Wiki system as an e-Portfolio Tool

Catching on the an earlier discussion with Brian and the Careers@UBC group on using a wiki tool to create an e-portfolio sounds like a logical approach for students with less technical skills or for students who just don’t wish to spend the extra time to learn about yet another system.

So recently I found out a wiki tool called TiddlyWiki, a self-contained (one html file), easy-to-edit wiki tool. The good thing about the system is that it does not require any server side support (no database, no php and no perl scripting). The entire tool is contained in one html file using HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Which makes the wiki very portable, and can be run in any modern browser. As suggested on the website, I also installed it and PortableFirefox on my USB thumb drive. This would make updating/showing the e-portfolio very portable as well. However, to save the changes of the wiki page, it requires Firefox or Internet Explorer, plus save capabilities (write access) to a server. Hence, I envision end-users working on a local copy of the wiki file in a folder on their computers. Then upload the final version and all associated files (contents in the folder) to a server.

Since the wiki system uses simple formatting syntax, students could easily build their wiki page (including the navigation) by following the wiki’s formatting rules.

With the experience from the last project using WebCT’s student presentation tool as an e-Portfolio tool, TiddlyWiki could be an easy alternative. Hopefully it could minimizes the issues with using the Java-based WYSIWYG HTML editor, and other frustration with HTML.

Here’s an example of my TiddlyWiki e-Portfolio

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