education.tw.com

[Richard Smith]

Hi All,

At Jeremy's invitation, I am putting together materials for a "tiddlywiki in education" portal, to eventually be hosted under the main site and addressing the particular use-cases found in education.

I'd really appreciate any feedback or input you might have about the site itself or the content that should appear on it.

I've made a template for the site here;

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/83055414/education.tw.com.html

Please feel free to edit it and publish it back at me with any improvements you would like to make in terms of function or form. I've also included a "community consultation" section listing some areas for discussion - I'd be really happy to get any feedback or contributions you'd like to make - either here in the forum or via wiki.

Regards,

Richard

[Peter Miller]

Thanks for doing this, Richard. Great start in my opinion. I'm only just getting to grips with TiddlyWiki in teaching this year so I can't provide much by way of case studies. I would, however, suggest that low-hanging fruit be included such as the use of journal tiddlers to create reflective logs as students progress through a module or project.

bw Peter

[Peter Miller]

Something else I've found useful is being able to email wikis to students, attach them to our VLE and provide updates that they can import to refresh their wikis. All self-evident but worth adding if they're not already in there.

One specific use case being explored by a medical student is the use of TiddlyMap to produce annotated views of metabolism: http://danielriggins.com/mednotes (although I guess it would be polite to consult him before putting it on the site?)

Incidentally, in terms of the feature set of an academic publishing platform, it might be worth a compare & contrast with http://scalar.usc.edu/features/overview/ . I don't mean this in any overt sense but as a way to think of areas where TiddlyWiki particularly shines.

bw

Peter

On Monday, March 2, 2015 at 9:28:59 AM UTC, Richard Smith wrote:

[Richard Smith]

Peter,

Thanks for the suggestions - I've added Daniel Riggins' site to the list and will check out Scalar in more detail - sounds very interesting.

Regards,

Richard

[Peter Miller]

Not my area but Active Calculus is another one worth adding. Peter

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/83055414/Active_Calculus_v0.1.html

On Monday, March 2, 2015 at 9:28:59 AM UTC, Richard Smith wrote:

[Peter Miller]

For the TiddlySpot section: http://pespot.tiddlyspot.com/ (lesson planner)

On Monday, March 2, 2015 at 9:28:59 AM UTC, Richard Smith wrote:

[RichardWilliamSmith]

Hi Peter,

Thanks for your help - much appreciated 

The active calculus book is something I made as part of my own project - http://www.didaxy.net - I will include it, for sure, but I don't want to seem as though I'm trying to use the portal to promote myself.

Your other recommendation -  http://pespot.tiddlyspot.com/ looks like a really interesting, practical use - is it yours? or do you know who's it is? How do you use TW yourself?

Any other recommendations or advice would be very welcome.

Regards,

Richard

[Jeremy Ruston]

I hadn't seen http://pespot.tiddlyspot.com until now - it's a pretty amazing piece of work. It's by Patrick Detzner who has posted about it here:

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/tiddlywiki/_giafhm86Ek/z97-Z7ujRuMJ

Best wishes

Jeremy.

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[Patrick Detzner]

Jeremy, thank you for the kind words. I really appreciate the encouragement.

Richard, that's a beautiful website, I'll be following your progress as a student teacher and hopefully one-day educator myself. I started out with the project because I was getting overwhelmed by all of the planning documents that were required, all the back and forth between multiple Word docs copying and pasting and formatting lists, etc. TW just solves it all, I love it.

As it develops I am starting to think about more long-term and comprehensive uses for it as a data management tool for teachers. For example the way it is now I can save and track units over time, and compare them across years. Right now I'm taking a Curriculum Assessment class so I got to thinking, you could create and edit a curriculum over multiple years to make sure that you covered everything, and use TW to visualize different aspects of the curriculum much more conveniently than the ~300 page pdfs I'm currently seeing. For example, a lot of teachers are now making plans in alignment with Common Core. How awesome would it be to press a button and produce a detailed document showing your commitment to Common Core standards, and all without any of Bill Gates' software.

Then the other area that I am very interested in developing (not now, maybe this summer) would be the use of TW as a long term grade book. This would provide important data on both the students and the teacher. There are ~250 learning objectives in that tiddler, for two units that are not even half completed. How well are my assessments aligned to those objectives? There is about a 0% chance that I can keep track of whether individual students are meeting those goals in a spreadsheet, but with TW, I would have a tiddler for each student and could keep track of their results on assessments. This record could persist across multiple years. Wouldn't it be great if you could hand each of your students a detailed report showing them exactly how they progressed over time? (Or email it to them, or have it available for them to peruse at will?) That would just be one button to click if you were keeping all your grades in a TW.

