Timelines

One of the side benefits of taking courses is learning about ways to depict information…and tools to assist with that depiction…in ways that enhance both perception/thinking and communication. I couldn’t resist looking more closely at two timeline tools. One was Tiki-Toki which a student in The Modern and the Postmodern Coursera course (being offered again starting Jan. 27) had used to make a timeline of the topics in the course. The other was a simpler timeline tool from readwritethink - a site I learned about via the K-12 education courses I’ve been taking on Coursera.

I used the simpler tool to make a quick graphic of the major events of my life. It was thought provoking to decide what events were really important to me. The last ones I added were the deaths of my grandparents; I haven’t had many people that I was close to die except for those four and it occurred to me that I still think of them relatively frequently….that their influence on me persists and is somewhat dependent on when they died.

Timelines are good ways to succinctly display time related items. The timeline above is the simplest form! I’ve wanted to create timelines before but they took a lot of effort to produce. Now I am celebrating that there are actually two tools that are easily available! The tool I used for the timeline above has the capability to have dates and images - features I will use next time. I have visions of including a timeline when I return from my next vacation….in the first blog post of the series! What about summarizing a whole year of travels? Maybe I’ll use the Tiki-Toki tool to create a timeline for all my Coursera courses too.