BP4_20091101_Researching & Blogging about Web 2.0 tools

Web 2.0 Investigation: Dipity

Web 2.0 tools offer endless possibilities for academic study. For example, Dipity is a collaborative multimedia Web 2.0 tool that creates interactive timelines, flip books, and maps. Users can create their own timelines placing events along it that include web links, blogs, embedded video, text, and RSS feeds. It is a mash up site as can embed content from other Web 2.0 applications. Users can invite friends to any project and allow full editing privileges. This could allow learners to collaboratively create a multimedia timeline for any area of study or research. Offering multimedia and collaborative opportunities through these tools can allow learners to engage multiple intelligences and the higher cognitive domains of synthesis and evaluation. Used in this way students could work together to research different aspects of a topic and produce an interactive multimedia timeline.

As an English teacher, I have used timelines to help students gain insight to the setting of a story. For example during the historical fiction unit, students read novels set during the American Civil War. They must create a timeline that covers the years within their novel and include researched historical facts about the war, technological advancements, pass times, and five major events within the lives of two characters within the novel. It gives students a context to grasp the impact of setting within a story. In years past, this has been done with poster board, markers, photos, or powerpoint presentations, but by using an application such as Dipity these projects could hold much more potential for learning and growth.

In trying to develop this idea, I began using Dipity. In order to familiarize myself with the application and facilitate my own study of Web 2.0 tools, I used the topic search feature and watched as the application created a timeline for me. There were some very valuable videos embedded and links to reputable sources. As a learner, I have a better understanding of Web 2.0 and how it differs from 1.0 than I had from reading my text book. I noticed, however, that events on the timeline were chronologically listed by the dates they were published to the web, not the date they occurred in the history.

With that discovery, I wanted to see what would come up, and in what chronological order, if I searched the topic “Civil War.” Again there were many valuable videos, reputable sources, and diverse perspectives. As was the case with my Web 2.0 search, many events were listed in the timeline in the 21st century as that is when they were posted to the Internet. There were also YouTube videos that showed world war two footage and played the Guns N Roses song Civil War, blogs that were obviously biased or completely irrelevant, and links that sent you to links that sent you to links before reaching the actual source of information.

Herein lies the caveat and a call to action. As mentioned earlier, Web 2.0 tools offer endless possibilities for academic study. Unfortunately though, among those possibilities are the chances that learners will be mislead, misinformed, influenced by biased content, or misdirected to irrelevant sources. While using this application to create a timeline, collaborating users can place videos, images, and links based on the chronology of the events, but using it as a research device could confuse the learner.

Because the topic search component of this tool does provide multiple pieces of valuable and valid information, it seems a shame not to utilize it as well. This brings us to the call of action. Research has been and will remain a staple of academic study, and tools such as this offer learners multimodal opportunities to experience the content as they learn. As educators, we could use this tool...and its validity flaws to teach learners real researching skills. Students could use the topic search feature for any topic of study, and their task would be to evaluate the validity and relevance of a set number of events in the timeline. I see this as a web based lesson that could be hosted on a website as a web quest or a discussion based model hosted on another Web 2.0 platform such as Ning. The web quest or Ning site could begin with direct instruction on evaluating sources. After which the topical timeline from Dipity could be embedded, and learners could be tasked with identifying a given number of valid, reliable sources and a given number of irrelevant and/or unreliable sources. They would justify their choices for each based on the direct instruction components of the lesson.

In summation, the surface level use of this technology could be a tool learners use to create a product that uses information and multimedia they have compiled. However, this tool used in conjunction with other Web 1.0 and/or 2.0 tools holds the potential to prepare learners with the evaluative skills necessary for life-long learning in the 21st century.

For your exploration, I have embedded the timeline on Web 2.0 and the timeline on the Civil War below. I had to resize the embedded viewer to fit blogger, it is usually larger. Clicking the " View in Dipity" button in the player will take you to the site to see it in full size. In this smaller version, you need to click on the + signs to view many of the events.

Please comment with any thoughts or further ideas for possible classroom implementation.


Embedded WEB 2.0 TIMELINE from Dipity topic search:

Search Results: web 2.0 on Dipity.

Embedded American Civil War timeline from Dipity topic search:

American Civil War on Dipity.