As an aside, one of my upcoming projects is going to be combining svg graphics, wikitext, and javascript to make graph widgets. For educators that want to display their student learning data, this would be useful. I used to love the simplicity and versatility of the graphing tools in Matlab, so I will probably base it on that and Excel. I know other people are working on making TW more math-friendly, and I think these two additions would go a long way towards making TW a viable spreadsheet alternative.

I would also like to add a section for assigning students to teams or groups for lesson activities, using BJ's taglist widget with the drag and drop. It would be pretty nice because you could automatically create and print custom handouts for all your groups in all your classes. You could also store parent contact information and any other type of information about the students.

Anyway, I don't mean to hijack your post but I was literally thinking about this all day and I got real excited when I saw your post. I've seen some real crap educational software and I'm sure it was expensive, so I'd love to see TW put some control back in the hands of the teachers and free up some money for better things.

Patrick

[Peter Miller]

Apologies -- I should have given some attribution but Jeremy and others have taken care of that now. I was simply harvesting interesting examples I've seen posted here.

bw

Peter

[RichardWilliamSmith]

Hi Patrick,

Thanks for your kind words and your thoughtful post. Clearly we share much of the same excitement for the possibilities of TW - it would be great to have your involvement. I remember my own teacher training and I'm sure this is a busy time for you - I certainly think that you're ahead of the curve in realising the importance of tracking student data.

 I am starting to think about more long-term and comprehensive uses for it as a data management tool for teachers. For example the way it is now I can save and track units over time, and compare them across years. Right now I'm taking a Curriculum Assessment class so I got to thinking, you could create and edit a curriculum over multiple years to make sure that you covered everything, and use TW to visualize different aspects of the curriculum much more conveniently than the ~300 page pdfs I'm currently seeing. For example, a lot of teachers are now making plans in alignment with Common Core. How awesome would it be to press a button and produce a detailed document showing your commitment to Common Core standards, and all without any of Bill Gates' software.

Right. My thoughts are that we can use TW to build organisational materials, and then eventually whole courses and textbooks, that map straight on to the curriculum. One of my next goals is to take apart the common core math standards and put them back together in TW and then use that as a starting point for building courses.

 

Then the other area that I am very interested in developing (not now, maybe this summer) would be the use of TW as a long term grade book. This would provide important data on both the students and the teacher. There are ~250 learning objectives in that tiddler, for two units that are not even half completed. How well are my assessments aligned to those objectives? There is about a 0% chance that I can keep track of whether individual students are meeting those goals in a spreadsheet, but with TW, I would have a tiddler for each student and could keep track of their results on assessments. This record could persist across multiple years. Wouldn't it be great if you could hand each of your students a detailed report showing them exactly how they progressed over time? (Or email it to them, or have it available for them to peruse at will?) That would just be one button to click if you were keeping all your grades in a TW.

This is an awesome goal and a can of worms. Have you seen the project we are involved with to explore integration of TW with the xAPI reporting protocol? You should join the group and follow our progress or join in if you have the time (https://plus.google.com/communities/113063293590109148292). The idea is to enable TW to communicate with a Learning Record Store to log information about students in just the way you suggest. One of the big issues in this area is data-protection and privacy with regards to what gets stored on the server and I think there are some ways in which TW as a 'smart-client' might be part of an interesting solution. Let us know when you want to work on it, I'd love to help.

 

As an aside, one of my upcoming projects is going to be combining svg graphics, wikitext, and javascript to make graph widgets. For educators that want to display their student learning data, this would be useful. I used to love the simplicity and versatility of the graphing tools in Matlab, so I will probably base it on that and Excel. I know other people are working on making TW more math-friendly, and I think these two additions would go a long way towards making TW a viable spreadsheet alternative.

This sounds amazing. I'm learning about a lot of this stuff myself at the moment - svg graphcs are pretty cool. There are also some javascript libraries I would like to explore for making math-interactives etc. that might also be relevant. (I'm not a programmer so it takes me a long time to figure things out, but I get there in the end!)

 

I would also like to add a section for assigning students to teams or groups for lesson activities, using BJ's taglist widget with the drag and drop. It would be pretty nice because you could automatically create and print custom handouts for all your groups in all your classes. You could also store parent contact information and any other type of information about the students.

These are some great Ideas. Thanks again for your reply. I hope that you'll keep us updated on your progress, what you've already done is very impressive. Let me know if there's anything I can help you with.

Regards,

Richard

[RichardWilliamSmith]

Hi Peter,

Thanks again for your recommendations. I understand that some people might care a lot about attribution but I don't. Perhaps it comes from being called 'richard smith' - there are so many of us that attribution is kind of meaningless :)

As well as esoteric applications, I'm really interested in the practical ways that TW can be used 'out of the box' and also very interested in what people make of it when they first come across it. Do you mind me asking how many students you have using it and do they find it easy to understand? How old are they and what do you teach? How do you get the content into your wikis? What sort of devices do your students use to access the wikis?

