Student notebook demo (TiddlyWiki in Education)

[Saq Imtiaz]

I've just posted a screen cast and a live demo of the Student Notebook in case anyone here finds it of interest. The Student Notebook is a customized TiddlyWiki used by students in conjunction with a class wiki (Wikispaces.)

Cheers,
Saq

[Saq Imtiaz]

PS: Naturally I forgot the link!
http://lewcid.org/2009/02/11/student-notebook-workflow-demo-and-screencast/

[Dave Gifford - http://www.giffmex.org/]

Hi Saq

Good to have you around. I looked at the SNDemo and it is very nice. I
may just get around to using that, if I ever get the time and knowhow
to translate it to Spanish for my students. Is there a help tiddler
with the items that would need to be translated?

Dave

[Dave Gifford - http://www.giffmex.org/]

Oh, and happy birthday tomorrow! (saw it on Facebook)

Dave

[Måns]

Hi Saq
I would like to be able to make this setup solely based on TW.
I'm sure it's possible with Bidix's php -saving features (prefilling
it with users and passwords) and tiddlersaveplugin.
I've tried to make acopy of your sn to an empty TW - but leaving out
the things related to wikispaces - but I cannot..
The pagetemplate and/or stylesheet seems to break...
I've also tried to find a way to toggle showing the backstage - but no
here luck either...

I've made a "mobile sick-leave notebook" for my school, based on
BidX's ItW.
I would love to be able to use the includeplugin in an adaption of
your SN to search and create local copies of tiddlers with content
from the main TW - using the tiddlernotesplugin.

YS Måns Mårtensson - danish teacher. (like Dave I would like to be
able to translate it too,, )

[lewcid]

Hi Dave,

Providing translations of the Student Notebook is definitely in the
plans but I'm afraid we aren't quite there yet. In this first version
the focus was on getting the user experience friendly enough for the
students in a specific configuration, and moving forwards I'll be
trying to create various templates with differing feature sets and one
of the things I'll be looking at there is translations.

Translations are a little tricky because the current tools available
for developers to assemble TiddlyWiki's from their components don't
have any inherent support for them and I'd like to be able to automate
this as opposed to having people translate them by hand. Whilst it
isn't too hard to add a Spanish translation plugin for TiddlyWiki
itself and to create something similar for the plugins being used,
where it gets trickier is that tiddlers that make up the navigation
and structure, such as the Help and Manage tiddlers, would need to be
translated as well.

One of the features under the covers of the SN is that every time it
synchronizes with the class wiki, it also checks to see if any new
features or bug fixes have been added for the SN code itself and
fetches them if so. This allows us to add new features and more
importantly fix any bugs that might be discovered without the student
having to jump through hoops... something which I think is very
crucial in these early stages of development. If certain tiddlers that
compose the basic architecture of the SN were to be translated by
hand, this would create conflicts when synchronizing.

It's not my intent to make the translation sound like an impossible
task but I wanted to share some of the background for it. I'd also be
very interested to get input from others on the best way to manage the
translation process, yourself included. If I remember correctly,
haven't you done some work on translating your own TiddlyWiki
applications?

Lastly, if you're really interested in stating to use the SN with your
students, perhaps we could work together on it and try to come up with
a solution for the short term until translations are better supported?
Such an exercise may actually reveal insight on the best way to manage
translations further down the road.

Cheers,
Saq

On Feb 11, 9:49 pm, "Dave Gifford - http://www.giffmex.org/"

[lewcid]

Hiya Måns,

Whilst working on the StudentNotebook an effort was made to ensure
that as much of the code written as possible was not Wikispaces
specific and I think that we were quite successful in this respect.
However, at this early stage in the development it was necessary to
add some "glue" if you will to hold the different pieces together and
this is what makes it a little difficult at this time to easily adapt
the SN to work with a server component other than Wikispaces. My
intention is that the next release of the SN will be server agnostic
and you will be able to choose which serverside wiki to work with.

