A new look, a new location, a new direction, and hopefully much more content.
That is the idea behind this re-launch of my weblog. The last few months have seen me become more active than ever in using and developing TiddlyWiki — especially for educational purposes — yet most of this has been unapparent to the TiddlyWiki community. I intend to change that, starting here and now.
The usual updates about my new plugins and themes will still be provided here, but I will also start documenting other exciting developments within the TiddlyWiki community. Interesting uses and adaptations of TiddlyWiki, by myself or others, resources and tools for using or developing TiddlyWiki — all will be covered.
It was the potential of TiddlyWiki as an educational tool that first drew me to it, and most of my recent work with it has been focused along these lines. I am involved in various collaborative efforts to customize TiddlyWiki for different educational scenarios, and in the days to come I will be sharing this work with everyone.
In this vein, I welcome any and all participation from educators, students, TiddlyWiki users and any other interested parties. Whether you are using TiddlyWiki in an educational context, want to, or know of someone else that is doing so, I would like to hear about it. My hope is that we can work together, to make TiddlyWiki an even better educational tool than it already is.
Some of the topics you can look forward to in the near future:
- a slew of plugin releases (including the PublisherPlugin)
- new themes for TiddlyWiki
- my visit to the Osmosoft offices, impressions and thoughts about Jeremy Ruston, his team, and the future of TiddlyWiki
- resources and techniques I use when writing TiddlyWiki plugins.
17 comments ↓
Sounds great! Look forward to see your stuff especially PublisherPlugin.
This is gonna be interesting - can’t wait to read more about the projects you’re involved with, especially regarding UnaMesa and TiddlyEducation!
Glad to see this blog from such a great contributor to TW. When and where will the PublisherPlugin be available. I am having trouble with the current PresentationPlugin importing.
Regards,
Cradit
Cradit, the PublisherPlugin will be announced right here, sometime next week. It is one of many plugins that I will be formally releasing. It should be a significant improvement on the PresentationPlugin, especially in terms of importing and set up. So watch this space!
Saq,
TiddlyWiki as an Educational tool is certainly a promising direction …
Will PublisherPlugin allow ColorPalette switching
Cheers,
– BidiX
Looking forward for your PublisherPlugin and other Tiddly Educational special packs.
Tiddlywiki is a landmark in opensourse movement. And contributors like you are steering it towards the ‘YouTube’ of opensource!
Keep it up!
-Balaji S.
Intriguing! Looking forward especially to find out what you really thought about JR and the Osmosoft crew!
I am glad to see this development focus you are suggesting Saq as I see it is where TiddlyWiki’s true potential lies, not as a micro-CMS or an alternative to conventional Wiki’s, but in it’s portability, flexibility and ease of use by teachers and students to convey, organize and annotate information, as well as in quiz tests like Paulo Soares latest plugin. As a university teacher I am looking forward to using more and more TW in the classroom and your efforts are very welcome. Thanks for all that great code Saq!
Tiddlywiki as an educational tool - that is my passion since many months. I’m sooooo curious about the solutions you made for education!
Here is a little gift for your (and also for others) inspiration…
http://bbz-dormagen.de/wennmann/TWLernkartei/TWLernkartei.html
All the best wishes for this new site!
-Uwe
BidiX: I can’t absolutely promise that the version released this week will offer ColorPalette switching. As you are well aware, the TiddlyWiki core code does not currently offer an elegant mechanism for this. However, I have just had some inspiration thanks to your prompting, so I expect to see it happen sometime very soon!
Balaji and David: Thank you for the kind words. My vision for TiddlyWiki is to get to a point where we can have a large collection of ‘templates’ customized for different educational purposes and a database of content to go with it. Using TiddlyWiki could be as simple as choosing the template that meets your usage scenario’s needs, and just plugging in the appropriate content. At the moment, this is just a vision… but it is my hope that the community can band together to make this a reality. I look forward to your input and participation.
Phil: You should be worried! I will be writing short biogs for the Osmosoft team members, yourself included! Since you lot are new to the community, I feel it is my responsibility to give everyone a heads up about your talents and vices.
