Offer of multi-user TiddlyWiki 5 hosting for educators

[Jeremy Ruston]

There's a lot more I hope to discuss about our response as a community to the Coronavirus, but today I wanted to start with one simple thing that I can do right now that I hope might make a small impact.

The offer is simple: to give educators who already use TiddlyWiki 5 in a classroom setting the infrastructure they need to be able to use it with remote students.

It's based on Xememex, a cloud-based multi-user implementation of TiddlyWiki that I initially built to host the Anna Freud Manuals project (now at https://manuals.annafreud.org/) when it had to migrate from TiddlySpace. Xememex uses an extended form of the bag/recipe model from TiddlySpace to give flexible ways to combine content into wikis. It is now fairly mature with several hundred users and several hundred wikis, with intertwingled content between them.

Elise Springer of Wesleyan University, Connecticut kindly agreed to trial the system with her Ethics class. We exported the existing course material from TiddlySpot and setup two new spaces:

• https://xememex.com/ethicsatwes is the space used by the 34 students to review the course material and attach their comments. They have their own login credentials and once logged in can leave comments using the TW comment plugin
• https://xememex.com/ethicsatwes-teacher is the teacher site that only Elise can edit. It contains the course material, which is also automatically transcluded into the student space

Hopefully Elise will be able to jump in and explain more about how the space will be used during teaching, but I believe it's for a combination of synchronous presentations via Zoom and asynchronous coursework by the students working alone.

If we can keep to a small number of variations of this setup then I see no reason why we can't support hundreds of educators. I may have to appeal for help with funding this initiative if it's a wild success but I don't intend to worry about that for the moment.

I'm posting now to gauge interest, so please do reply here (or via email), and give an outline of your needs. The next step is that I will post a spreadsheet with the information I'll require to set things up. In the meantime, please feel free to ask any questions.

Best wishes

Jeremy

[HansWobbe]

Kudos, Jeremy!

This is a good time to try an initiative like this.  I have a number of associates who are feeling quite over-whelmed by the sudden need to "home-school".  I will start collecting their impressions about how their youngsters are interacting with their now remote teachers.  Perhaps that will yield some useCases that TiddlyWiki is particularly well suited to address.

Cheers, Hans

[Rahul Kashyap]

Dear Jeremy,

This is really fantastic. I've been using TW for my content management of research but, I have always felt the need to have such a solution so that I can share the content with my collaborators and students with the philosophy of TW in mind. 

I support this. 

Best,

-Rahul Kashyap

Postdoctoral Fellow,

Pennsylvania State University

[Mohammad]

Hi Jeremy,

 This is interesting solution and I like to give a try and give feedback on how we can improve it.

--Mohammad

[HansBKK]

Wow would jump on this!

ESL teacher, been a TW user many years personally, but only limited use in my classes.

Just a dozen or so logins would be a great start.

[TonyM]

Jeremy,

Great initiative, In future I would like to access such a platform, initially to set up training in tiddlywiki to build my local community, then later to support other coaching, but for now I stand back, so it can be used where the current circumstances demand. If a solution like this is not open sourced, I imagine a cost effective online solution like this would be in high demand.

Great work

Tony

[Marc Ferguson]

I am so excited about this. I am a retired teacher developing a consortium of schools and institutions that are really wanting to involving communities in education bay involving everyone in the development of the experience not just coming and being entertained. 

Currently we have a space simulator that participants can board and tour our solar system for up to 24 hours. There are new tasks for the participants every 15 minutes. 

All of those activities need to documented  and accessed over and over again during the simulation but the fun is extended by students and interested adults creating all of these activities for the simulations.

So far all of these activities are written and delivered in all sorts of ways.  I think a multi user tiddlywiki would be exactly the documentation system and also provide a way for the participants to record their performance scores and journal their mission. 

I would love to be part of developing this idea although I am not a great programmer. 

Let me know if you need more interim me. 

Sent from my iPhone

On Mar 21, 2020, at 10:10 AM, Jeremy Ruston <jeremy...@gmail.com> wrote:



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[Saq Imtiaz]

Jeremy, great initative. 

In the TiddlyWiki Classic days, UnaMesa supported a fair bit of work with using TiddlyWiki in an educational setting including separate student and instructor editions that synced with each other. Perhaps at a calmer time and if you think it would be helpful, I would be happy to engage with you and Elise to see if there are any learnings to be passed on from those experiences.

Regards,

Saq

PS: the new dynanotate plugin would have been very helpful with the work we did back then, and may be useful now as well depending on the workflow.

[Morgaine O'Herne]

Thanks, Jeremy!

Is it alright if i share these links with teacher I know?  Also, I'm thinking this would be a great way to host tabletop RPGs or board games online, for those of us who can't get together with our friends anymore. Is the platform open to non-teachers?

