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.
Key TiddlyWiki features
The features of TiddlyWiki which make it particularly suitable for such uses are:
- Self-contained and easy to distribute.
- Does not require expensive computer hardware to run.
- Easily adaptable to different needs.
- Synchronization ability, both with remote servers and other TiddlyWikis.
- Free and open-source roots, making it an attractive alternative to expensive proprietary solutions.
- Free or low-cost technical support via a large community support group.
MORE project
The MORE project focuses primarily on developing parts of the world where resources are at a premium, making free and open source tools like TiddlyWiki a particularly attractive option.
The current prototype for the MORE project presents video lessons via a TiddlyWiki, followed by interactive questions related to the lessons. Students’ responses are sent to a SharedRecords server, and their results are retrieved and displayed immediately.
Future versions will allow students to register and obtain a unique student ID, which will be used to provide a history of their results and progress.
The prototype has been designed to have three different modes — Student, Admin and Teacher — which can be switched between using a drop-down button in the menu. The view you will see when you load the prototype is the Student view; the Admin and Teacher modes are yet to be implemented.
Eventually the Teacher mode will offer the ability to easily add new lessons and questions, retrieve and view student results from the server, as well as providing statistics pertaining to the lessons.
Next steps for MORE
Our eventual aim is to develop this prototype into a more general-purpose educational adaptation of TiddlyWiki. While it might seem tailored for distance learning, I anticipate that it will find uses in the traditional classroom too. The individual components will also be made available to the community as more generalized, stand-alone plugins.
We are about to begin designing the teacher’s interface, so any suggestions, advice or requests in this regard would be very helpful — particularly from those of you with a teaching background.
Participate
I would highly recommend viewing Lesson1 in the MORE prototype, and answering the questions that follow it. The lesson is extremely short — less than a minute — and will give you a very good feel for what we are trying to achieve. Any suggestions or feedback you can provide, whether from the perspective of a potential student using it, or from that of a teacher, would be greatly appreciated.
While the MORE prototype will not cover all the features and possibilities mentioned above, it will be a solid step in this direction once completed. I am really hoping that with enough community participation, we can develop this into something very useful and effective.
I would also like to explore the possibility of other projects in this vein, and am always open to offers of collaboration. So if you have any thoughts, suggestions or feedback regarding TiddlyWiki as a distance-learning tool, I would love to hear from you.
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PS: I would highly recommend viewing Lesson1 in the MORE prototype, and answering the questions that follow it. The lesson is extremely short — less than a minute — and will give you a very good feel for what we are trying to achieve.
This is certainly a very promising project!
However, I’m generally not very fond of multiple choice questions; those produce viable results only in very limited settings.
So I hope this will be extended to include textual submissions (e.g. essays).
Also, I’m curious what the “process flow” will look like - e.g. will there be an RSS feed that students need to subscribe to in order to get the latest lessons?
By the way: I think that prototype lesson is a pretty weak example - the questions are very silly (kinda reminded me of those rip-off TV call-in shows).
I know it’s just a placeholder video and quiz, but an actual lesson might be much more revealing.
Apart from the educational setting, I think this project could very well yield technologies and techniques that are useful for collaboration in general (e.g. something similar to - or even building upon - TiddlyChatter).
Anyway, please keep us updated on the progress of this and similar projects - this is very interesting stuff!
I have tried lesson One. Unfortunately I can only hear the sound. I have no image.
I am using Ubuntu 7.10 and flash usually works quite fine.
Saq, don’t listen to FND
- next he’ll be asking for the Minority Report interface there in India (or was it Bangladesh - I haven’t got my test results yet).
No, I thought it was a great start. The repeatability of the video helps one set their level of mental acuity to what’s expected (e.g., I had to really strain the second time to hear them talking about the alphabet (?)). Then on the second one I knew what to expect and didn’t have to repeat the video (although I could have gone back to look for some sign of which country it was in.)
By the way, that must be a plugin to convert asterisks to radio-buttons, right? Are you going to release that soon, or is it already out there?
PS Okay Fred, text answers would be nice. Also maybe you could throw in some version of the rearrangePlugin with a random initial mix-up to have the student put things in proper order…
Looks great. There’s too little content to give a real opinion, but almost all the tools are available to create great content easily.
I just think there should be a means of communication between the student(s) and the teacher, like a message board or a Private Message inbox. This should be relatively simple considering you already have the wiki hooked up to the database server, it’s basically just a new set of tiddlers.
Btw, what license is SharedRecords? The website does not mention this.
Yay, Saq, excellent stuff. I’m really excited about MORE, it’s great to see the potential of TiddlyWiki for education being tapped. And we’re starting to see the potential of UnaMesa to pull together our community which makes me very happy.
Marwan (and others),
The SharedRecords web service is currently freely available for non-profit uses and can be accessed directly using REST API’s.
Both the server code and a java client which does encryption/decryption and reads/writes barcodes on the client side before accessing the server is available from the site under Creative Commons-by-NC license.
Note that the SMS response learning technique has been pilot tested in Bangladesh by a BRAC university professor. Would it be helpful for discussion purposes to see the actual lesson content? The current content is really just a placeholder to test the technology. Anyone have real content they would like to see in this format?
Also, the multiple-choice questions serve as a starting point for additional discussion. They are not the only means of evaluation or interaction. However, they are one way of rapidly aggregating feedback from the entire class automatically in real time. This would not be easy with essay questions.
