Instructify

With the success of technological advancements catapulting us into a world full of visual stimuli, learners are becoming more and more in need of visual qualifiers in order to completely understand a topic. Wikipedia and its brethren have done a wonderful job of linking topics by embedding links to other articles on the site and what the relationship is between subjects. Unfortunately, so often it happens that you’ll be doing some light research on Cane Toads, and the next thing you know, you’re on an article about Ultima Online shard emulation and you have no breadcrumbs to show you the path that led you into this distraction. Visuwords is the remedy for these black holes of information. The site is predominantly an application designed to visually show the links between words and their meanings, origins, and uses.

Simply type in a word into the search space, or hit the Random button to get a completely arbitrary word. The word appears as the center, and suddenly becomes surrounded by wistfully hovering orbs, each with a bond to other words that relate to it. Because of the Flash element to the application, you can drag the viewing area around, and you can expand any of the links and their subsequent connections just by double clicking one of the bubbles. The bubbles are color coded by noun, verb, adjective and adverb. The connections between the words are color coded and specific – for example, a solid green line means, “is a kind of.” Think of this as the model of an atom, with the search word as your nucleus, and the surrounding words as the electrons and such that make up the atom. Check it out for yourself, and maybe you’ll find that visually learning words and their meanings might be your thing. –JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

Visuwords