More on TiddlyWiki and WebCT e-Portfolios

After discussion with others, I start to wonder if calling TiddlyWiki a wiki system could be a little misleading…

Calling it a wiki somehow implies that anyone could modify/update the page; in the e-portfolio world, it would probably be the ability to provide feedback and comments directly on the page.

However, TiddlyWiki doesn’t really provide this functionality. In other words, it’s more of a personal wiki system in that the owner herself can edit the page like one would edit a wiki.

Why? and What’s the mechanism behind this? Since there is no database behind to drive the wiki, TiddlyWiki actually needs to create new files to save the updated page. It first creates a backup file that stores the original page. Then it updates the file and saves it in the system. To do this, the user will need to have permission to create and write files on the server.

Thus, the best way to have TiddlyWiki working would be editing and saving the files on the user’s computer, which she would have permission to save and create files.

I think TiddlyWiki might work in the WebCT environment because it saves the students from using the HTML editor (which could be a pain to load up the Java Applet), or having to do even a little bit of HTML editing (e.g. changing the title of the html file). Thus, instead of having students to edit the e-portfolio template (a simple HTML file) inside WebCT, we can actually ask them to use TiddlyWiki and make all the changes on their computers using simple wiki formatting rules. The final step would be uploading the wiki page and other evidences (e.g. word documents, images, movie clips, etc…)

To provide feedback or comments, instructors and students will still need to use the native tools like Mail and Discussion Board in WebCT.

Other features of TigglyWiki which I like are:

• its ability to generate an RSS feed
• custom CSS style sheet
• wiki on a thumb drive (think about e-portfolio on a thumb drive… cool)
• and there are other adaptations like TiddlyTagWiki and TagglyWiki that feature tagging

This is cross-posted on the alison’s blog.