e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: TiddlyWiki

  • ANGEL's Open Source Move

    ANGEL Learning has announced that they have incorporated TiddlyWiki into their product and that they have released the source code to the enhancements. What the announcement doesn’t mention is that the company also made a financial contribution to TiddlyWiki’s main developer Jeremy Ruston in recognition and support of his work.

    I happen to have had a number of conversations with the ANGEL folks about this move, starting from early in their process, and I must say that they made every effort to do this right. They put a fair amount of thought, for example, into where they should contribute the code and considered donating it back to the TiddlyWiki community before settling on EduForge. It’s sometimes difficult for a smallish company to figure out an affordable way to productively contribute back to open source; I hope that other educational software products, including open source and proprietary LMSs, pick up on ANGEL’s contribution and help to build a larger community around it. TiddlyWiki is a great tool for teaching and I think that ANGEL’s enhancements to it are rather clever.

    Kudos to ANGEL Learning for understanding and respecting the work of an open source community.

  • TiddlyWiki – a reusable non-linear personal web notebook

    TiddlyWiki has some unusual affordances that makes it suited to somewhat different tasks than other wikis I’ve seen (though I remind you that I am a wiki newbie). To begin with, the display allows you to call up a number of posts (which the developer calls “tiddles”) on the same page. This makes it well-suited to help users follow a train of thought across a number of entries. (I’d love to see a similar interface that enables me to aggregate a chain of blog-to-blog links and trackbacks on one page.) It also encourages shorter, one- or two-paragraph posts. Furthermore, TiddlyWiki is 100% client-side, using only HTML and Javascript. This means you can’t do things like version control and roll-back, but it’s incredibly lightweight and easy to install. Calling it a “non-linear personal web notebook” sounds about right; it’s useful for blog-like journaling by an individual but in a more interconnected and non-linear way. I may use this tool to create the educational conversation pattern language wiki I’ve been thinking about.

    Found via heyblog.