I am however curious as to your reasoning behind wanting to use an
entirely TiddlyWiki based solution only. Are there some compelling
circumstances or reasons? We started off working with TiddlyWiki on
the server but ended up settling on Wikispaces because a) It has a
much more user friendly UI (from the students perspective at least!),
(b) it is accessible to screen readers (which is a legal obligation in
a lot of educational institutions) and (c) because it allows for
discussion features as well eliminating the need for a separate
bulletin board for the class such as WebCT. I realize that your
situation is rather different from that of Andrew's class but I'd love
to understand your needs better.

Also, if you are able to share a copy of the TiddlyWiki you wish to
adapt for this purpose, that will allow me to offer better advice as
well.
Cheers,
Saq

[Dave Gifford - http://www.giffmex.org/]

Hi Saq

I'm not in a hurry for the Spanish translation. I have enought to do!
Just wondered. Will look forward to that though in the near future.
Blessings and congratulations on a fine piece of work.

Dave

[Måns]

Hi Lewcid

I've made a wikispaces wiki and set up a sn-tw to fetch material from
it.
I totally agree with you. Wikispaces has very very userfriendly UI.
But I can't even use danish characters for the title :-(

I'm planning to use the concept for danish students and/or teacher
collegues - and I would like to have total control over the
"masterwiki" - beeing able to tweak it in any direction we would like.
That's the power of TW - beeing able to customize it. (Change the
language, stylesheet, pagetemplate asf.)

A collegue from a neighbour "efterskole" (a Danish boardingschool) is
setting up Moodle as a LMS - and maybe I will attempt to do the same.
(I've been using Claroline for a year now - and I have discovered many
of the benefits from using a LMS-system - generating spaces for
classes - and having a individual homepages for each subject and
groups ). I've even made a TW designed for each subject made available
for students on relevant pages in Claroline.
Moodle has a cleaner interface with more modules and I've discovered
that linking to different pages in Claroline isn't working the way I
need.. - so I'm ready to try Moodle. Moodle I expect - also has a
better danish translation.

I'm fiddling around with the thought that I might make two TW-
adaptions which accomodate teachers and pupils respectively - beeing
preconfigured with links and iframes to navigate in Moodle. I've
already made some attempts with Claroline - but as I mentioned before
- Claroline isn't quite up to it. If I fx. link to documents on the
danish-page - then I'll have to be on the Danish-page in a browser
already. The links in Claroline are relative.

Also beeing able to fetch/send material from/to Moodles built-in wiki
- would certainly make it even more usable.
I've found this: Tiddlywiki integration with New Moodle Wiki:
http://morfeo.upc.es/crom/mod/wiki/view.php?id=22&page=Tiddlywiki+integration+with+New+Moodle+Wiki&gid=0&uid=0
and this: Tiddlywiki integration: http://docs.moodle.org/en/Tiddlywiki_integration

Fetching material from "masterTWs" would also be very usefull on my
work. I've been making a sick-leave ITW (BidiX's tw for Iphone) that
I've integrated as an iframe in serveral prototypes - that I would
eventually share between my teacher collegues.
Recently I've discovered the IncludePlugin, which has very good use in
this context - especially when you use the TiddlerNotesPlugin - with
"Enable to pre-fill notes with the original tiddler's contents" Then
each teacher is able to get his own copies of each studentcard - for
his own notes - same procedure as you use in sn-tw.

I will send you 3 files - 1 is my ITw-adaption, another (hu0809) is
the first one iframed in a TW - which sole purpose is to present and
display. The third one (Sang 0809) is a tw specialized for a group of
teachers collaborating on making sing-along-lessons (don't know if
thats the right word for it..). It fetches the first one via
includeplugin and when you click on notes ("Kommentarer") on each
student card you'll make a tiddler-copy to this tw...
The two last tws are adaptions of Daves No brainer notes...

I've tried to find good use for the tiddlychatterpackage - but as I
understand it - it requires each user to have his own tw hosted
online. That's to complicated if I want my collegues to get anyway
near using tws...

Your sn as an download-option on a "parenttw" preconfigured to fetch
information from the parent tw (maybe several others too?) would be
very usefull I think...
If you have some other suggestions - I should investigate - please
give me a hint.

YS Måns Mårtensson (Denmark)