Here’s the skinny on my project…
I originally had the thought to use the Simile Timeline to show data from some random historical event. The interactive part would be to have the student enter their age. This would plot a static bar along the timeline so that the students could visually see what they would have lived through from that historical time frame. They would also be able to add the ages of their parents for the same effect.
After looking around for data from some historical event, I found that there is no good timeline for World War II. I did find lots of data, just no good format. So my purpose is to present a World War II timeline, but instead of going the route of showing a static bar for the students age, they will have to read a little bit about the War, some of the contentions on why some details might be more important to some people than others, and then give them the opportunity to pick the top ten most important events of World War II and generate a timeline of that. They will also have to explain why they chose the dates they did. I’ll probably limit this to a high school level, so I’ll give them 20-30 dates to choose from.
So basically the site would be 1) a description of how the interpretation of history is often relative to the researcher, 2) give the students an opportunity to order history and defend their reasons, and 3) provide a time line with as many dates as possible. I could also show how it can be important to limit the historical data in order to understand what’s going on (too many dates just make for a lot of points on a line).
I’ll probably start off with a lot of the data on the wikipedia, if I can figure an easy way to scrape all of that data.