November

Adding to Delicious

I've added two bookmarks to my delicious account. The first is a reference to a book I read about on a blog about graphic design. The book, Decoding Design: Understanding and Using Symbols in Visual Communication, by Maggie Macnab, sounds interesting to me and is something I'd like to have in my own library at some point, but it is not yet available on Amazon. By bookmarking the link, I will remind myself to check in on it, so I'll know when to order it. The book explores principles of design found in nature and applies those same principles to visual communication in graphic design. This bookmark may appeal to Tracy, who shares an interest with me in learning more about designing blogs and web pages so that they are visually appealing.

The second is a site called Many Eyes. I think all teachers would appreciate this site because it posts sets of data, allows you to choose a means to visualize the data, and then allows you to customize and publish the data set. In addition, you can create your own data set and choose a "visualization option." Among the choices are: scatterplot, network diagram, matrix chart, word tree, maps, tag clouds, phrase nets.

Not only does this site have immediate application for use with students, it gives the reader an interesting look at the data sets that are being represented by users of the site. One can choose to view the information by date or by rating. For example, Vicki would be interested to have a look at a tag cloud of words used in Shakespeare's Sonnets posted on July 19, 2007. She could then read the comments related to that post, and could choose to register and make her own comments.

I will return to this site, just to snoop around. At some point in the future, I'd like to play with my communicating my own data set.