Also, the idea of a TiddlyChatter or other back channel seems like a good idea. The digital study hall project in India uses a similar kind of technique, but with a small student group gathered together in the same place watching recorded materials.
Marwan, Dave, FND: You raise a fair point about the content. At the time we added it we were focused on demonstrating that the two-way communication using either TiddlyWiki and the internet, or text-messaging could work in such a scenario. Therefore we did not give much thought to the actual content. However, I agree that we have now reached a point where in order to get a better idea of the efficacy of this teaching approach, we need a proper sample lesson. I have forwarded these thoughts to Priya Raghavan, the project director for MORE.
Pierre: Thank you for reporting that problem! Frankly I have no idea why it is not working for you. However, I have forwarded this bug report to Eric Schulman, one of the other programmers working on the MORE project. With any luck he should be able to help you sort this out.
FND: Thank you for the thoughtful feedback. It is worth keeping in mind that the MORE project focuses primarily on the underdeveloped regions of the world, where the literacy rate is very low. This, combined with the ability to respond to questions via SMS when internet connectivity is not available, makes multiple choice questions particularly suitable. The overall educational TiddlyWiki prototype will no doubt be extended to include textual submissions.
As for the process flow, there are two ways this could work. Either, TiddlyWiki’s could be distributed via CD-ROM to regions where there is no internet connectivity. The TiddlyWiki’s would include all the lessons, but you would need an unlock code for each subsequent lesson, which could be obtained by answering the questions correctly via SMS. In situations where the student is expected to have internet connectivity, we could either use the same system with unlock codes so that a student could set their own schedule. Or we could have the TiddlyWiki file automatically update itself with the latest lesson, say every week, working to a pre-announced schedule.
It is nice to hear you mention TiddlyChatter. As you are no doubt aware, my interest in it also stems from the fact that is could be used to implement a discussion forum of sorts in TiddlyWiki, so that students could discuss the questions amongst themselves.
Thanks again FND!
Dave: Thank you for the encouraging words! The repeatability of the video is intentional for precisely that reason, though in the actual lessons it should be much easier to hear what they are saying! Terrific idea about the Re-arrangePlugin. It is not something we had thought of yet, but could definitely be useful in some contexts. At this time the plugin for radio buttons is tied in with the ability to send responses back to the SharedRecords server. However, it will be released to the community in a more generalized form in the near future. In case anyone is curious, the prototype uses a pre-release version of the PublisherPlugin for switching between Admin, Teacher and Student modes.
Marwan: In some cases the TiddlyWiki’s with the lessons might be distributed via CD-ROM and the responses might be sent via SMS. In these situations, the SMS interaction will serve the purpose of the message box as well. However you raise a fair point, we definitely need a communications mechanism between students and teachers, for those students that are working online. Thank you.
I am very impressed with what you guys have put together. I can’t wait to see what all you have when it is ready for release.
Now for the part that will surprise no one: IE6 breaks it. A lot. SinglePageMode –doesn’t work– needs to have the cookie set when you enter. Popups fail. Tiddlers appear below the sidebar.
But the test worked!
Ken: Thank you for taking the time to take a look, I really appreciate it. We should have some content updates in very short order that should give a better impression of the efficacy of the technique. As for the Internet Explorer problems, that actually does come as a surprise! I tested it extensively during development and everything worked fine. There seems to be an odd bug that crept in since, but I think I’ve got it fixed. Could you kindly take another look to confirm that?
In case you are interested, the problem seemed to be caused by TiddlyWiki 2.2.5. This prototype was developed mostly in 2.2.4 where it behaved well, and upgrading to 2.2.6 fixes the problems as well. The mysterious part is that I can see no rhyme or reason why 2.2.5 would cause these problems!
Viewing seems to be working in IE, except I get a weird flashing every time I slide the cursor off a tiddler with an embedded video. It is kind of like everything except the video changes to white for a fraction of a second.
In both Teacher or Admin modes editing makes the tiddler jump back to being below the menu.
This is just great! I look forward to seeing this completed. This will be a fine educational tool not just for the educational institutions, but even in the corporate environment for on-going training.
I went through the tests, tried some editing and poked around a bit. I’m using Firefox under Ubuntu 7.10 and had no glitches or problems. Not being a java programmer… I am not certain of using this beta for myself. I will try it on a separate TiddlyWiki to play with and see if I may be able to implement it to my needs.
Thanks Saq for your help!
I have been convinced as to the value of TiddlyWiki as a distance learning tool ever since discovering it in October 2006 - while I was exploring the Wiki component of Moodle and discovering that it seemed far too complicated. While I had enjoyed my time with Moodle - Modular Online Dynamic Learning Environment - I soon realized that TiddlyWiki seemed to fit the definition of a Moodle, both in its architecture and in its ability to support a moodling approach to learning.
Among the many features of TW that appears to be ideally suited for a variety of distance learning environments is the ability for teachers and students to download their own copy of a curriculum, both to customize the content, menus, appearance, etc. and to use it as a workbook.
For students/learners - as well as for teachers, what makes TiddlyWiki so brilliant for long distance learning is that the TW page can be used as a versatile workbook in which responses to tests/exams/questions as well as notes, annotation, re-organization of menu, use of tags, etc.
And if that were not enough, the use of TW as a platform open up a wealth of learning opportunities on how to take advantage of the countless opportunities to learn about the “underworld” - beneath the covers - of a knowledge-based universe, and to become familiar with some of the languages - of style, organization, functions and processes - that increasingly enhance our ability to navigate this knowledge-based universe.
Robert
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