Even before social media there were so many tools to be used for training and facilitation that it was hard to get a grip. Nowadays, this seems even harder. Fortunately, there are people out there providing a helping hand. Top 100 Tools for Learning 2011 provides a useful list of practical tools that are actually used by the people voting for the list.
One of the tools that made the 2010-list is Wordle. Go to Wordle and see how easy it is to create a word cloud. You can feed in text or an url and the playing starts: what font to use, what colour scheme, what orientation … You can also remove words from the wordle picture (right click and remove). For each of these actions you will immediately get a fresh wordle.
What you get is a visual summary of a text or site. Words that are used more often are bigger in the picture and thus keywords or repeated words are more easy to pick out and dominate the picture more than others.
This visualisation of the main words in a text can be useful if you are making an inventory of expectations or evaluations of participants:
Expectations
Evaluations
Provided you have Internet access, both of these visualisations can be made during the workshop or training. You can make it an assignment for the participants or do it plenary, and agree with the group on what picture represents the groups feelings and ideas best. Once this is agreed, the Wordle can be used as a starting point for discussions with participants on the main issues to be dealt with or the main conclusions of an event.
A Wordle can also be used to show the key elements of what you will talk about. Of course it is not as organised as a mindmap or as slick as bullet points, but the advantage is that the key words are highlighted because of their size and form part of a whole picture that does not force the audience to decide on order or linkages yet. In that sense, such a picture leaves more space to the speaker to make connections and provide organisation to the word chaos. The speaker can thus perhaps surprise the audience more with the story. Very possibly, the audience will also be more focused because they cannot already guess from the slide what will be the next point to be made.
Participatory Development
