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.
The TiddlerNotesPlugin allows you to add notes to tiddlers, without needing to edit the original tiddler. This means that your original content will remain unaltered, and if you update it in the future, you won’t lose your notes. Notes are stored in separate tiddlers, but can be viewed and edited from within the original tiddler.
This feature was developed primarily for Andrew Lister — professor of political studies at Queens University in Canada — who shares his lecture slides with his students via TiddlyWiki. Andrew wanted his students to be able to add notes to the slides - though the original slides had to stay unaltered in case they were updated by him, which would otherwise lead to the notes being lost.
The plugin can be configured to have the notes for a tiddler start off blank, or pre-filled with the contents of the original tiddler. A tiddler can have any number of notes, so the same TiddlyWiki file could hold both teacher’s notes and student’s notes, for example.
This plugin also served as the starting point for TiddlyChatter. I am hopeful that others will find this plugin useful as well, and welcome your feedback and suggestions as to how to improve it.
10 comments ↓
Looks very nice. I can see how TiddlyChatter got its’ roots. One comment, I noticed it doesn’t respect the readOnly flag. Ie when you are in “view” mode you can’t edit a tiddler but you can still edit a note. It doesn’t matter much, just a little ui nicety.
Another way to install this would be to put the notes macro into ViewTemplate. (And possibly show or hide it based on a “showNotes” tag with HideWhenPlugin).
Another great plugin - I can’t wait to see concrete usage scenarios for this!
PS: IMO hiding the code only makes sense if it’s been compressed…
Simon: Good point there about respecting the readOnly flag, I’ve jotted it down for the next release. You are absolutely correct that the most convenient way to use the TiddlerNotesPlugin is via the ViewTemplate. I have included some comments to that effect, including using HideWhenPlugin to add it to selective tiddlers, in the plugin documentation. I forgot to mention it here, so thank you for pointing it out!
FND: Thank you for the kind words Fred. I tend to prefer to not have plugin code blatantly visible as I feel the average TiddlyWiki user should need to see it nor be intimidated by it!
Here’s one usage scenario: student note-taking in a lecture course.
I became interested in this, and eventually had the good luck of becoming involved with Saq in developing this plugin, because I was using TW for all of my course web-pages, and even using the webpage as a presentation device in class (using Paulo Soares’s SlideShowPlugin, or Eric Shulman’s SelectStylesheetPlugin). At some point it became obvious that students could use a downloaded, local version of the course page to hold the notes they take during lecture. Students could then download new and updated slides into their annotated local course page (using Eric’s LoadTiddlersPlugin).
Many students already take notes in class on computer, and others transfer handwritten notes to wordprocessor after the fact. The advantages of TW over a WP are that students notes can be integrated with professor slides, and everything indexed with tags and hyperlinked. Knowledge has a web-like structure; in class we pursue one particular line of reasoning, but there are other possible avenues through any given body of material. If it is advantageous that the online course-material have this web-structure, via TW’s micro-tagged-hypertext approach, it is also advantageous for student notes to have this form.
I set up a note-taking system last year using existing plugins, but didn’t get uptake from the students, partly because I started half-way through the course, and partly because the system demanded quite a bit of the students. Saq’s NotesPlugin greatly simplifies things, however - and there is more to come. Based on my experience, it will take a really simple, easy to use system to get uptake in large numbers.
Some of the issues I am thinking about:
- how best to use TW in a presentation, taking into account some of the dangers of PowerPoint-style presentations
- how to integrate or at least connect online discussion with TW content. (Currently, I have a WebCT discussion board for my big lecture course, and it works well enough, but it is not well connected to the course page)
Nice as always! Thanks!
I can get this plugin to work in a normal tiddler and also within your accordion menu. Unfortunately (?) I have my base tiddler’s set up as a 3 tab structure created with the coding (and then drop down galleries and comments and other goodies according to the tab section - the tabs are used like chapters of a book) so I am trying to work this notes plugin into that
structure.
Currently I use the comments plugin in the 3tab structure, and would like to see if the Notes plugin has advantages over the comments method. (IE can the notes be user specific …) In any event, when I place the <> command within this 3 tabbed tiddler it gives me a macro error.
Any ideas on how to work around this error?
@Gam: It’s a bit hard to analyze this without being able to play with the actual file - but maybe this helps.
A bug found:
Different rows of a table will be displayed as different 1-row tables.
Two issues:
1. I’m really missing an option to enable CTRL ENTER for submitting edits in the notes section.
2. The suffix parameter does not include the separator char. That’s currently a dash/hyphen, which I think is not very suitable (no offense) - so I’d much rather change the suffix to something like " [Notes]" (i.e. space instead of dash/hyphen).
I’m trying to work with what I call “non-destructiive contribution” … like the way MediaWiki allows for reversion.
I had hoped Notes would allow visitors to my TW to leave anonymous notes … but not.
Nonetheless, this is a nice step forward.
–bentrem
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