Forum Teaching with LAMS - experiences: Re: LAMS and textbooks

By: Peter Miller

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Another shout for TiddlyWiki in this context. If you recall, this is a Javascript-powered, serverless wiki that saves chunks of formatted text as so-called tiddlers. Students can save their own copy of the file and edit it. Nice features in this context include:

1. You can specify a default set of tiddlers to be displayed, e.g. without, perhaps, the tiddlers carrying definitions.

2. It's easy to generate a link in a tiddler that dynamically opens a definition tiddler.

3. Tiddlers can be tagged, e.g. all definition tiddlers could be tagged "definition". More abstruse content could be tagged "definition advanced". It's easy to generate popups listing, for example, all the definitions. (This feature is also built-in using the tabs in the right margin).

4. You can generate alternative views of the same TW, i.e. display another set of tiddlers, and TW can assign this set a permalink as an extended URL. One document, two or more views.

5. Students can edit text and add their own tags, e.g. "check_this" so they can recall specific subsets of tiddlers.

6. It is possible to date-stamp entries to generate a blog/journal view.

Drawbacks? You can include links to external images but there is no infrastructure for packaging images with the TW file so you lose them offline. Some functions don't work on Opera but I think IE and Firefox are pretty well covered.

More at http://www.tiddlywiki.com/.

Posted by Peter Miller