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.