Over the course of the last semester, Andrew Lister’s class of over 250 students at Queens University have been using a combination of a Student Notebook and an online Wikispaces wiki. I have previously introduced the concept of the Student Notebook and today I’ll be explaining in a little more detail how this set up works. There are three main components: an Instructor Notebook (IN), a Wikispaces class wiki and a Student Notebook (SN). My focus today will be largely upon the latter, the Student Notebook.
Student notebook workflow, demo and screencast.
February 11th, 2009 — Distance-learning, Education, TiddlyWiki
A busy year and a Student Notebook.
February 3rd, 2009 — Education, TiddlyWiki
The year 2008 was exceptionally busy for me which unfortunately kept me from sharing with you my work with TiddlyWiki in the annals of education. With any luck this year will be a little different.
Over the last year I’ve spent a considerable amount of time on the Student Notebook project. This is an UnaMesa project developed with the assistance of Professor Andrew Lister (Queens University, Canada) which provides students with a tool that allows them to have a local copy of their class Wikispaces wiki (lecture slides and class materials) which is searchable and to which they can add their own private notes. Students also gain the ability to work with class wikis even when not connected to the internet and are able to synchronize with the online class wiki when they are connected
The local copy of the wiki is implemented using - you guessed it - TiddlyWiki. The choice of Wikispaces as the server-side wiki to use as the class wiki was based on its extremely intuitive user interface and excellent support infrastructure, which has made it one of the most popular wikis in educational circles. However the core technology developed can easily be adapted to work with most wikis.
Jeremy Ruston sells out.
December 14th, 2007 — Community, TiddlyWiki
A few months ago Jeremy Ruston, the creator of TiddlyWiki, joined British Telecom (BT) as their Head of Open Source Innovation and in the process, his company Osmosoft was acquired by BT as well. This led to a considerable amount of speculation as to what this would mean for TiddlyWiki and its future, and whether Jeremy had “sold out” and turned his back on the TiddlyWiki community. So when I was given the opportunity to spend a few days at Osmosoft and interview Jeremy about the history of TiddlyWiki and its future, I asked him precisely that.
Easy sortable tables in TiddlyWiki.
November 28th, 2007 — How To, Plugins, TiddlyWiki
The TableSortingPlugin allows you to sort the rows of a table by the data in any column, simply by clicking on the header for that column.
For example, if you have a table listing the plugins installed in a TiddlyWiki, you can sort the table by author or plugin-size. Another example is a table that lists your movie collection — where you could sort the table by rating or genre — depending on what you are looking for.
Unlike existing solutions for sorting tables, the TableSortingPlugin is light-weight, easy to use, and future-proof. It also offers the ability to avoid sorting by specific columns, or to sort a table by default.
Feedback and suggestions are welcome as always.
Recommended reading for Nov 20th
November 21st, 2007 — Distance-learning, Education, Shared Bookmarks
TiddlyWiki and distance-learning.
November 13th, 2007 — Distance-learning, Education, MORE project, TiddlyWiki
As mentioned earlier, I am involved in various projects to develop TiddlyWiki for educational usage. Amongst them, is the MORE project which uses TiddlyWiki to allow students to receive and respond to educational and healthcare information. During the course of my work on the MORE project I’ve had a realisation: TiddlyWiki has great potential as a distance-learning tool.
We are working on an early TiddlyWiki prototype for the MORE project, which is a promising start in this direction. However it has also shown us that the possibilities with TiddlyWiki in distance-learning seem endless and there is a lot more we can do.
The possibilities
The possibilities for TiddlyWiki as a distance-learning tool include:
- Electronic course books - distribution of lectures and other course materials as TiddlyWikis, shared via email or CD.
- Electronic notebooks for note-taking and homework.
- Automatic downloading of new lessons to the student’s TiddlyWiki.
- Synchronization of homework and tests between students and teachers.
- Collaboration between students via TiddlyWikis that synchronize with each other.
- Authoring of new course materials and tests by teachers.
- Tools for teachers to store, view and analyse student results and performance notes.
Creating TiddlyWiki navigation menus — the easy way.
November 6th, 2007 — How To, Plugins, TiddlyWiki
Intuitive navigation is key to a good user experience, and creating navigation menus in TiddlyWiki just got a whole lot easier!
The DropDownMenuPlugin allows you to turn a bulleted list into a drop-down menu, by placing <<dropMenu>> on the line after the list. It comes with two CSS themes, for horizontal and vertical menus. You can however style it to your heart’s content and come up with limitless variations.
The AccordionMenuPlugin also allows you to use lists as a basis for menus, by turning them into accordion style menus which are divided into different sections. Clicking on a section expands it and displays its contents, while collapsing the other sections. Once again, using it is as simple as placing <<accordion>> on the line after the list.
TiddlyBookmarklets — everyday tools for TiddlyWiki use
November 3rd, 2007 — Bookmarklets, JavaScript, Programming, TiddlyWiki
Bookmarklets are small pieces of JavaScript code that you can use on any web page, by clicking on a bookmark. I’ve put together a selection of my most often used tweaks and tools for TiddlyWiki in the shape of bookmarklets, for the community to use. Presenting TiddlyWiki Bookmarklet Central.
New: TiddlerNotesPlugin
October 26th, 2007 — Education, Plugins, TiddlyWiki
In light of the recent discussion in the community about annotating tiddlers without modifying the original contents, I have decided to release the first public version of the TiddlerNotesPlugin.
How to: List tiddlers by tags - the filter tipped way.
October 23rd, 2007 — Development, How To, TiddlyWiki
One of the most often asked questions by new TiddlyWiki users is, “How can I get a list of all tiddlers with a particular tag?”.
Thanks to one of the new features in TiddlyWiki version 2.2.6, there is a very easy way to do it now. The filter tipped way. Continue reading →