Help us Build on our Timeline

November 12, 2013 in featured, handbook, timeline

Just before MozFest a group of us got together to start building the Open Education Timeline. There was lots of post-it notes involved and over 100 ideas/events collected.

We’ve now placed all those suggestions into a Google Spreadsheet that links to TimeMapper.

Screen Shot 2013-11-12 at 16.42.21

[TimeMapper is a project of Open Knowledge Foundation through OKFNLabs and the Source Code is available to use. TimeMapper is open-source. You can find details on Copyright and License.]

Most of the dates need checking (I can’t even remember the date of birth of my children let alone important open education events!) and they also need fleshing out (so urls, locations, text, images etc.) to turn them into the most comprehensive Open Education Timeline to date! But this is a collaborative community project so we thought we’d get you all to help!

The main Google Doc is available for everyone to edit.

Each column has specific requirements:

  • Title – the name of the event, this is required
  • Start – start date, this needs to be in American format, so for the 1st June 2013 use 06/01/2013, this is required. You will spot that many dates currently have 01/01 as their day and month – these haven’t been checked.
  • End – end date, only relevant if this a period rather than single point in time, this needs to be in American format, so for the 1st June 2013 use 06/01/2013
  • Description – textual description, not too long
  • Web Page – web page for this event – URL
  • Media – URL to an image or media (e.g. video)
  • Media Caption – Caption for the media item (optional even if you have a media item)
  • Media Credit – Credit for the media (optional even if you have the media)
  • Tags – separate with commas
  • Place – Human readable name for place (if any) e.g. any one of London, Europe, Paris, Texas
  • Location – Machine readable form of Place. Must be either GeoJSON or in following format: latitude, longitude e.g. 37.5, -122. You can use the Universimmedia site to do this – it is these co-ordinates that place the event on the map.
  • Source – Source name/title
  • Source URL – Source url

Once you have made changes to the spreadsheet you need to publish to the web for your edits to be seen (File>Publish to the Web>Republish now) on the Open Education Timeline.

To avoid mishaps we recommend making small changes and republishing often – so you can work out if there is a problem.

Contact us if you need any help.

One response to “Help us Build on our Timeline”

  1. […] Toward the end of the week Jane and I headed to London to participate in Hit the Roadmap… Co-hosted by School of Open, Creative Commons, P2PU, Open Knowledge Foundation and FLOSS Manuals this was – like MozFest – a totally hands-on event. Around 10-15 of us brainstormed and mapped (involving lots of stickies!) the history of “open,” chronologically charting events and projects on a long strip of paper (see the picture above for the start of this process!).  Jane facilitated the session and got us warmed up with introductions, including a spectrogram exercise where we positioned ourselves along a line in order to illustrate what stance we took on different statements about openness and education. Contributions to the timeline have been put into Google docs and are being visualised via TimeMapper. Find out more in Marieke’s (Open Knowledge Foundation) blog post. […]

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