a word picture from the music that I most listen to.
Last.fm 'scrobbles' (sends the data to your internet profile) the music that you play on your computer and builds a picture of your listening habits, enabling you to connect to other like-minded music fans. Wordle itself is a great tool for visualising texts, and is particularly effective and finding themes in longer pieces. It does this by taking the words that are used most often in a text and making them bigger than the other words that are used less often. It's a tool that I really ought to use more in the classroom, but like with so many more of the online tools available to all these days, have yet to sift through them fully enough and actually try and be innovative with them. Guess that's part of what my data sift is about too - might help me to become a better teacher.
Although I might contest the results, it seems that I'm STILL listening to The Beatles more than any other artist. Rhombus, a dub act from New Zealand that I came across in Tokyo, seem to come in second, which I'd probably agree with. I also apparently listen to a lot of Tom Waits and David Bowie, again something I'd agree with. One or two surprises there though. Didn't think that I listen to that much Mozart.
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