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Timelining (a 2.0 approach)
July 3, 2007

xtimeline just launched in beta.  I am already planning how to use this tool--a kind of Wikipedia for timelining--for student research in September.

The tool allows you to create interactive timelines enhanced with images, videos, music, and Web links.    It stores timelines and allows multiple timeliners, or "friends" to collaborate and share collected knowledge. 

Students can build their own timelines.  They can examine, contribute to, and comment on the timelines of others. 

Each entry is set up for the following: an image, a pulldown menu of categories, tags, description, source.

Choices include the ability to allow views, edits, or comments from "my friends," everyone, or the timeline creator alone.

Timelines can be shared. Each timeline gets its own URL.  The site provides code for embedding timelines in other websites, blogs, etc.

Now, a timelining tool itself is not likely to inspire higher level thinking, but here's what I am thinking. 

• We can use this tool to build a history of our township in collaboration with senior citizens and our historical society. 
• We can use this as a presentation tool, for instance as a frame for presenting the family and immigrant stories our students often prepare.
• We can build timelines of controversial topics with other classes, perhaps from other cultures.  If we ask  students to be truly selective, we can compare reasons why different classes would find different events most important.
• We can build timelines that explore events that might have been left out of history, science, and other textbooks.  What were women doing?  What were children doing?  What was happening in the non-Western world?  What was going on in the worlds of music or art?
• We can create timelines relating to literature--novels, nonficiton, plays--that incorporate analysis.
• We can examine the timelines of others to analyze choices and improve them with richer description and analysis.
• We can ask students to evaluate and reach consensus by justifying the "most important" events.
• We can use this as a tool for learning evaluation strategies. As they should with all the documents they use for research, students should validate these timelines against more reliable sources. Students should ask, "What sources are the timeline builders using?"
• We can create carefully researched timelines, and share our new knowledge.
• We can up the level of thought by establishing what a good description looks like.  (Perhaps all descriptions need to have a "so what?" or an analysis element present. These criteria might be jointly negotiated by a class.)
• We can up the level of digital citizenship by insisting on solid documentation and by insisting students use copyright-friendly media in their timelines.

Check out Shakespeare's Colorful Life, Darfur: Timeline of the Crisis, and Timeline of the Harry Potter Series for samples. 

Note for the fainter of heart, fainter of policy, or folks who work with younger children:
Like any collaborative 2.0 tool, or any free Web 1.0 tool, students are just as likely to find solid curricular content here as they are to find the Life of Angelina Jolie or the History of Pornography.  ReadWriteThink (from IRA and NCTE) offers a timeline generator for a more protected environment.  Tom Snyder's Timeliner 5.0 is a commercial software alternative.

Posted by Joyce Valenza on July 3, 2007 | Comments (1)