The Timeline Beta Blog

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.