Not that this was necessary. The edtech metaphor making for Martin Weller had completely run its course (and the great John Johnston sharing a way to feed it via a Google spreadsheet), yet I am still tinkering.
Today happened just because I was cleaning out old unread email, and found a link I had emailed myself (the original sneaker net) to perchance.org:
Perchance is a platform for creating and sharing random text generators. To create a random generator you simply create lists which reference other lists
It’s quite clever, and really approachable for fiddling, as the editor lets you see the results as you change things. I could go on about it, but spend some time looking around at what’s possible.
The other thing I like about this tool is that everything published is shared / remixable. So I took the basic template and quickly made a version that does everything the one I created before did.
Go to https://perchance.org/edtechaphor to see it, and click the edit button to look under the hood.
Setting it up means editing, adding items to the two lists- metaphor and technology, each of the items just indented in.
And the real gun is putting together the possible sentences, see how easy the syntax is? I just added a few more:
sentence Use [metaphor] as a metaphor for [technology]. How is [metaphor] an analogy for [technology]? What does [metaphor] tell us about [technology]? Join the new MOOC on how to deploy [technology] like a [metaphor]. Teilo knows that [metaphor] is just another name for chasing [technology].
There is much much more one can do with perchance, and everything it creates can be downloaded as some simple web files that could be run from your own site.
I did not really dress it up at all, but one could add quite a bit more with CSS. Or see a nifty plugin for creating layouts.
If I was teaching media or narratives class again, I’d definitely put perchance into the mix.
After all… “What does finding a big stick tell us about Artificial Intelligence?”
Image Credit: File:L&bperchance2.jpg is a WikiMedia Commons image shared under a Creative Commons BY-SA license.
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