Got an unanswerable question? Agony Aunt is taking too long to reply? Or maybe you think I know nothing about some arcane topic. Or you’d like to hear the plain truth about missions in Africa. Or just the first absurd thing that comes to mind.
Here’s your chance to stump the chump.
I’ll only take suggestions for the next 12 hours and then after that I’ll start writing. You name the topic. I guarantee I’ll blog about it.
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OK, my question is a non-controversial one, since it is something you said you would already talk about — I’d like for you to share your ideas about TiddlyWiki.
I’m getting some provocative questions offline. Thanks everybody.
What’s your question?
[...] is unbelievable 2009 April 15 by David Ker Responding to my Stump the Chump challenge, someone emailed me: When Jesus says that we need to "believe in him" to have [...]
I will give you a short answer here and a longer one in the near future. TW or something like it is great for creating offline learning environments. Yesterday for example I put together a wiki for teaching someone how to use the digital recorder that we are going to be using for field recordings here in Mozambique. Because it keeps everything in one HTML file and relies heavily on JavaScript it it pretty simple for the content creator and end user to manage. I can give this TiddlyWiki to anyone on a Flash drive and they can read through the material on their own computer and even answer the questions at the end of each section.
See here for a more sophisticated system: http://lewcid.org/2009/02/11/student-notebook-workflow-demo-and-screencast/
I blogged briefly about this and also portable apps yesterday: http://lingalinga.wordpress.com/2009/04/13/portable-apps/
My initial impression was that this was a cool idea from several years ago that had never caught on. However I discovered a very lively Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/TiddlyWiki
Here’s a brief tutorial: http://www.giffmex.org/twfortherestofus.html
I’m thinking about using this with my students who have access to the computer lab. I could keep all their assignments and schedules in a single TiddlyWiki and even give them homework and tests that would all be a single place. It would be a bonus not to have to deal with all the paper and also would be good experience for students with limited computer skills.
Finally, I’ve created a TiddlyWiki called “My Electronic Book” (in Portuguese) that is specifically designed to encourage Mozambicans to write in their mother tongue through stories, proverbs and a daily journal. For those who adopt the idea, their work could be uploaded to the web in a single file.