Matthew Allen

Here is the first of ten application posts I will make in coming weeks – based on my Web 2.0 presentation. I am going to take each of the 10 apps I am presenting and turn them into a single post, with a cut from my slideshow. Of course, you will only really learn to use these apps by playing with them

xtimeline

This application is xtimeline, which is a public timeline generating system. First of all, it’s creative and clever and has many features which make it work as an example of granular, distributed and collaborative knowledge work. See the slideshow below for more information. I can see this being used as a ‘plugin’ to a normal university unit of study – it’s an equivalent of an LMS (thank god!), it’s a short, snappy app which can be used to make student do some private or public collaborative knowledge work.

Two things I love:

• timelines are a really good example of a knowledge form which contains a ‘whole’ made up of many discrete ‘parts’ which are structurally linked to make that whole is a really good genre for collaborative co-creation of knowledge objects. Imagine 100 people writing a report -arghhh! but 100 people can work in parallel and series to make a timeline very easily. Collaboration depends on the type of knowledge work, not just the inbuilt toold
• xtimeline has many features: but I LOVE the upload / download a .csv file – now that is smart.