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 2:28 pm (features)
In progess…
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!
April 2, 2008 at 6:45 pm (bug fixes, features, releases)
We’ve changed the code so that duration events (those with both a start and an end date) should only show as a discrete dot for the start date on the timeline instead of a bar that spans the distance between the start and end dates. The start and end dates are still reflected in the pop-up window.
The Modified and Created dates for events now include the time in addition to the date.
March 25, 2008 at 10:15 am (bug fixes, features, pictures)
Well, we changed the color for the “what’s new” from green to red. Green was very friendly, very appealing — but difficult to see in the lower band, since it was too close to the blue. Red is admittedly less friendly, but shows up very nicely on the lower band.
Also, the Ostermonster has fixed the problem with double quotes. We can now use double quotes in the title, source, and more info fields without losing information.
March 23, 2008 at 11:24 am (features)
We’ll find out this week what the students think of the new “what’s new” display. It’s already a great improvement from my point of view, however. Which is particularly interesting in light of the fact that supposedly, from the instructor point of view, the student posts are less about learning new material and more about keeping track of what they’ve done. So that would suggest that the list view would be ideal for me. And it’s useful, certainly. But I like stars and colors better.
March 20, 2008 at 7:41 am (features, releases)
This is a great example of the shifting priorities of software design based on real-world testing experience.
We initially thought a “list view” would be the best way to view “what’s new” in the site. We found quickly, however, that without the temporal placement relative to other events, the entries were lacking critical context.
But it’s time for the coder to stop pretending to know what he’s talking about from a pedagogy standpoint. 
I give you, What’s New version 2.0.0.0.0.1! <- Note the room for iterative revisions
The default is what has been created in the past 7 days, but this can quickly be modified to use for search filtering. The idea is to leave the non-matching entries there when filtering to provide context rather than showing a limited set of entries, but we may find a need for the latter case where we only want to view a limited set.
March 19, 2008 at 10:38 am (features, use cases)
Talking with a colleague in the biological sciences, I encountered a new wrinkle. We have already discussed the question of representing historical time vs. fictional time in the context of my courses. (we haven’t solved it, but we’ve discussed it!)
However, the needs of my colleague are somewhat different. On the one hand, she could use the timeline to represent the history of science, and sees that as a useful and practical supplement to her course material. On the other hand, however, and this is the part she found more exciting — it could be used to represent a particular process or reaction, something that might be measured in seconds or tenths of seconds. The thing is, while the timeline would quite easily accomodate one or the other, it will not so effectively represent both on the same line, because our “zoom” level is fixed, not adjustable. Furthermore, the events from the history of science DO have an absolute date — something was discovered in 1984, for example, and not in 2006 — whereas the specific process to be studied does not have an exact date. It exists IN time, but not at any one specific time. Arbitrarily assigning it a specific time is only an acceptable solution if it is not then coexisting with real-time events.
This got me back to thinking about the idea of having multiple timelines within a course, for different kinds of time, for different processes, for different student projects, etc. Then the question of how these different lines might interact (or not) comes up — should they be combinable? Could you import events from one to another? Private/public?
February 29, 2008 at 8:13 am (features, pedagogy)
Two incidents in class this week suggest that (brace yourselves)… just because a piece of information is on the timeline, doesn’t mean that it is also firmly lodged in the brain of the students in the class.
Well, duh.
From this, two reflections. I still think, observe, and maintain that the new posts, and the act of researching a post, represent an extraordinarily fertile mental space; that the students seem to be engaging with the material in a way different from anything I’ve experienced in a literature class. So the green and growing edge of the timeline is alive and well.
At this time, however, there is no accountability for older material, and no way to navigate it other than the rummage sale box method (sift around, see what you find.) Also, without a spiffier “What’s new” function, I think there’s relatively limited lateral contact with other people’s work, outside of the in-class show-and-tell (which works absolutely great, for what it does.)
I do plan for the final project to incorporate a degree of accountability for the content, in that each person will be asked to actively incorporate the timeline, using existing posts and posts added for the purpose, into their presentation. However, we are a few features short of that reality, insofar as we need a search/sort/limit function before this will easily work.
