Has Jeremy sold out? I’ll let you watch the video and be the judge of that, for now. (transcript available)

History of TiddlyWiki

I made an effort during the interview to represent the community’s concerns and questions as well as I could, touching upon issues varying from what Jeremy’s move to BT means for TiddlyWiki, to what role (if any) BT or the members of Osmosoft would play in future TiddlyWiki development, as well as the contributions of Greg Wolff and the non-profit organization UnaMesa in supporting TiddlyWiki.

Some of you might be wondering why I have decided to write about this now, seeing as how it isn’t exactly news any more. For those that have not seen it, it is an opportunity to do so, and for those that have to refresh their memory in preparation for the articles to follow.

During my last visit to Osmosoft, I was able to form a fair opinion about Jeremy Ruston and his team at Osmosoft, and what impact these developments would have for TiddlyWiki. Next week I’m going to have the opportunity to continue this process, as I’ll be visiting and working with the Osmosoft team. Upon my return, I will share with you my true thoughts on Jeremy (as promised), his team and the future of TiddlyWiki.

The articles to follow include:

• My true impressions of Jeremy Ruston and the significance of his move to BT.
• A personalized introduction to each of the newest members of the TiddlyWiki community - the Osmosoft team (think RippleRap).
• TiddlyWiki and its immediate and long-term future.
• An introduction to UnaMesa and its role in supporting TiddlyWiki.
• A report from the TiddlyYuletide celebrations as well as my long over-due impressions from my first visit to Osmosoft.
• New developments in the use of TiddlyWiki in education, including a brand new and very exciting project.

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.

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.

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.

Both plugins are extremely easy to use and consist of a bare minimum of JavaScript — relying primarily on CSS — which results in a small size and no performance concerns. Feedback and suggestions are welcome, as always.

For those of you familiar with my bookmarklets from the previous blog, you will notice that there have been some additions. I have added some new bookmarklets myself, and Jeremy Ruston has graciously allowed me to include his bookmarklets as well.

I am hoping this will grow into a central place for everyone to come to, for their TiddlyWiki bookmarklet needs. Suggestions, feedback and ideas for new bookmarklets are all welcome.

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.

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.

TiddlyWiki has a ‘list’ macro, which has been extended to use the new filter syntax introduced in TiddlyWiki. How do you use it? It couldn’t be simpler:

<<list filter [tag[MyFavouriteTag]]>> generates a list of tiddlers with the tag MyFavouriteTag.

You could also do <<list filter [tag[MyFavouriteTag]] [tag[AnotherTag]]>> to get a list of tiddlers with the tag MyFavouriteTag or AnotherTag. However, currently a small bug will make a tiddler appear twice in the list if it has both tags. But do not despair! This will be fixed in the next release, hopefully along with another powerful feature, the ability to exclude tiddlers with a given tag.

What this means is that very soon you should be able, to do something like this:

<<list filter [tag[MyFavouriteTag]] [tag[AnotherTag]] [!tag[[NotThisTag]]>>

Please note the ! before the last tag, to imply that we do no want to include tiddlers with this tag. What this will give us, is an extremely powerful and versatile way of filtering and listing tiddlers by tags, without the need for any plugins!

The AnnotationsPlugin allows you to annotate content, by creating small text bubbles that appear when you move your mouse over key words or phrases.

The FootnotesPlugin provides an automated way to create a bibliography for each tiddler, by creating footnotes which are automatically numbered and linked to the relevant part of the content.

Both plugins were written primarily with an academic usage in mind, though they should prove useful in a variety of contexts. Feedback, bug reports and suggestions for improvement are most welcome.

These are the first of numerous plugins to be released here; watch this space for more.

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.