Abstract timelines

[jxxmxxj (Jordan Johnson)]

I am curious how other Tbx users deal with this:

As a teacher, I have usually laid out my course plan in terms of weeks and days. Because I’ve taught the same courses many times, the most natural-feeling way for me to think about the timing of course events in general is by week number and, within the week, by day number. (I may group the events into multi-week units as well.)

Of course, when I teach the course, this abstract schedule gets instantiated, and week/day numbers get mapped to calendar dates.

So, I feel like I want to do a lot of my design work in a relative timeline view without necessarily anchoring the view to actual dates. Then, when I get ready to teach, I could perhaps copy the container that holds all my course plans, and adjust the copied notes to have dates that are correct for the course instance I’m about to teach.

Given that that’s not exactly how the timeline view works, I wonder how other users, particularly teachers, go about this sort of design.

[mwra (Mark Anderson)]

Before Tinderbox added a timeline view, is seemed to be common for people to lay out course schedules in map view, using the x-axis for time.

[eastgate]

I like to set up adornments that represent abstract time periods, like your weeks.

This is nice in the early phases, where it’s useful to be able to express things like “this needs to be covered sometime early”, or “this needs to be before that”.

It’s also nice I’m the late phases, because it’s useful to be able to express things like “we didn’t discuss Lemurs today, so move them to next week, and we’ll have to move Tarsiers to the following week.”