Visualising Events in Time: SIMILE Timelines

The SIMILE project is based at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and one of their developments are interactive timelines that you can use to visualise time based events.

This can be used to display historical events. In this example they've displayed the events surrounding the assasination of JFK, and if you have time to play with the code you can create your own variations.

Meg found a web service that uses this technology to help you easily create a timeline for your own web site. The 'My Timelines' service just uses the RSS feed from your web site and supplies you with the code to place a timeline on your own web site. Meg has created one for Cakes, and it allows you to easily view activity on the blog.

It could prove to be a good way of introducing the concept of RSS feeds to people, because it demonstrates how they work in a visual way.

Badger: Create Quick Links to Web Feeds

You can create quick links to web feeds, from relevant websites, very quickly using Badger.

Just add the details of the page, and select the colours and you'll get some code. Copy and paste this into a text block in your WebCT area and you'll get something similar to what you see below.


















It might still have some problems, but it looks like an simpler service to use than we've looked at before (FeedoStyle and FeedJ2S).

(Via Boing Boing)

Lawrie Phipps' Presentation on Emerging Technologies

Last month (25.01.07) Lawrie Phipps from the JISC Users and Innovation Programme came to the SOLSTICE Centre at Edge Hill University to talk about Emerging Web Technologies.

The session was videoed and edited into the 11 sections below. They are currently available as streamed Windows Media (.wmv) files.

01. Introduction - (2:55)
Links:
O'Reilly: What is Web 2.0

02. The Web as a Platform - (2:16)
Links:
Google Docs

03. Participation - (3:25)
Links:
Wikipedia: Edge Hill University
Wikipedia: University of Plymouth

04. Social Networking - (5:38)
Links:
SurfBird.com
ELLG Spaces

05. Data Consumption - (3:23)
Links:
Skibonk.com
also see: Googlemapsmania blog

06. Are These Useful? - (3:28)

07. Real Students and Their Digital Experiences - (8:34)
Links:
Instant Messenger
YouTube
MySpace
Google Mail
Blogger
Skype
Zoomr
del.icio.us
Writeboard
Nuvvo

08. Encouraging the Use of Technologies - (1:59)

09. What Next? A Look at Second Life - (4:08)
Links:
Second Life
What is an Avatar?
Education space in Second Life

10. Assessing Risk - [2:23]
Links:
Yahoo Mail
Flickr

11. Google Homepages - [7:36]
Links:
Google Homepages


In the future I intend to write some posts expanding on some of these topics from our perspective.

Finally, this nicely crafted video from Kansas State University seems to have been linked to by everyone, and it gives an overview of what we have been looking at here, and how the Web is evolving.

Web Cats: Episode Five - Interview with John Davey, SOLSTICE Manager

In Episode Five (10:45 minutes) Peter Beaumont interviews John Davey, SOLTICE Manager, about the role of the SOLSTICE Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL) at Edge Hill University.

Other viewing options:

• Subscribe to itpc://clickcaster.com/clickcast/rss/1163 in iTunes (select 'Advanced' / 'Subscribe to Podcast...')
• Watch .wmv streamed version in Windows Media Player
• Watch online at ClickCaster

You can contact John and the SOLSTICE team via email at solstice@edgehill.ac.uk or telephone on 01695 584744.

A transcription is available.