Regards,

Richard

[Peter Miller]

Hi Richard

I teach microbiology at university level. I'm somewhat gingerly exploring multiple uses of TW5 in three classes with 30-70 students but I don't have any feedback to share as yet.

bw

Peter

[Peter Miller]

It's interesting to measure the capabilities of TW5 vs the Web Literacy Map at https://webmaker.org/en-US/resources -- I think it fares pretty well.

On Monday, March 2, 2015 at 9:28:59 AM UTC, Richard Smith wrote:

[Alex Hough]

Scalar's intro video makes points relevant to TW.

The annotation of texts is an important aspect of learning: it appears to do this well

Alex

On 2 March 2015 at 13:00, Peter Miller <pmi...@liv.ac.uk> wrote:

Something else I've found useful is being able to email wikis to students, attach them to our VLE and provide updates that they can import to refresh their wikis. All self-evident but worth adding if they're not already in there.

One specific use case being explored by a medical student is the use of TiddlyMap to produce annotated views of metabolism using TiddlyMap: http://danielriggins.com/mednotes (although I guess it would be polite to consult him before putting it on the site?)

Incidentally, in terms of the feature set of an academic publishing platform, it might be worth a compare & contrast with http://scalar.usc.edu/features/overview/ . I don't mean this in any overt sense but as a way to think of areas where TiddlyWiki particularly shines.

bw

Peter

On Monday, March 2, 2015 at 9:28:59 AM UTC, Richard Smith wrote:

Hi All,

At Jeremy's invitation, I am putting together materials for a "tiddlywiki in education" portal, to eventually be hosted under the main site and addressing the particular use-cases found in education.

I'd really appreciate any feedback or input you might have about the site itself or the content that should appear on it.

I've made a template for the site here;

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/83055414/education.tw.com.html

Please feel free to edit it and publish it back at me with any improvements you would like to make in terms of function or form. I've also included a "community consultation" section listing some areas for discussion - I'd be really happy to get any feedback or contributions you'd like to make - either here in the forum or via wiki.

Regards,

Richard

--

[RichardWilliamSmith]

Hi, I got chance to have a poke at Scalar. My feeling is that, whilst they have some useful integrations with other services, their underlying platform is actually quite basic - essentially just a server-side wiki engine - and editing materials on the platform is quite tedious - just like making an online wiki from scratch.

Without wishing to tear into them too badly, I would say that TiddlyWiki 'out of the box' offers a number of advantages over their platform;

- much quicker editing

- ability to add content from anywhere (by many different means - drag and drop, bulk importing, iframe inclusion, tiddlyclip etc.)

- serverless and self-contained

-- platform independent

-- 'future proof'

-- works offline

- content can be included internally or linked to externally (local or remote)

-  extensible (through plugins/wikitext)

- easy to maintain multiple projects and move content between them

- greater flexibility of overall design and structure

Having said that, there are some useful things we might be able to gleen from the design decisions they have made in an attempt to provide a clear experience to their users, although they only seem to have produced 5 books in 4 years... 

The really important topic that they highlight is 'content metadata', which is going to be very important in educational tech in the future. I'm very interested in the standards and formats that they are using and will do more research into it, following some of the links out of their site.

Thanks again for the recommendation. If you haven't seen it before, you may also be interested in 'Visual Understanding Environment' from tufts university - I have found it very useful for organising complicated information: http://vue.tufts.edu/ 

Regards,

Richard

[Peter Miller]

Thanks for the background on Scalar and the comparison guide -- good to see Tw5 ticking important boxes. I have used VUE but not on a regular basis and not recently. It was another tool that felt like it should have gained more traction than it did. Hopefully TiddlyMap will provide something similar in due course.

bw

Peter

[Alex Hough]

I recall Reasoning Well [1] and Elise Springers TW [2] as a early and beautiful TWs. Both still look good today.

And wow! So fast!

Alex

[1] http://reasoningwell.tiddlyspot.com/

[2] http://espringer.web.wesleyan.edu/

--

[Alberto Molina]

Hi Richard,

I'm very much interested about your "TW in education" portal and I hope to have TW for Scholars working again very soon, that could be followed by a TW for Education. The idea is to have a set of tools (using the MagicTabs plugin) that can be adapted to suit different needs.

Best wishes,

Alberto

[Richard Smith]

@Peter - I feel like there were actually a bunch of tools around 5 years ago that never got the attention that they deserved. I haven't played with TiddlyMap yet but it looks great. The ability to move backwards and forwards between a mind-map and a wiki of the same information is very tantalising.

@Alex, wow! I agree - both look excellent. Really detailed and slick navigation. Thanks very much for the recommendations.

Keep them coming!

