Timeline Object TEL Activities
Barbara Martinson, an associate professor in the Department of Design, Housing, and Apparel at the University of Minnesota, teaches a History of Visual Communication course. She wants her students to see the connections between art objects and events across time periods and to be able to compare and contrast them, but many students find related test questions to be challenging. She wanted to develop a group assignment that would help foster these skills. Last year, she took our Designing Learning Objects: Producing Media-Rich Learning Activities short course and proposed to develop a Design History Timeline learning object and related class assignments. Our consultants worked with her over this past fall and spring to create the object.
Campus Project
Learning objects are small, reusable chunks of instructional materials that can be included on course Web sites or with other digital instructional materials, such as blocks of text, photographs, illustrations, animations, audio/video clips, multiple choice quizzes, games, and other kinds of interactive tools. Martinson proposed to create an online representation of a timeline that would be organized by time on the horizontal axis and topics on the vertical axis. Users would be able to navigate to different historical periods and select thematic icons placed at different dates. The icons would link to pages that included three related images and text comparing and contrasting them.
During the fall 2003 term, Martinson designed the timeline/analysis layout and related student assignments, and our consultant Kurtis Scaletta used Macromedia Flash MXÆ and extensible markup language (XML) to develop the tool. Students in the fall 2003 session of Martinson's course developed the initial analyses using word-processing and AdobeÆ PhotoshopÆ software. Martinson plans to have students in the fall 2004 and subsequent sessions of her course develop additional analyses, use the timeline as a reference tool, and assess their own and other groups' analyses based on collaboratively determined criteria.
In the spring of 2004, Martinson was awarded an E-Teaching Award by the College of Human Ecology for "contributions to the use of technology in education that are creative, innovative, and effective." Scaletta says that her timeline assignments in particular are pedagogically effective "examples of constructivist theory in practice" because the students create original presentations and make thematic connections among images from different historical eras. In addition, the timeline object also serves as a motivational tool because it enables students to publish their work in a meaningful, real-world context. "Such connections to the outside world are highly motivating and represent a good use of authentic assessment," Scaletta says.
Bibliography
For more information about the educational uses of historical visualizations and other visual aids, see the following.
Lakoff, G., and M. Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. London and Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980.
This is a good introduction to how we use metaphors to think about and represent ideas. See Singh and Minsky's article for a description of specific metaphors of time and how they are represented in the form of timelines.
Rivera, Francesca. "If 'Writing about Music is Like Dancing about Architecture,' Maybe it is Time to Draw: Using Visual Aids to Introduce Musical and Stylistic Analysis." University of California Berkeley Graduate Division. http://www.grad.berkeley.edu/gsi/tea/essays_02-03/f_rivera.html
Rivera describes an assignment for which students created their own timelines and then aggregated them in class.
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. "Making Sense of Modern Art." San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2001-03. http://www.sfmoma.org/MSoMA/index.html. .
This online guide to the museum's holdings enables users to compare works from different times using a multimedia timeline. After the introduction, select "Comparisons Across Time," then place your cursor over an image. When a full view of the image appears in a white box, double-click the box. A new screen will load with the image in the middle and others around it. Drag another image you want to compare to the original image over it. A new screen with the images and descriptive text will load.
Second Story Interactive Studios. "The Endurance." Eastman Kodak, 1999. http://www.kodak.com/US/en/corp/features/endurance/home/index.shtml .
This Web site about the sinking of the antarctic ship Endurance includes a multimedia timeline superimposed on a map of the expedition route. Select "The Expedition" in the lower right corner, then select one of the orange dots on the map in the left half of the screen. The date and location will appear in the top left and descriptive text in the right half of the screen. A simple text timeline also is available in the "Reference" section linked from the bottom right corner.
_______. "Remembering Pearl Harbor Attack Map." Nationalgeographic.com, 2001. http://plasma.nationalgeographic.com/pearlharbor/ax/base.swf
This is an example of a multimedia, multidimensional timeline created to help users understand the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
Singh, Push, and Marvin Minsky. "An Architecture for Cognitive Diversity." Forthcoming in Visions of Mind, edited by Darryl Davis (2004). Also available online: http://web.media.mit.edu/~push/CognitiveDiversity.html .
In this article, Push and Minsky discuss a cognitive architecture for an artificial intelligence system. Of particular interest is their description of two metaphors we use to think about and represent time: as events "treated as atomic points on a timeline" or as events "treated as occurring over intervals on a timeline." For a more general introduction to cognitive metaphors, see Lakoff and Johnson's book.
Staley, David "Historical Visualizations." Journal of the Association for History and Computing III, no. 3 (November 2000). http://mcel.pacificu.edu/JAHC/JAHCIII3/P-REVIEWS/StaleyIII3.HTML .
In this general introduction to the use of visualizations in historical studies, Staley discusses how complicated multidimensional representations enable students to see thematic connections among discontinuous historical events.
