Excising Large Outlines in TW

[Mark Cubberley]

I have been using Soren’s Grok TiddlyWiki and his Zettelkasten shell over the last several weeks. Most of this time has been just getting stuff into TW and seeing what happens (or doesn't and trying to figure out why). I have not spent any time creating, connecting, etc.. The product of my work thus far is here.

I have two large outlines (GeneralChemistryACCMOutline and OrganicChemistryACCMOutline) that delineate anchoring concept content maps for most of the undergraduate chemistry I teach. The hierarchy of these outlines is identical at Level 1 (Big Ideas) and Level 2 (Enduring Understandings) and differ at Level 3 (Subdisciplinary Articulations) and Level 4 (Content Details).

I need to excise these outlines and then add open educational resources (text, links to videos, images, and simulations, exercises, etc.) to the resulting tiddlers.

I am interested in your thoughts on how I might excise these outlines in a (unique?) way that leverages TW’s utility/flexibility as a content-management system considering:

1. The order of Level 1 Big Ideas is consistent with the sequence of instruction.
2. I would like to somehow leverage TW and the connected, context-free facts derived from these outlines to move away from a reductionist approach to teaching and learning to a systems approach to teaching and learning. 
3. I do not yet know specifically how I am going to use this resource in a teaching setting.
4. I am new to TW…

Thanks for your help.

Mark

[David Gifford]

I doubt this fully addresses your question, but just so you are aware: my new Subsume plugin allows you to excise items as both links and detail elements, and thus create an outline in which you can view any number of levels from the top level, or "zoom in" to any level using the link. There is also a video tutorial. https://giffmex.org/gifts/subsume.html

[Mark Cubberley]

My apologies. A cut-and-paste error compromised a link in my original post. My public TW is here (https://markcubberley.github.io).

[Mark S.]

The official slicer edition does pretty much what you describe https://tiddlywiki.com/editions/text-slicer/ .

But it uses a complicated relationship between the resulting tiddlers that may be difficult to manipulate.

Notowritey (https://marxsal.github.io/various/notowritey.html) allows you to split large texts using a regular expression. You can then manipulate items into a hierarchical arrangement in a manner similar to a regular outliner. The relationship is based on simple listing and tagging.

I would imagine for a systems approach, you would have to add a great deal more of material. What I remember about chemistry is that they already give you too much material to remember and often assume you are familiar with processes and techniques that you have never encountered anywhere. As if someone just ripped pages out of your textbook and threw them away. Trying to see how you could fit MORE into the curriculum seems somewhat unkind.

Another Mark

[Mark Cubberley]

@David

I have been keeping my eye on the Subsume threads and this plugin may be what I'm looking for. Between my naiveté of TW and, for the moment, a rather nebulous pedagogical project, I am not convinced I know what I'm asking, but I appreciate the reply nonetheless.

@ Mark S.

You are correct. More often than not, there IS too much material and I my intent is not to add more to an already dense curriculum. I see systems thinking as pedagogical strategy/framework for my teaching. (Systems thinking in chemical education is new to me and to chemical education for that matter.) I do not yet know what content I may have to sacrifice to use this pedagogy, nor if the loss of this content compromises the learning objectives of the course(s). I am hoping to figure all this out in a public facing TW using these concept outlines as a knowledge base.

[Mark Cubberley]

@David

Is there a plugin folder to download. I'm not convinced I know how to install your plugin otherwise. I'm running TW via Node.js.

[Saq Imtiaz]

Mark you can save a plugin tiddler as a folder: https://links.tiddlywiki.com/urls/4b5e9c4afc6923035ef9/

Otherwise you can drag and drop the plugin to your wiki and import it and it will work, though it will only be installed for that specific wiki to which you dragged it.

[Mark Cubberley]

Thanks for the help. I exported the $:/plugins/giffmex/subsume as a .json file and it yields $__plugins_giffmex_subsume.json. 

In the terminal: 

tiddlywiki --load "$__plugins_giffmex_subsume.json" --unpackplugin "$:/plugins/giffmex/subsume.json" --savewikifolder "subsume"

and I get:

Error: No tiddlers found in file ".json"

What am I missing?

[Mark S.]

The --unpackplugin takes the name of the tiddler, not of the JSON file (just delete ".json" from your unpackplugin command).

It looks like after you're done you'll need to do some cleanup, moving subsume/plugins/subsume to plugins/subsume, and deleting the subsume directory. 

[Mark Cubberley]

I missed that in the example, thanks. I tried the following:

tiddlywiki --load "$__plugins_giffmex_subsume.json" --unpackplugin "$:/plugins/giffmex/subsume" --savewikifolder "subsume" 

and got the same error...

[Mark S.]

Oh. Are you running linux? I also changed double quotes to single quotes around $:/plugins/giffmex/subsume  so the shell doesn't interpret the $ as a variable. I'm wondering if the unpackplugin is even needed.

[Mark S.]

Oops. I removed double quotes from $__plugins_giffmex_subsume.json .

[Mark S.]

And the unpackplugin command just turns the plugin tiddlers into separate tiddlers in tiddler space, which isn't what you want. So that part doesn't seem necessary.

[Mark Cubberley]

Geez...this has been a slog...

I'm on a Mac. The $ seems to be the culprit. I changed the filename from $__plugins_giffmex_subsume.json to plugins_giffmex_subsume.json and ran:

tiddlywiki --load "__plugins_giffmex_subsume.json" --unpackplugin "$:/plugins/giffmex/subsume" --savewikifolder "subsume"

and it works! The command also works without the unpackplugin (i.e., tiddlywiki --load "__plugins_giffmex_subsume.json" --savewikifolder "subsume").

Thanks for the help.