A redirect link called “Visit the NASA Portal” on one of NASA’s galaxy of webpages sent me to the url nasa.gov. The page is worth a semester’s study in a web design class. There are many, many features ranging from old school nav bars top and bottom to the usual gorgeous photos and an interactive poll. You can read it in two languages, but when you switch to Espanol most of the cool stuff turns to plain text.
The feature most at the edge of the web space horizon is the “Popular Content” feature illustrated with this post. Interestingly, clicking on one of the topics in the cloud just takes you to a text list like the Spanish language content. NASA has only displayed the surface so far with this idea, but the tag cloud format of the illustrated panel is, for sure, far out stuff.
Why? The tag cloud breaks away from the hierarchical relationship among the topics. Any of the topics in the panel can be associated with any of the others, depending on what the visitor has in mind. Each text item is a node that can be linked to any other. Venus, jupiter, saturn, pluto and mars can be linked to each other as planets and/or singly or together to the planets topic. The International Space Station can belong with mars when it is taking pictures of the red planet. Etc. etc.
We are only beginning to see the organizational muscle of tags for the content of the Internet. NASA is on to something with its tag cloud navigation. Educators should pay close attention to the principles in the tag cloud. They illustrate something basic about how we think and learn. Why not use tag cloud mechanisms instead of hierarchies for lesson plans and lock-stepping through grades and standards. The NASA panel is, quite directly, connecting ideas, which is a very fine definition of learning and teaching.
