The Visual Display of Temporal Information for E-Textbook: Incorporating the Mind-mapped Timeline Authoring Tool

Abstract

With the ever-increasing queries related to temporal (or time-related) information, such as the product launching time, in search engine, most web pages will be augmented with such information in the future. Meanwhile, the gradual emergence of the use of electronic textbooks (or e-Textbooks), which enrich the traditional paper-based textbooks with multimedia contents such as interactive quizzes and multimedia-based simulations, has led us to infer that e-Textbooks will be blended with temporal information to support learning. The use of temporal information helps teachers and students to understand the level of prior knowledge required to study a topic, as well as the sequence of learning activities and related sub-topics, that best attains the educational goals. This paper presents a simple yet efficient tool called TimeMap, which is based on mind mapping, to create an e-Textbook called TimeBook that takes account of time-related curriculum and the ability of students to learn via collaboration.