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.
March 3, 2008 at 9:04 pm (Testing, bugs, to fix)
Well, for some odd reason, students don’t really want to test the timeline as an independent study tool when IT WON’T EVEN POST TO THE TIME PERIOD THEY NEED TO STUDY. So our “unpleasant discovery” of last Friday has negated our possible study-tool tester. Apparently, this is a problem with Cold Fusion. (We are writing the beta version in Cold Fusion before turning it into a native Sakai environment app once we have the bugs coralled a little better.)
So, rats. But we did learn about an important glitch, in a not-entirely dire context, either for us or for the student.
I’ve another class trying out the ripple self-assessment map (though I encouraged them to adapt it as necessary to describe their experience.) I asked them to pick one or two posts that they felt had been particularly effective or interesting and try to map out where it had taken them. So we’ll see what comes of that.
February 29, 2008 at 3:10 pm (Testing, to fix)
Our timeline will not accept BC dates. Oops. Gotta fix that…
February 29, 2008 at 8:01 am (Testing, pedagogy)
We’ve got another testing angle going. A very strong student, self-described Painfully Visual Learner, with a monster art history test looming on the horizon…. and the intrepid and opportunistic Professor Hurlburt says, “Do you think the timeline might be a good way to study for that test, if you had your own?”
“Well,” they said, “Yeah!”
And we set them up. And now we are waiting, almost forgetting to pretend that we are the ones doing the student a favor, to see what comes of it.
I’ve no idea how much of a pain in the Tech Services patooty it would be if this thing extended to students being able to each set up their own timeline. But I think that application is a question worth asking, and we’re asking it.
February 26, 2008 at 11:54 am (Testing, features)
Well… sort of.
Embed commands work in the popup window, as long as the size of the object is less than the 300 pixels (I think that’s what it is) of the popup window. Youtube video is 425 pixels wide by default, and won’t let us change that by hand to resize. Dailymotion.com has an “embed small” option which gives you code that WILL paste into the description field and work. Quicktime also works fine, although I’ve been using net tools to generate the “embed” stuff. In either case, however, the question of how to make it easy for students to use seems the real challenge.
Note that Youtube.com video works in the flat view. It just doesn’t work in the popup window.
Set all videos to autoplay=false, otherwise when you go to flat view, they ALL START PLAYING AT ONCE. <ahem>.
February 25, 2008 at 12:54 pm (Testing, bug fixes, bugs, to fix)
More bugs have cropped up in the last week, which is to be expected now that we have 21 different students trying to use the timeline, instead of just 4.
The title field does not like double quotes. In fact, it dislikes them so much it just eats everything that comes after the double quote. Since lots of people are using double quotes to express the title of movies or books, this is a problem.
Note, however, that it doesn’t eat the quotes until you attempt to revise the post. The initial post will go up correctly. When you edit it, something happens in the process of retranslating the database information to the editing form.
February 12, 2008 at 10:44 pm (Testing, bug fixes)
So, when someone asked me today what would happen if they entered “January 0, 1832″ instead of “January 1, 1832″ (the second being our current convention for indicating a date that is only accurate to the year)… I said I didn’t know. And suggested they try it.
The problem with creative beta testers, however, is that they just aren’t content with running one test at a time.
So. We now know that putting in a 0 date takes you to 1905. We’ve been taken to 1905 before, and never knew why. So this is progress.
We also know that embedding image links directly into the description text works, although in this case I would add that the first time I looked at the window, only the first kitten showed up. I had to click on the second link to get it to appear; now that I have, it comes up again.
Something about this post has also eliminated the little blue dot marking the point on the timeline — the title appears, but no dot.
Then we come to the broken image link, and another mysterious link, which when you click on it, sends you HERE:
The address on this link would inspire suspicion in many a soul less jaded. So we go and investigate the source code for the post, and discover the hidden message behind it all — here:
I haven’t actually figured out how many different test posts it will take to unravel the issues discovered here, and even once I do, it’s not going to help with this kitten problem.
February 12, 2008 at 5:43 am (Testing, pedagogy)
Tags: cinema pedagogy, syllabus
Today I introduced the project to the students in my Introduction to French Cinema course. We are already using a technology tool for that course, from voicethread.com, that allows you to record audio comments and annotate (draw, etc) video clips. This tool has only been available for a very short time (December or so) and seemed so ideal for working with film that I have given it priority over the timeline in the work stream.
I’ve decided to go ahead and ask them to post to the timeline on a weekly basis, however, and we will see how it goes. I was motivated to do this, and indeed regret not beginning sooner, although they have not been idle, by Renoir’s films. Understanding what was happening in France and Europe in the 1930s is critical to fully appreciating these films. So I posted about Munich, and Czechoslovakia, and showed them how it works today, and we will see how it goes.
Doing beta testing with real live students is more than a little nervewracking, since it has been my experience that in general students prefer NOT to have things change mid-semester, and the very exploratory nature of the technologies I’m using this semester (both the timeline and the voicethread) mean that it’s simply impossible for me to anticipate all of the ways in which the assignment will work. Changes to the assignment structure are therefore inevitable; we will hope that they are not also detrimental to student attitudes.
February 6, 2008 at 3:30 pm (Testing, features)
Tags: date, error, features, feedback, fields
From the comments, a “Doh!” idea for us :
“It would be nice to have a better creation error screen. That is, rather than saying “Oh no! Admin has been told that you messed it up, jerk” it would say “You know, including a DATE might be helpful. Go back and put one in, you.”
Maybe we can implement “required fields” (hm, let’s see, those are usually in bold, and then they turn red when you do it wrong..), so that it will send you back when it’s empty.
I do have a question, however. Can we really program this thing to be sarcastic? 
February 2, 2008 at 11:46 pm (Testing, to fix)
Tags: form, polish, todo, ui
Just got the following error email:
The argument BEGINDATE passed to function setbeginDate() is not of type date.
I suppose that would happen when you don’t actually type anything in the field:
Event Data
struct BEGINDATE [empty string] EID 0 ENDDATE [empty string]
Time to get validating BEFORE people submit data…
