From Andrew’s point of view:

• He sets up a Wikispaces class wiki as a means to sharing his lecture slides with the students.
• By means of the Instructor Notebook he authors slides for every lecture. Using the IN as opposed to directly using the Wikispaces wiki gives him the freedom to work on the train whilst commuting every day, as well as the ability to have private notes and talking points associated with each slide.
• The IN synchronizes with the class Wikispaces wiki and all the new slides automatically become available online for the students. (The intstructor’s personal notes/talking points do not sync, keeping them private)
• Using the IN notebook in class, Andrew is able to present his slides during the lecture, thus avoiding the need to use multiple software for authoring, organizing and presenting.
• As students discuss individual slides and lectures on the class wiki, Andrew is able to follow their progress and answer questions.

From a student’s point of view:

• At the beginning of the course, each student downloads a copy of the SN and saves it to their computer. As it is just an HTML file there is no need to install it and it works on all operating systems, and they can carry it around on a USB stick if they need to.
• Every time a student opens the SN it tries to connect to the class wiki online and if internet access is available, downloads any new slides available.
• If no internet access is available, the student is able to continue working with the content they already have in their SN.
• Using the SN to browse the slides, the student gains extra navigational tools such as “next” and “previous” buttons between adjacent slides of the same lecture and tag based references between slides.
• If they have any questions or wish to discuss the contents of a slide they are able to go to the page for that slide on the class wiki and use the discussion feature to discuss with other students or Andrew himself.
• Using the SN with the class wiki allows them to take personal notes for every slide, and all of their notes and the contents of the slide are searchable and easier to use due to hyperlinks between different parts. As a student, being able to easily maintain your personal study notes and have them associated with the appropriate class materials is very helpful when reviewing and studying for exams.
• The student is able to print out lecture slides with or without their own associated private notes for each slide.
• The SN also allows the student to have access to the content of the class wiki whilst not connected to the internet which can be useful to make better use of time spent commuting or in any other situation where they are not able to connect to the internet. The SN also serves as a backup should the Wikispaces class wiki become unavailable for any reason.

As a result of privacy concerns I am unable to share with you the class wiki that Andrew’s students are currently using. However, Andrew has graciously allowed us to reuse some of his slides to create a public demo, where you can try the Student Notebook yourself. This demo also includes a tool which will allow you to create Student Notebooks for use with any Wikispaces based wiki. However, do keep in mind that the SN is still in active development and as such still a little rough around the edges in some ways.

Over the next few months we will be working on using the feedback we have received to make improvements and make an improved SN available for the fall semester this year.  The Student Notebook demo with step-by-step instructions can be found here. Andrew has also created a screencast for the demo which you can find below. Any feedback you can provide, by means of this blog or the demo wiki, will be greatly appreciated.

Over the last year I’ve spent a considerable amount of time on the Student Notebook project. This is an UnaMesa project developed with the assistance of Professor Andrew Lister (Queens University, Canada) which provides students with a tool that allows them to have a local copy of their class Wikispaces wiki (lecture slides and class materials) which is searchable and to which they can add their own private notes. Students also gain the ability to work with class wikis even when not connected to the internet and are able to synchronize with the online class wiki when they are connected

The local copy of the wiki is implemented using - you guessed it - TiddlyWiki. The choice of Wikispaces as the server-side wiki to use as the class wiki was based on its extremely intuitive user interface and excellent support infrastructure, which has made it one of the most popular wikis in educational circles. However the core technology developed can easily be adapted to work with most wikis.

More details on the project and the pedagogy behind using the combination of an online class wiki and a Student Notebook, as well as reports on the experience of trialing this is Andrew’s class over the last semester, can be found here.

Another component of this project which is under development is an Instructor’s Notebook which allows course instructors to author new content and lecture slides for the class wiki, keep their own private notes for slides, and present them in the classroom - all from one tool.

Future plans for the project include exploring the possibility of using this technology in parts of the world without persistent internet connectivity, to provide students with better access to educational materials. While the Student Notebook has thus far been customized for a particular educational workflow, we will also be making more generalized versions available in the near future which can be used by anyone wishing to have an offline and privately annotable copy of their Wikispaces wiki.

I’ll be posting more details in a few days on how the Student Notebook is being used in Andrew’s class, as well as a link to a public demo where you can try it for yourself and get a notebook to use with your Wikispaces wiki.

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 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.

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.