Uwe: Great to hear from you. Schilke was kind enough to point out your work in this area to me a few days ago. I am planning to take an indepth look at it this weekend, and will get back to you with my impressions. Thank you for sharing!
These are great news Saq. I’ll be following them!
Paco: Happy to hear that! I look forward to your suggestions and participation.
Saq, This is great! I am looking forward to using your work for the MORE project.
http://wiki.unamesa.org/wiki/Team:MORE
David writes:
“it’s portability, flexibility and ease of use by teachers and students to convey, organize and annotate information…”
I am anxious to see if there can be a browser-independent app to annotate external files that is managed from within TW. Very much like the WYSIWYG Plugin is used to create text with FCK Editor. The key is integration with TW because that is where your ideas live.
My browsing on this tells me the tools are out there, but no one has assembled them in this exact way. The closest thing, I guess, would be Annozilla, which is not independent of Firefox, and can’t be randomly installed on the host computer.
The great thing about TW is you can put it on a USB and use it on Unix, Mac, and Windows computers in one day. A lot of the schools where I live put the kids on Macs that they get free from Apple, while the library uses Red Hat, and work is on an XP Pro network. My daughter comes home from school and the family computer is Ubuntu.
I see the potential of a portable (Javascript) annotation editor. Hope it becomes a reality soon.
Thanks
David: You have some interesting thoughts there regarding text annotation. Such a tool would definitely be very useful, however I cannot think of an elegant way to implement it. I will give it some thought however.
I agree whole-heartedly with your comments regarding the portability of TiddlyWiki. It is an excellent means for bridging the gap between different operating-systems and computers, and hopefully very soon different wikis as well.
I have also been struck by the potential of TiddlyWiki to create TextBooks. I teach Maths and Science in Melbourne, Australia and have begun to work on a TextBook to cover the junior high-school maths programme (http://richardwilliamsmith.googlepages.com/annotatedVelsmaths.html)
This is very much a work in progress.
I am particularly interested in the potential of using ChatterFeeds (or some variation thereof) to facilitate collaborative writing for different contexts. If a whole bunch of people all wanted to write Maths text-books but the books were aimed at different audiences (age groups, cultural groups, different state curricula) they could each share what they make with the others who would be able to include only what was pertinent to their particular project. In that way the whole collection would get written much quicker.
I’d be interested to know what you think. I’d also like to know more about the ‘more’ project (the wiki link is broken right now) and any other initiatives/communities to which I may be able to contribute.
Richard: I’ve had a look and that is some interesting work you are doing.
TiddlyWiki definitely has the potential to be used as a great electronic textbook for students and teachers alike, however it requires significant investment in terms of time to configure it for this purpose.
I’m working with a non-profit organization called UnaMesa to try and provide some pre-configured ‘templates’ for TiddlyWiki that are tailored for different educational uses. This would allow teachers to start using TiddlyWiki without having to learn for themselves how to customize it extensively. It is still early days in this work, but I’m confident that we can provide a very useful service. We are trying to work with as many educators as possible during this work, so that your requirements can drive the direction of our work. So please do feel free to make suggestions as our work continues and I talk about it here.
About collaborative writing… we are also looking at this but from potentially two different perspectives. One is that of students collaborating between themselves, and this is where chatter feeds or RippleRap is an interesting solution.
The other approach is focused precisely on collaborative writing for textbook authors. You can read more about some of our work in this area here: http://mixins.projects.unamesa.org
http://mixins.projects.unamesa.org/Wikispaces project
While the project has greater scope than just textbook authoring, that is one of the areas we are focusing on.
I’ll be talking a lot more about this work in the days to come.
As for the MORE project, we recently updated the wiki infrastructure and location, which is why the links were not working. They have been updated now, and for your convenience: MORE project
Anyone interested is welcomed to join the wikis for any of the UnaMesa projects and provide feedback via the discussion tab on each page. It is only through collaboration and a community-based approach that truly vialble solutions to problems can be found.
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