Chronicle

Part of the Learning Project

The Chronicle Research Project is exploring a new type of system that will allow users to easily share and learn from software workflows. The Chronicle system records the timing and details of workflow information – the mouse clicks and typing, the tool and settings being used, along with a continuous screen capture. We associate all of this captured information with the application’s data file – so every document can also have an automatically generated “making of” video.

Chronicle makes it extremely convenient and easy to document and share workflows. In essence, Chronicle will allow software experts to showcase their expertise, and will allow other users to view and learn from these real-world expert examples. A decade ago the idea of capturing every video frame would have seemed ludicrous, but the advent of cloud computing and ubiquitous streaming video have made all this very feasible. We are exploring a cloud-based architecture to make the research vision of Chronicle into a reality.

Where could this all lead? We can imagine a future where we don’t explicitly create tutorials or help documents but supply example designs to show users how to use an application or suite of applications to create the design or materials they are interested in. Moreover, we can imagine user communities creating their own Chronicle examples to show new employees in their company particular ways of designing things or community forums sharing Chronicle-enabled data files to help other users or report problems. Essentially Chronicle has the potential to dramatically amplify and increase the quality and availability of learning materials.