July 30, 2008 at 8:18 am (Testing, features, to fix)
Unless the Simile group says otherwise, it looks like when building the data file for the timeline, we’ll have to truncate any date prior to January 1, 100 AD to just the year (no month, day, etc.):
There are examples of dates that live in this realm in the Simile examples, but they all have precision down to the year.
July 28, 2008 at 2:44 pm (to fix)
Recent unfortunate discoveries include… a very ugly word-wrap problem in Firefox 3. Functionally, this doesn’t seem to be having any effect, but it sure looks nasty.
Also (and how did we not notice this before?) No scroll bar on list view when you open it in a new window.
Ick.
July 28, 2008 at 2:28 pm (features)
In progess…
July 18, 2008 at 8:54 am (assessment, pedagogy)
I’m reading information provided by the TLT group about assessment. Specifically, I’m looking at what they call the “flashlight approach.” This fall, we want to design an assessment process that would be administered at both ends of the course, before the students used the timeline and then after. We’re looking for some good advice on productive ways to approach this task.
The basic goals of the flashlight approach, as reinterpreted by yours truly in the context of this project :
June 27, 2008 at 12:02 pm (features, releases)
With Summer here, you would think we’d be taking it easy, but we’re hard at work converting our prototype application to native Sakai code. Once things are in reasonable enough shape, we’ll move the code to Sakai Contrib.
June 26, 2008 at 2:45 pm (features)
Well, school is out, the students are gone, the grades are in. For the last month we have spent a lot of time talking about the timeline project, at Pomona College on May 21 and then at the NITLE Sakai Users’ meeting in Tacoma on June 12. These presentations went very well, and we’re looking forward to following up on the contacts we’ve made. Mike will be taking the show on the road next week, to the annual Sakai meeting. It’s going to be in Paris this time, so it’s important to feel sympathetic to the effort he’s putting forth.
We’ve fallen off the blog wagon a little bit with all the travel, but we will be posting development notes as we progress over the summer. At the moment, we are hip-deep in the transition from Cold Fusion code to native Sakai. If you are visiting us for the first time, we encourage you to browse through the semester’s posts for screenshots of our virtual progress as well as pictures of the corresponding physical wall constructed in Sarah’s courses this semester. You’ll also find development notes, student reactions, and numerous stories and reflections about the pedagogical uses of the timeline tool. You may even inadvertently learn something new about the French Second Empire while you’re at it!
May 6, 2008 at 8:11 pm (assessment, pedagogy, releases)
Last week’s presentation to faculty was very successful. Approximately 30 people attended, which is marvelous for the end of the semester, and they seemed very engaged and asked a lot of questions. I had a mole in the audience to make sure we noted down all of those questions (I was too busy trying to answer them to take notes).
I’ll start with the outline I posted at the beginning. As you can see, most of this ground has already been covered in the blog.
DESCRIPTION – What is the CLEo timeline tool and how does it work ?
APPLICATION – Using the timeline in & out of the classroom
ASSESSMENT – Concept maps of student timeline posts
OPINION – Survey of student attitudes
Here are the questions asked by the faculty, and a brief sketch of some answers
Did students work in groups? Short answer: no.
Why is some stuff off “the wall” (above main timeline) The physical timeline corresponded to when the books were written; the students, however, kept posting about the time period when the books supposedly took place. I blogged about this in “When are we?”
Did you grade the concept maps? What is the relationship between the concept maps/posts and the assignments? I didn’t grade the concept maps, except as a “done/not done” grade. My most immediate plan now is to use them when designing research trajectories for the hands-on research methods session with the library in the fall. So they are going to have a significant impact on assignment design for me. In terms of student assessment, I think that they have a lot of potential as self-assessment tools, a way of getting students to reflect upon a learning process of which they may otherwise be unconscious.
Do you limit the number of words they can have in a post? Were they forced to discriminate the content, aka choose the valuable nugget of information? No, I didn’t limit. I did tell them informally that I didn’t think the timeline was an effective way of displaying large amounts of information, and then I think that their own experience demonstrated that to be true. So I think they were forced to discriminate the content, systematically and even extensively, but that this was almost a “natural” consequence of the format. In the cinema course, most posts averaged between 100 and 150 words. In the 19th-century literature course, posts were either less than 50 words (for little things encountered while researching the main post) or 200-250 words, most falling into the latter category.
In your survey, were your grumpy people always grumpy in their answers (and in class)? Mostly, yes. The person who preferred traditional lecture and didn’t want to listen to what a bunch of “dumb kids think” – well, that person wasn’t meant to be happy in my class even before the timeline assignment. 
