When taking about the web and web-based developments, timelines can be powerful tools to help people understand something of what's afoot. Two approaches that I've found work well in schools (because they speak to the experience of both teacher and pupil):
1) A riff on the Rates of Change theme for schools, or what Ian uses in lectures (and these are his words, not mine):
Moore's Law suggests that computers improve by a factor of 10 every 5 years. In educational terms that is pretty significant because it tends to be the length of time that a student stays in each stage of their education ... So it should take approximately 20 years to get an improvement of 10,000 times baseline.
Elsewhere, Ian put it thus: 'as a student moves from 13 years old to 28 years old the computers around him will become 1000 times better'.
2) Or try a good, clear, uncluttered timeline of the relevant innovations. John Naughton recently came up with this timeline of technological change during the life of someone now aged 22:
1985: Born — Internet 2 years old; Nintendo release 'Super Mario Brothers'
1990: Start primary school — WWW being conceived
1992: 7 years old — first SMS message sent
1995: Amazon, eBay founded
1996: Heading towards secondary school — Hotmail launched; pay-as-you-go mobile tariffs; instant messaging
1998: Teenage years — Google founded
1999: Studying for GCSEs — Napster; Blogger
2001: Wikipedia; iPod
2002: Studying for A Levels — social-networking services appear
2003: University — Skype
2005: Graduation approaches — YouTube
Of course, this can be finessed as much as you like and will, in any case, need constant updating. Right now, it will need to major on Facebook — and that's an opportunity to look back at the original page:
And if we're really going to sleuth down the appearance of social-networking sites, Six Degrees (1997) must be added in — the Wayback Machine also has its original page (well, the 1998 version) and this from its 'about' page:
I also looked up the wiki danah boyd started, yasns, last November:
Please help me document the history of social network sites by adding key dates to this timeline. … i'm trying to focus primarily on major social network sites.
[yasns-blogs] is a separate timeline for social network sites that are primarily blogging services like [LiveJournal], [Xanga], and [Vox]. Likewise [yasns-dating] is for dating sites that are not primarily social network sites. And [social-software] is for related projects that are not primarily social network sites (like [Flickr], [MeetUp], [43Things], and [YouTube]) or are software meant to support social network sites (like identity tools and aggregators).
You can weave quite a lot from all that, making sense of a today that, whilst it's often talked about as if it has arrived very fast, has been signalling its coming so clearly and for so long (22 years!) that (in another context) Tom Coates could talk of it as a snail:
'The snail! The snail!', they cry. 'How can we possibly escape!?. The problem being that the snail's been moving closer for the last twenty years one way or another and they just weren't paying attention.
Timelines can help us pay attention.
