Education/Projects/JetpackForLearning/Profiles/LineHive

LineHive.com

A user can string together a sequence of websites by just pasting URLs into a box and pressing 'Add'. Our site parses the sites and gets the title, date, and thumbnail. They are aggregated into a timeline. Each timeline has a unique URL and can be embedded like a YouTube clip on any page. In this way, paths through the web are crowdsourced. People can learn search/browsing strategies from each other.

Creating timelines

There are two ways to create a timeline:

1) via the website's 'create' page 2) via the custom-made Firefox Jetpack

The user just gets the right URLs, we do the rest.

Features coming soon...

• Jetpack shows all the links in your stack
• Jetpack allows you to create the trail without visiting LineHive.com
• when on a page that other people have created timelines for, the Jetpack will display an information message -- the Jetpack will show the controversies and debates that surround the article in question.
• Jetpack will show the timeline as its being created
• timelines on linehive.com will be embeddable (without Flash)
• timelines on linehive.com 0will have fisheye magnification, and will cluster overlapping links

Theoretical motivation

The design of LineHive is deceptively simple. Much thought, design, and re-design work went into LineHive to create something simple enough that it could be used across genres, classes, age groups, and domains. We are shooting for elegance, not over-engineering.

The design of learning technologies is non-trivial. They are not simply "productivity" apps for classrooms, teachers, and students. Learning differs from productivity. The most effective way of designing learning applications is to have some learning theory or framework in mind that your work stems from.

One step closer to 'memex'

Our work is in part an attempt to realize Vannevar Bush's idea of "associative trails", part of his "memex" vision. Bush wanted linear sequences of 'frames' to be found and transferred between people. Hyperlinks and bookmark collections (even social ones) do not satisfy this vision.

"...modern hypertext systems have rarely imitated Bush in providing individuals with the ability to create personal trails and share them with colleagues - or publish them widely." -Wikipedia

We feel we will succeed where others have failed because:

1) we are focusing on the expressivity and storytelling rather than the personal organization 2) we are leveraging a well-understood metaphor (the timeline) 3) the output is visual, scannable, embeddable and, hopefully, viral 4) we are succinct and playful 5) we are not relying upon the Jetpack to do the heavy lifting but to augment the web experience.

Develop information literacy socially

How did you learn to search the web? Do you have any idea if you are an excellent or novice searcher or not? Think about it. The problem is we don't know how each other are searching and browsing.

Web search skills develop in isolation, solitary, on the computer. There are few things in life we learn quite like this. We have no search mentors or any real sense of 'good' or 'bad' searchers.

We are convinced that the best way to address the problem of information illiteracy is through social means, and through the design of technologies themselves.

Cognitive apprenticeship

This work rests upon the theory of cognitive apprenticeship (Collins, Brown, & Newman, 1987), which in turn inherits from cognitive modeling. In cognitive apprenticeship, a learner is exposed to the normally-tacit cognitive processes that give an expert their expertise. These processes are often subconscious and the expert may not even be aware of them.

In LineHive, other surfers are able to see the browsing and searching strategies of their peers. We hypothesize that increasing the ability for users to send path information to peers will increase the sender's own metacognitive awareness of the path they are taking, turning searchers into "reflective practitioners" (Schon, 1983) of web search.