I also strongly suspect that the three people who indicated that they spent less than 30 mins per timeline assignment got out of it (and out of the course) about what they put into it. This being said, the grumpy person(s) were very much a minority.
How did the students claim dibs on what items they would put in the timeline? How long do you think they took to make their posts? I told people not to double post – that if someone else got there first, you needed to post about something else. But since list view and the colored “what’s new” functions were added over the course of the semester, I didn’t really hold that line very hard. In any case, it was only very rarely crossed, and by accident. As for time to write a post, I told them initially that I expected them to spend about 45 minutes on a post, based on my own experience with how long it took to find things, and when I would hit information saturation. The majority followed that guideline.
Did you worry about plagiarism? Yes and no. We made the “source” field mandatory, although I only rarely checked on the sources listed. It was surprisingly easy to identify cut and paste, simply because the timeline post format was so dense compared to most of the sites they would consult. I think that in the next round I will be able to instigate a library resource requirement, a certain number of posts that must include paper sources, which will encourage responsible citing.
What happens in areas that are “dense”, full of events? Can you zoom in/out of the timeline? The SIMILE timeline allows you to hardwire in a “zoom” for a specific period, but we are still pretty far from making that available on demand. We’ve got it back on the list of development priorities under consideration.
Can you export stuff and re-import it in to other timelines? Not yet, but we’ll be adding that feature in the fall semester (2008).
(This question from a person who had observed a timeline class session) How do you think about the cost balance of doing this? Amount of time it takes relative to the pedagogical gain? What was useful to me in watching you do this is how you used this tool. I had originally been worried about this stuff just being interesting details for a generation that likes sound bytes. What I liked about what you did is how you kept bringing this back to the text. I felt very strongly that the payoff was worth the class time. I would say that if you aren’t willing to spend at least some class time with the assignment you probably won’t see a dramatic impact compared to other kinds of information presentation or organization. I do realize, however, that the structure of the assignment as I have planned it would really have to change with larger classes. One possibility we are looking at is making it possible to have multiple timelines within the same course. Then timelines could be created by teams, or could be used to present lab results, a chemical reaction… We are really looking forward to more diversity in the faculty test group, so that we can discover and address the needs of courses that deal with time on a less human scale.
Could this tool be adapted to organize things topically or a different category than time? For example in a novel, you organize things by character? I think that concept mapping programs might do this more successfully than our timeline. We’ve come up with a couple of examples of things that exist IN time, but not at a specific date – narrative time, for example, where an hour can take three pages, and a jump of ten years three words. Or “chemistry time” – a reaction that follows a specific timeline but does not necessarily exist, say, in 1998. These examples still respect a certain linear logic, however, that distinguishes them from category by type.
April 28, 2008 at 10:40 am (pedagogy, pictures)
Well, Friday (April 25) was the last day for timeline posts in class this semester. The 19th-century students are to incorporate a contextual element in their final projects, but otherwise, the teaching part of the timeline beta test is pretty well complete for Spring 2008.
The 19th-century course generated 130 posts for 10 assignments, including those that I posted myself. The cinema course, with 17 students and only 4 assignments, generated 102 posts. Here’s a shot of the wall for 19th century, with its 130 bits of paper.
I will be presenting my experiences and results to interested faculty here at Whitman tomorrow at noon. I’ll be blogging about that, and about my plans for the next round of testing. We also have a presentation at Pomona on May 22, and at UPS on June 12.
April 22, 2008 at 7:55 am (Survey, assessment, pedagogy, use cases)
We always do this with assessment; we frequently to do it in our course material. Our tests/assignments/exercises attempt to teach (or enforce) a larger amount of knowledge than fits into the moment. You still have to do all of the reading, even if we don’t cover it in class. Next week’s test will cover X amount of material, but only ask Y questions. If you knew which questions those were, you could save a lot of time… but you don’t.
One of the things that happens with Web 2.0 is that teachers get all starry-eyed thinking that we’ll be able to use the same old pyramid trick, but with carrots instead of sticks. Instead of getting students to do work by holding them accountable in a traditional sense, we are going to motivate them to cover that ground by sheer coolness. Except that, oops, guess what — students are really good at telling the difference between work and… not-work. Sigh.
Today’s survey results fall on both sides of this question. Since I want to work with four questions from the survey for this point, I’m posting them as images rather than listing the results.
I learned more information researching my post than I posted to the timeline.
