Still, the physical keyboard is the preferred tool to use when you need to do a lot of typing. I’ve heard many people complain about their lost abilities to write neatly with pen and paper, and many of them are certain that typing is much easier and faster. For those who type a lot, touch typing really helps to improve speed. The dvorak keyboard never really caught on though, and qwerty is everywhere.

If you know where to find the keys, you don’t need vision anymore. For feedback on your typing you can rely on other senses: touch and hearing. The old mechanical typewriters had a nice typing sound that could really keep you in a writing rhythm. The people from Das Keyboard took this idea pretty seriously and created a keyboard with blank keys, no peeking. It has mechanical clicking sounds and keys that feel nice to your fingers.

• Das Keyboard: The mechanical keyboard that clicks
  A computer keyboard with blank keys and mechanical clicking sounds built into the keys. No visual feedback on this one, but tactile and auditory combined with memory and learning.
  (tags: keyboard design haptics)

My delicious bookmarks resulted in this image (I haven’t tried to optimize it, although Wordle gives a lot of choices):
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Not for navigation

This is clearly not a navigation aid. If you’d give your users the task of finding a particular word, they would in most cases score much lower than in the alphabetically sorted ‘clouds’. Nevertheless, it would certainly be a good idea to make the words clickable if this cloud were to be put on a website.

Chaos is good

In this case, visual chaos is good. The only structure in the data is in the relative frequency of the words. A artificially sorted presentation would give the impression of more structure than there really is. Most of the time, reality is interesting enough and does not need alteration.

Vertical text

Some of the words are placed vertically, the rest horizontally. Horizontal reading feels most natural. Vertical reading (e.g. reading the titles of books on a shelf) takes a little more effort. For mixed horizontal reading there is no clear, natural reading order. People don’t start at the top left corner, and people don’t start at the center; they just start reading ‘somewhere’, then read ‘something else’ in no particular order (unless you start taking other features into account). And this is exactly the behavior a word cloud needs.

In ‘Pedagogical Anthropology’ (1913) Maria Montessori wrote: “in order to educate, it is essential to know those who are to be educated.” Almost a century later these words are still very true. Even so, many of the recent developments in education can be characterized as politically (not empirically) inspired experiments, at the expense of lost potential and – maybe even worse – causing a slow extinction of Teachers: those people who can do the magic of imparting knowledge to their pupils.

At the same time, research on human development and learning continues steadily in for example developmental neuropsychology. There has been much progress in understanding the workings of the human brain. When Maria Montessori wrote her book, neuroimaging had yet to be born and experimental psychology had not yet collected the large amount of data on both normal and abnormal development; so she worked with insights from anthropology instead. Now the data is available and the knowledge is there, but they seldom find their way to modern pedagogy.

As a consequence, those who should benefit from education suffer. An example: it has long been known that children are very good at language acquisition (of their mother tongue); insights from linguistics show that this has to do with their capability of memorizing and the fact that they do not bother with rules, strategies and exceptions as much as adults do. In their education though, this is not acknowledged. Instead, they are asked at a very early stage to develop their own strategies and memorization progressively disappears from the curriculum.

“In order to educate, it is essential to know those who are to be educated.” This especially holds true for those who educate the educators. Much knowledge still remains unused, apparently the gap between neuroscience and pedagogy is too large. This calls for a bridge: neuropedagogy.