@Alberto - Hi! I'm very pleased that you're interested. I love your project and think it can be useful to many people - I expect it will have a prominent place on the portal and I can't wait to see how it develops over time. Of course, the portal is not 'mine' but 'ours' and I hope we will be able to work together to make it into a showcase for all the fantastic work that people are doing. Please let me know if there is anything that I can do to help you with your projects or if you have any other suggestions.

Regards,

Richard 

[Alex Hough]

Reasoning Well is interesting in it's context: its creator (as far as I remember), is into pragmatism Alexander Technique and ergonomics. I thought it interesting that a someone with these interests would choose TW in the first place and also created an artefact of great beauty. I am a fan!

best

Alex

--

[Peter Miller]

I ran a f2f class using TiddlyWiki to run through some basic website building activities. Given it was the first time I was reasonably happy with the outcome. Things to watch, however,

• Using Internet Explorer by default (it's the institutional choice) or accidentally rather than Firefox
• Not installing TiddlyFox/attempting to install TiddlyFox in Chrome
  
• Running from the copy mounted on the VLE rather than a downloaded copy

Obvious stuff but you still have to diagnose/catch it. One that I managed: having the same file open in two tabs and closing the one with the edit first so the edit was lost when the second was closed (at least I think that's what happened).

On Monday, March 2, 2015 at 9:28:59 AM UTC, Richard Smith wrote:

[Felix Küppers]

Hi Richard,

I just stumbled upon this (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/83055414/education.tw.com.html) and it is a great, extremely modern looking site you build there with tiddlywiki! Very impressive.

-Felix

[Devin Weaver]

Wow, That theme looks amazing. Good find!

[RichardWilliamSmith]

Hi Felix,

Thanks - as chance would have it, I just got round to figuring out a bit about how github works and put the tiddlers up there, with a view to opening it up to collaboration - https://github.com/r1chard5mith/edu.TW5. I'd like to highlight all the many educational uses for tiddlywiki - I'd love to feature your tiddlymap project here, what do you think? (I think there should probably be another landing page too - for productivity and organisational tools and I think tiddlymap would belong there too, along with things like GTD)

Regards,

Richard

[Ste Wilson]

Not much to add to the discussion but definitely interested in seeing how it progresses. My own fledging effort is Stephenteacher.tiddlyspot.com

[Felix Küppers]

Hi Richard,

Thanks - as chance would have it, I just got round to figuring out a bit about how github works and put the tiddlers up there, with a view to opening it up to collaboration - https://github.com/r1chard5mith/edu.TW5.

I put your repo on my watchlist. If you want to include me in a discussion or need help at some point simply use "@felixhayashi" in the issue
 

I'd like to highlight all the many educational uses for tiddlywiki - I'd love to feature your tiddlymap project here, what do you think? (I think there should probably be another landing page too - for productivity and organisational tools and I think tiddlymap would belong there too, along with things like GTD)

I think it is a nice idea to discuss tiddlywiki aspects/plugins and how they could be applied in the context of education. Of course I feel honored if TiddlyMap is mentioned in such a way :)

-Felix

[Jeremy Ruston]

Hi Ste

On Mon, Jun 22, 2015 at 1:02 PM, Ste Wilson <stew...@gmail.com> wrote:

Not much to add to the discussion but definitely interested in seeing how it progresses. My own fledging effort is Stephenteacher.tiddlyspot.com

That's great! Thanks for sharing, it's a lovely example, I think.

Best wishes

Jeremy.

 

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[Ste Wilson]

Just been exploring the internet in regards to maths interaction/ marking online etc.
Found WebWork
http://webwork.maa.org/wiki/Introduction#.VaTvJctwbqA

Does anyone here have any experiance with it? Can it be tiddlyed?

In reply to someone taking about graphs hhtml2late.com seems to provide a partial implementation of rendering PStricks which is a post script mark up in LaTeX, to allow interactive graphs and diagrams. I don't think it's being actively developed though.

I've also being looking at themathist.com and fastfig.com as potential methods of bypassing my students poor handwriting and or submitting assignments.

Any further developments on marking/ tracking with tiddley?

[Ste Wilson]

Just a correction. The link should be latex2html5.com Is there anything else out there?

[stevesuny]

Hello All, reviving an old thread: I just came across this from the Scaler folks, and am wondering how / if TW might be compared to the current activities of https://hypothes.is

I haven't used Scalar -- and don't really want to start with a new platform -- but am wondering if anyone has figured out a way to use TW to write to Scalar? Or done any serious analysis of it lately?

[Alex Hough]

Hi Steve,

I was thinking that, now my tiddlers are in GitHub, they have their own URL and are therefore referenceable as .tid files.... I was thinking how each tiddler could include metadata which would help make tiddlers referenceable in texts

I can see the value of  https://hypothes.is but I also see the sticking point: the academic firewall. I don't see that papers will become available anytime soon....

Alex

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