A brief timeline of History

I was fascinated by this blog post about inculcating an interest in Geography and History by allowing children to create their own historical timelines and maps, giving them a good overview.   My kid is* already a History buff, with regular visits to the British Museum and a poster from the Pompeii exhibit on her door, so this idea was quite appealing.  Her bedroom has a 2m long wall which is currently free of posters, which seemed like a perfect spot.

But how to arrange this?  I wanted to represent the whole period from the Big Bang up to the present day, and clearly a linear representation would end up with human history the width of a single hair.  Maths is not my strong point, but after discussions with some friends, and plugging some formulas into Excel, I came up with the following equation.

Explanation:

• Timeline of length l
• Start year of s (using negative numbers for years Before Common Era (or BC as we used to call it)
• End year of e
• Target year of t, i.e. the year you want to mark off on the line

This gives a position p for the distance from the end (typically the right) for the target year.  This gives a nice effect where dates towards the end year are more spaced out, but going back to the beginning of time gets more compressed. 

After experimenting I went with the root of the log as this shifted the emphasis more to the left, giving more space to record events in human history, especially recent history.  I can then, with millimetre precision over a 2.3m span, plot significant years as my daughter discovers a historical period.  

And here it is in a spreadsheet:
You can see where I’ve put the starting date as -13.5bn years, and 2022 as the end point.  It’s quite simple to tweak this for any span of years, or for any size wall just by plugging in your numbers.

If you want to focus on the middle of a period, (e.g. Shakespeare’s productive period within the context of his life), just do two lines, one from the start of your timeline to the midpoint (position is from the right, as usual), and then the reverse.

Example

Here’s a quick example based on a 25cm line. You can see the time is heavily compressed towards the left, with the Big Bang, appearance of life on Earth, K-T extinction event and modern humans.

Hopefully this makes sense (and is of use!), but feel free to ask or comment below.

*Written 7 years ago and never finalised!

Bringing a horse to water: getting ITSM into an academic support team

Last week I took the ITIL Foundation Certificate in Service Management and so I face a new challenge of sharing this knowledge with my colleagues.  This is something we’ve looked at a number of times over the last decade or so, but never actually been able to follow through on.  Perhaps because we went into it like a bull in a china shop, didn’t really know what we were trying to achieve, or just because we didn’t know where to start.

I wanted to document this journey, partly to monitor how we’re doing, but also because I think this could be helpful to other people looking at service management and implementing best practice.

Vygotsky’s learning theories in Minecraft

A couple of months ago I saw this video of the Colour 3D printer in Minecraft, and whilst initially I was a bit dismissive (what’s the point?!) I started to wonder if there wasn’t something deeper going on.  I believe that the kids playing Minecraft today are developing some astonishing skills that are going to shape the future.