Serendipity35

Synchronoptical means seeing at the same time or more accurately parallel views. It is is a graphic display of a number of entities as they proceed through time. This type of view is most likely to be used for the visual display of kinds of history. Sometimes, rather than a single timeline, there will be a number of related timelines on a single graphic which can show how events that are contemporary and which might be connected (the 9/11/01 attack occurred; I went into a depression) or not connected ( 3/19/03, the U.S. invades Iraq; I end my therapy) can be viewed together.

A synchronoptic view has many uses in educational settings. For many learners, visual information is learned more easily than just textual information. On top of that, a timeline can make the connections between events clear. Timelines on the Internet have the added advantage of allowing hyperlinks to more detailed information so that the timeline itself can be clean and simple.

HyperHistory Online is a good site that provides detailed information about world history during the last 3,000 years and abbreviated timelines for before that. The site several timelines of events and their dates in scientific, cultural, and religious events, giving a connected overview of the time. They divide things into five categories: People, History, Events, Maps, and one called Options for the items that don't fit neatly into the other categories.

On the PBS American Experience website, they have a timeline about American technology from Franklin's lightning rod to the Hubble Space Telescope.

To get 2.0, you can use any number of commercial programs to create timelines such as SmartDraw.

But I'd like to introduce you to a new, free service for web timelines at Dipity.com. The service is new this year, so I think there are still more features than most people are using. I created an account for myself and created a personal timeline (embed below or view by link) and used RSS feeds to pull entries from this blog, my poetry blog and my Flickr account. That means that the timeline will populate automatically with my uploads to those sites.

You can zoom in/out from a 100 year view to one day. You can view as a traditional linear timeline, flipbook, in a list view or in a world map view (if you have geotags on the events).

This tool could be used by students/teachers to chronicle historical periods or selective history (how about Internet memes) personal biography or bios of authors (see one for Aldous Huxley) or any one (see Beatles) including students or your class or school's history.

My personal timeline sample