UCD Concepts

I ran across an interesting word application today and thought I would share it with you.

The site is called Visuwords™ and is quite intriguing.  You can find it at http://www.visuwords.com and I have included three screenshots to kind of give you a heads up.

Oddly enough, every time I performed a “Random” search, Jefferson Davis appeared.  I then thought I would be funny and type in the word “random” and see what appeared.

Now that’s more like it.  The search came up with something a little more meaningful.  I continued to play around with the site to try different words and although it was fun at first, it got boring way too fast for me.

So my question to you is, “What can we learn from a tool like this?”  Is this an every day tool or more of a novelty item?  Who would benefit most from this type of an application?

All good questions, right? Maybe.  Let’s give it some thought.

  Visuwords™ uses Princeton University’s WordNet, an opensource database built by University students and language researchers. Combined with a visualization tool and user interface built from a combination of modern web technologies, Visuwords™ is available as a free resource to all patrons of the web. 

This type of tool could be extremely useful to students that are learning the english language.  heck, any language really.  I tried typing in manana and it displayed the words “future, hereafter, futurity and time to come”.  Is futurity a real word?  It sure is.  I guess I really did learn something from this tool.  Wow.

Of course I don’t really speak spanish and took a wild guess at how manana was spelled, but all the italian words I tried brought up nothing.

So it looks like anyone can learn from this tool, not just students.  I am still wondering how often someone would really use the tool though.  It’s definitely a fun tool to play with so I will add it to my Fun Stuff category.

Go ahead and check it out at http://www.visuwords.com and let me know what you think.  How often would you use this tool?

Cheers.

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