[Morgaine O'Herne]

Also, could I get in on the Alpha...please?

On Saturday, March 21, 2020 at 10:10:47 AM UTC-6, Jeremy Ruston wrote:

[Jeremy Ruston]

Thanks everyone for your support. To answer Morgaine's question:

At the moment I wanted to focus on educators who already have TW5 course material and are ready to go. There’s clearly a lot of scope to try to encourage other educators into the TiddlyWiki fold but that’s not really dependent on what I’m doing with Xememex (Elise was able to build her course material on TiddlySpot without needing to have access to Xememex until we deployed it there)

I’ll shortly post a spreadsheet questionnaire to gather the information needed to get them set up.

Many thanks,

Jeremy

 

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[Jeremy Ruston]

For the moment, this offer is for educators with existing TiddlyWiki 5 course material who want to enable multi-user access by students.

Here’s the information I need for the initial setup:

* Name of your space. The name may only contain lower case letters and dashes (e.g. “ethicsatwes")

* Description of your space. A brief textual description that will appear on the xememex.com home page

* The desired username for the teacher (e.g. “jermolene” or “jeremyruston"). Again, may only contain lower case letters and dashes

* The email address for the teacher

* If possible the URL of the existing TW5 material so that it can be imported

Please email me at jeremy (at) jermolene (dot) com.

Once we’ve got the site set up I’ll need a spreadsheet of usernames/email addresses for the students themselves.

Don’t hesitate to ask any questions!

Best wishes

Jeremy.

[springer]

So here I am, jumping in to confirm that Jeremy created a great tool for my remote teaching by porting my TW5 (previously at tiddlyspot) over to xememex, where a "master" TW5 is available only to me, and a "target" TW5 is available to students as a space where they can log in and add comments, but without risk of the source material getting messed up.

As Jeremy pointed out, my TW5 is already heavily populated (mostly with accumulated stuff carried over from TWC), and so this just new way of serving it up just enabled a "asynchronous" kind of interaction to help mitigate the loss of in-class opportunities to navigate the material together and use the tiddlers as springboards for discussion. Please do check it out, and feel free to contact me with questions. What students see is here: https://xememex.com/ethicsatwes

One feature I am only beginning to dig into is that the "target" site can be modified directly, and if I modify a tiddler there (such as a stylesheet tiddler), it will from then on resist being overwritten by the master. Having some style differences between the two is actually useful, for quick visual recognition. But also, I can make it so that the interface at the target page is less cluttered with things that students don't need to see.

Students only "returned" (to virtual classes) on Monday, so I haven't got very much actual interaction to report. Stay tuned...

-Springer

On Saturday, March 21, 2020 at 12:10:47 PM UTC-4, Jeremy Ruston wrote:

[TonyM]

Springer

Interesting to hear your experience. As you say about having something to visually differentiate wikis is a good idea. I do find however not all are visually pleasing. It makes me wonder if Actualy adding some elements, that style a wiki but has no substantial impact would be helpful.

I know once I shared a plugin I created, on a minimaly restyled wiki a number of people sent me emails telling me they were concerned about what the plugin did to the styling, although the style had nothing to do with the plugin, it was just a look I preferred.

I admit some styled wikis just don't work for me too. So I wonder if some pin stripes and other subtle elements could help differentiate wikis from each other without too much visual impact.

Could be a nice project for someone.

Regards
Tony

[springer]

Saq, I look forward to comparing notes...

What is this "dynanotate"? A quick search here, and also via google, doesn't turn up anything...?

In the TiddlyWiki Classic days, UnaMesa supported a fair bit of work with using TiddlyWiki in an educational setting ...I would be happy to engage with you and Elise to see if there are any learnings to be passed on from those experiences.
...

[Jeremy Ruston]

What is this "dynanotate"? A quick search here, and also via google, doesn't turn up anything...?

It provides primitives for displaying clickable highlights over other content. It can be used to display search result snippets with highlighted matches, or to display annotations over text.

It was developed for the EPUB project I’ve been working on with Xavier Cazin at Immatériel.

https://groups.google.com/d/topic/tiddlywiki/_VLufc4Svp8/discussion

You can try it out on the prerelease:

https://tiddlywiki.com/prerelease/#%24%3A%2Fplugins%2Ftiddlywiki%2Fdynannotate

Best wishes

Jeremy

In the TiddlyWiki Classic days, UnaMesa supported a fair bit of work with using TiddlyWiki in an educational setting ...I would be happy to engage with you and Elise to see if there are any learnings to be passed on from those experiences.
...

PS: the new dynanotate plugin would have been very helpful with the work we did back then, and may be useful now as well depending on the workflow.

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