January 29, 2008 at 5:10 am (features)
Tags: categories, features, search, sort
We’ve talked about establishing content categories, that would be reflected in the color of the dot next to the entry. The more I think about it, the less certain I am that I could keep 4 or 5 different colors straight, especially since those colors could potentially mean different things for different courses. This may be a personal limitation, but still.
At the same time, I’m still thinking about categories. Right this minute, it seems to me like the most useful thing I could have would be two colors of dots, one color for things that really happened, and another color for things that happen in novels set in ‘real time”. So, Emma Bovary wasn’t really born in 1814, but it would be cool to put down that she was, but have it be distinct from, for example, Napoleon getting booted out of France. 
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January 28, 2008 at 5:15 am (Testing, pedagogy, use cases)
As part of our mission to bring manna to the masses, we have a new collaborator! Overwhelmed with the massive amounts of coolness emanating from the timeline wall in Olin 305, another humanities professor has asked to be part of the beta phase of this project. We’ve set him up with a timeline on his course CLEo site, and await further developments with aplomb, interspersed with enthusiastic hops. Up and down. In a decorous, professorial manner, of course.
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January 26, 2008 at 5:33 pm (Testing, pedagogy, pictures)
Well, we did it! We printed out our entries so far and taped them to the wall yesterday. It turns out that thumbtacks are longer than the foam core is deep, so we used tape instead. The new print function is just great over half the time. If there’s a picture and very little text, it’s a bit silly, because there’s all this white space. I’ve been snipping the caption from the left and taping it to the bottom of the picture, to save real estate on the wall. I also used screen capture to print some of my more recalcitrant formatting problems. The difficulty with the screenshot approach is that you have to hand edit out the identifying information, which is annoying and unreliable (as we humans generally are).
So, the format we are going to follow is that on the day the timeline assignment is due, you have to print out, AND TRIM (we discovered that doing the cutting in class is far too slow) your timeline entries and bring them to class. Then we post them, and have a short show-and-tell session, where each person indicates what they have added that week and explains how they came about that piece, how it relates to the course, and describes some of their thought process.
One immediate consequence of having actual events on an actual wall has been in how I inhabit the mental space of the classroom differently, because now as I talk, I can POINT, to 1848! We can walk up and down the wall, discussing things. Kinesthetic. Marvelous.
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January 26, 2008 at 4:42 am (features, to fix)
Tags: duration, features, vertical order
More thoughts on duration events. As follows.
1) the bar stinks. you can’t identify what it refers to unless the start point is on-screen.
2) It appears that the duration events display just below the single events, so at least they aren’t all mixed up. Could we get them to go to the bottom of the top layer?
3) It would be really nice to be able to indicate a duration for something without having it be a bar – so, put in an end date, and have the date show as “Jan 4, 1856 – Jun 5, 1856″ but NOT have the bar.
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January 25, 2008 at 5:20 am (features, releases)
Tags: images, print, wall
So, we’ve got a print function now, and it looks great. I haven’t actually made it to a physical printer yet, but it’s looking fab on the screen.
Note that strange things happen in the print view when the original image actually IS the size that it displays in the smaller popups. If you look at the “Poubelle” entry, which is up in the 1880s, in print view, you see that the original picture is smaller than the new print size, and so pixelates all over the place. Is there any way to detect when the resize is making it bigger than the original, and just go w/ original size?
BTW, “poubelle” is the French word for garbage can. Because it was invented by this guy named… poubelle. Yup. Honest to gosh true.
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January 25, 2008 at 5:19 am (pedagogy)
… it is SO NICE to have an actual thing to point to when talking.
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January 23, 2008 at 8:53 pm (pedagogy)
The physical twin to our timeline is up in Olin 305, and it looks MARVELOUS. There’s something really exciting about having the physical object in place. I can’t wait to start taping stuff to the wall.
The back wall of the classroom is 24′ across. We bought 5 sheets of 40″ x 60″ foam core. We mounted it horizontally, approximately 30″ off the ground. This was not a measured distance — we looked at the marks where the backs of the chairs had scarred the wall, and mounted the foam core about 4″ higher than that. Also, this was a height that allows me to still reach the top part of the timeline comfortably. I am 5′4″.
To mount the foam core, we just screwed it straight into the wall and then painted the screwheads with whiteout. Simple, effective. If this turns out to be the kind of stunt we want to repeat, I’ve talked to the physical plant about mounting mirror tracks along the back wall, that we could just slide the foam core into, without damaging the wall each time.
This is a class on 1852-1870; we made each inch a month, (12″=1′=1 year) and the timeline runs 1848-1871, with vertical lines at each year. The dates are written across the top. I took a wide black pen and the big level and drew a black border around the entire thing, which ties it all together and sets it apart from the white wall.
Now to get the print function working!
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January 23, 2008 at 4:47 am (Testing)
Tags: back, images, reload
- Clicking “back” after you have viewed an image link and the timeline disappears. You have to reload it from the menu.
- Until we can resize a linked image just like we do on an image upload, I think we should take that option off the form. It just farts everything up.
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January 21, 2008 at 9:46 pm (features, releases)
Tags: more info, recenter, source, useability
Yay for “more info” and “source” fields!
The fields have been in the “new entry” form all along, but did not display in the popups. Now we are referenced, and it even scooped up things that had been entered before we enabled this feature. Nice.
Use the vertical pipe | to separate multiple links. It will even accept old-fashioned bibliography references, like books.
AND, as if this cornucopia of goodies did not already overflow, the timeline now automatically centers on your post when you add a new entry. This is fantastic – it was very disorienting to add a post to say, 1862, and then have the timeline jump you back to the same not-1862 midpoint. Now the thing you are thinking about… and then posting about… and then looking at… all flow together in one seamless moment. Gorgeous.
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January 20, 2008 at 4:51 am (Testing)
Look at 1905. All of those events are duplicates, but with incorrect dates, (1905 dates!) of posts that appear elsewhere in the timeline. Huh???
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