Tiki-Toki / Chronos Reports:
LINK TO TIMELINE (once you’ve already signed up)
Tiki-Toki, a web-based timeline program, will serve as the foundation for our “Chronos Reports.” This is one of two more experimental aspects to this class; I have personally never done anything like it. Once I decided to teach a modern poetry course based purely on chronology (rather than privileging authors and movements) it seemed fitting to introduce a collaborative group project that will help us keep track–visually and textually–of what accrues over the course of the semester. Our collaborative timeline will be an idiosyncratic outtake from art, history, and their charged intersection as it catalogs the events, figures, and ideas that emerge from our collective interests.
The English Department has generously purchased an education license so we could pilot this software. Simple go to Tiki-Toki’s website and click on “free sign-up” in the upper-right corner. Be sure to enter your “class code” at the bottom: 10533-434782741. Once you’ve signed up, log out and follow the instructions to our class timeline offered below.
To access the class timeline once you’ve signed up, just click here. You will be prompted to enter your username (which you chose when you signed up) and the secret word, which is “chronos.” If you haven’t yet signed up, re-read the previous paragraph! The process of adding a “story” and “media” should be fairly self-explanatory, but will require some playing around / experimenting / practicing / leg work. In order to upload photos, for example, you will need to set up a FlickR account. If you have any questions about the tech stuff, feel free to visit me during my office hours.
Each of you will be responsible for composing 10 entries on our Tiki-Toki timeline, which you will coordinate with your Chronos Report. If you signed up a Chronos Report covering 1914, for example, on that day you will give your report by way of your updates to the Tiki-Toki timeilne. For your 10 entires, you should include at least one entry for each of our four categories.
Though a few of your entries can be very brief, at least six of them should be more involved, including more background info, a pictures, audio, and/or video.
Every Monday and Wednesday, a few students will deliver condensed 5-7 minute presentations–based on their updates to our class timeline–on the years we are addressing that day (indicated on the reading schedule). Using Wikipedia’s entries for each individual year (simply google a year–1922, for example–and you should arrive at such an entry) along with other historical sources, students will report happenings related to a set of “categories” that are color-coded on our Tiki Toki Timeline. I have devised the following categories: Arts and Culture; Science, Technology and Ideas; Social Change (issues of gender, race, class, immigration); and War, Politics and Nature. Some categories overlap (the Paris Exposition of 1900, for example, was a cultural and scientific and and political affair)–so use your best judgment.
“Chronos Reports” are meant to sound casual. It’s not a test of what you know; it’s an opportunity to share. We are simply patching together a history here that will help us more fully understand the artistic works we encounter. We will be adding layers and tossing in major (and some minor) odds and ends, not offering a comprehensive historical accounts. All history, when reduced to a timeline, is highly selective. Make your choices count; make them purposeful. In the presentations themselves, do your best to distill complex historical happenings even as you relate them to the work we are reading during any given week. Before you dive right into the presentation, please say a few words to frame your selections.
I will supplement these “Chronos Reports” by offering more specific mini-lectures on important modernist ideas, movements, and developments. For more on the collaborative timeline, see the separate “Assignments” entry for Tiki Toki.
A few pointers / directions:
- Tiki Toki refers to new entries as “stories.”
- The categories have already been set–you simply need to select the category for your story.
- If you want to offer more information, use the “more info” tab, which will become available after you save your entry. You can also add media after you save you basic entry. The key here is that you need to save an entry before you can expand upon it with other info and media.
- One setback of the program is it wants you to supply a very specific date. If you don’t know the month and day, but only the year, just accept the date it offers by default. But please do your best to track down specific dates where possible.
- To access our class timeline, you need to follow the direct link to it (at the top of these instructions). You won’t be able to access the timeline from the general Tiki Toki page.
As this is a collaborative project, please feel free to post your own updates as you see fit. Adding extra updates is yet another way to secure those participation points if you don’t speak up as frequently in class.