Nobody disagreed with this; out of a total of 18 respondents in the two courses, only 3 people were even neutral on this point. This is a classic example of a successful pyramid scheme assignment. It’s also the locus of some of the most active critical thinking around the assignment. Pick a topic, explore it broadly, narrow the field, select the pertinent information, synthesize, post. Fantastic.
Now, the story of that extra information doesn’t end there, however, and I think it would be less successful if it did. By having the students present their timeline posts in class, a lot of the extra information that didn’t make it into the little 150-word post DOES get communicated as part of this presentation, in which the students usually describe their research trajectory as well as their conclusions. Hence our next question(s)….
I learned a lot from other students’ posts during class presentations. / Presenting and discussing timeline posts was a productive in-class activity.
I’ve lumped these two together for discussion. Again, the responses are globally quite positive. Less than a quarter of the students disagreed with this statement, about a quarter of the students were neutral, and slightly over 50% agreed or strongly agreed. I think, too, that these questions are impacted by student attitudes towards peers as a reliable source of information. Students who only listen attentively when the instructor is speaking, and tune out the rest, are not likely to glean much benefit from this format. It should be noted, however, that I am very active during these presentations – in between each one I usually speak for a few minutes, expanding or linking the information presented to the course material at large. I use them as a dialogical framework for information that I might otherwise present as straight lecture.
I learned a lot from other students’ posts outside of class.
What is surprising about this question is that anyone responded in the affirmative at all. Before we implemented the list view on February 14 (3 weeks into the semester) there was no way to identify new posts whatsoever. The list view was an imperfect, but at least functional indicator of recent activity. However, it wasn’t until we put in the color coded new entry function on March 20 that we had a true, visual representation of recent activity, one that was visible on the timeline (and so in context.)
Because there was no real way to monitor recent activity, the only accountability I imposed for reading classmates’ posts was that duplicate posts were marked down. In other words, check and make sure someone else didn’t get there first. This was much more of a factor for the cinema class than the literature class, because they were researching narrower topics (New Wave films, for example) and because there were more students.
I’m unsure whether I want to implement greater accountability for peer information in the next round. The question of quality control becomes much more pressing if the students are to be held accountable for the information. I like the in-class presentations, and I think that the visible “what’s new” function is going to increase the level of browsing. I can easily imagine a different subject area or assignment format, however, where an instructor might want to hold students accountable for the timeline information.
April 21, 2008 at 7:29 am (Survey, assessment, pedagogy, use cases)
Two questions on the survey targeted the issue of learning styles. I was trying to get a sense of where students situated themselves in relationship to this style of presentation of information.
I prefer traditional lecture as a source of contextual information.
This question got the most uniformly diverse response of any of the questions. For the larger class, results were exactly symmetrical – 1 person strongly agreed, 1 strongly disagreed, 3 people agreed, 3 people disagreed, and 6 people checked “neutral”. For the literature class, there was one response per category for all but “strongly agree”.
I find it interesting that the same person who indicated that they strongly preferred traditional lecture also provided the most negative responses in other areas. (see my response to their comment here.)
I consider myself a visual or kinesthetic learner.
This was surprising. According to the VARK project, approximately one third of the population has a visual or kinesthetic learning preference. However, in response to this survey, two-thirds (9) of the cinema students either agreed or strongly agreed with this statement. 4 students were neutral, one student disgreed. For the literature class, 3 of the 4 students strongly agreed with this statement (the 4th student checked “neutral”.) So, the number of students in these classes who consider themselves to be visual or kinesthetic learners was twice as high as what the VARK would have predicted.
However, contrary to my normal practice, I did not ask students this semester to take the VARK survey at the beginning. Over a third of the students have worked with this survey with me in the past; others may have encountered it with other professors. But there was no systematic approach to diagnosing or defining student learning styles at the beginning of the semester, other than my own overtly expressed attempts to cater to all learning styles in my teaching. At the same time, the subject matter itself may have biaised the sample towards visual learners – a course on cinema – and all four of the literature students have worked with me before.
From our grant proposal:
Current research into learning styles indicates that students with a preference for visual and/or kinesthetic modes of information presentation make up approximately one third of the population. These students are typically disadvantaged in higher education compared to students with a strong textual preference, or students with strong aural abilities – the two modes of information presentation that dominate in the traditional classroom. Visual and kinesthetic learners, however, will struggle in this environment. The timeline module will improve the learning experience for these students by providing them with the information they need in the format that they understand and retain the most quickly and easily. It will also enable professors who do not normally (because of their own learning styles) present in a kinesthetic or visual format to better support these students.
An important next step for testing in the Fall would be to diagnose learning styles at the beginning of the course, before the assignment itself has influenced their perception.
