Open Discussion: Building a wiki for student notes

TW_Tones · May 15, 2024, 12:39am

Folks,

I will be returning to formal studies in the near future, and would like to build a TiddlyWiki edition to support course notes and the related study activities. I am keen to develop it before I start studies to avoid using the tinkering to procrastinate.

This may also result in a community edition.

I am starting this discussion to solicit plugins and design approaches because I am confident a lot of people have done something similar and come up with solutions after using such a wiki.

Here are a few high level requirements;

Ability to build a subject or course based wiki with structured content before, during and after classes and online activities.
- The critical thing is easy access to tools and resources in real time.
Ability to ultimately combine all classes into a single wiki for a comprehensive resource. Eg combine glossary, and other dictionaries into one.
Help and support, or cheat sheets to help leverage installed tools.
- For example its all fine to have a footnotes tool but when you want to use it during note taking you may need help to look up its syntax etc… if you have not used it for time or learned it yet, especially since our edition will have a lot of features.
Although many features will be at their best on a desktop we need to keep it useful on mobiles and tablets. Although we can just have a subset of features available that are mobile friendly.
- This includes touch screens and size eg external core, for this and other cources.

I have many other detailed requirements and lots of resources I have already defined but I do not want to prejudice your replies, or make this first post too long.

I look forward to your ideas and experiences - Tony

Ste_W · May 15, 2024, 5:06pm

Well My maths notebook was a stab at that which I never have the confidence to push on my students or the time to refine!

I’m guessing bibliography and reference plugins would be usefull?

Do you want cheat sheets to be created automatically? My experiance suggests these have to be crafted, though reuse of existing tiddlers in a new cheat sheet context can aid the process.

Ah… I misread. Your cheat sheets are for the wiki itself! That seems doable!

You say ‘combining’, are you thinking inital separate repositories of knowledge to be combined in a final end of term tomb?

TW_Tones · May 15, 2024, 10:31pm

Yes, basically documenting the plugins, and tools installed to assist with study notes, and ideally where the information is needed such as in the editor toolbar, or menu etc…

Some time the hardest part is giving enough information so the installed features are made use of, and habits developed.

Let say I spend a year in training doing multiple subjects, I think there is value in having a wiki per subject, but once completed, it makes sense to bring them together into a single wiki to search all past learnings.

Combining multiple subjects into the course that they belong.

Anjar · May 15, 2024, 11:51pm

I agree with you that procrastination and tinkering are potential problems, not only for functionality, but also regarding structure.

One challenge is that classes/lectures and reading often are linear activities, and the non-linear nature of TiddlyWiki can be distracting. Say you are studying art and have a lecture on Italian Baroque paintings - how should one organize the material as a student? Make a tiddler for each artist? Each technique? What if there a certain facts that you know are important - or details that are less important but useful to keep - how to highlight them? Separate tiddlers or just styling? What title to give them (Caravaggio/Tenebrism, Painters/Caravaggio/Styles/Tenebrism, Lectures/2024-05-16/Caravaggio)?

What I imagine would be a nice solution is if you were able to go to class and make a tiddler that looks something like this:

@@.summary
This is a short summary of this lecture.
@@

! Italian Baroque painters

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Nulla tellus sem, facilisis a lorem ut, blandit malesuada magna.

@@.definition
Italian :: From Italy
@@

@@.important
Do not taste the painting, it can be poisonous.
@@

!! Caravaggio

Sed mauris nisi, vulputate pellentesque tortor non, accumsan interdum felis. Nullam sagittis odio metus, quis volutpat dui ornare ut.

@@.flashcard
When was Caravaggio born? || 1571
@@

@@.detail
This text is hidden as a detail element
@@

---
title: Lecture/2024-05-16 08:00
caption: Italian Baroque painters
date: 2024-05-16
teacher: [[Jane Doe]]
status: [[Needs revision]]

And later query those tiddlers for the summaries, important facts and flashcards. One strategy is to split the tiddler into subtiddlers. Another strategy is to use CSS to show/hide text (e.g., display: none; for everything that is not a summary).

I would also suggest to include a plugin to preview tiddler contents when hovering a link, and perhaps the reading mode plugin and a TOC plugin. Furthermore, having a nice stylesheet for printing (or saving as PDF) may be useful

Best,
Anders

Justin_H · May 16, 2024, 1:57am

Ah yes, the Picasso Prevention Rule lol

given TW’s design, I’d probably go with using journals as your note pages, and then tagging based on the subject, and backlinks connect to relevent topics, such as artists, terms, etc.

IE say I was about to attend Spanish 101, I would create a new journal that would be titled “Spanish 101 - DATE” or something akin to that, and tag it “Notes” “Spanish 101”

Now you have all of your notes under the single tag of Notes, and all the ones specific to Spanish 101 under another tag. Give’s a nice timeline in the Recents tab of all the notes you take.

TW_Tones · May 16, 2024, 5:58am

Thanks for your responses.

Whilst non-linear can be distracting the subject mater, rather than the class is often non-linear and it is identifying the relationships that are important, so I think we need to make use of tiddlywiki’s non-lineir nature whilst assisting linear activities.

*I think this may be important when you are doing a number of simultaneous classes, where one moves quickly to the next on a timetable, I am unlikely to be undertaking too many subjects at once. But we do need to cater for these different learning circumstances.

Springer · May 17, 2024, 2:26am

Hi @TW_Tones!

The right structure, of course, depends on the subject matter, the level, and your own temperament.

Obviously there are notational tools specific to technical fields, such as math, and study tools specific to memorization-heavy fields such as languages.

If the course has a significant reading list and/or needs you to work with research and citations, go ahead and set up refnotes and learn your way around it. I now use it in all my teaching sites.

If the course relies on lots of concepts and definitions, mock up a good working glossary system in advance. I love a glossary that offers a single-tiddler overview (gleaning the first paragraph from each definition tiddler). Then in the tiddler for a given term, I can go into more depth with examples, clarification comments, etc., after that first definition line. Here’s an example: PHIL270 — Environmental Philosophy notes

If I were a student, I think I’d try enabling freelinks (freelinking to any destination tiddlers tagged person or tagged concept, or whatever other category ends up being central). That way, while you’re looking at notes on unfamiliar material, you’ll automatically see an inline link to each of the granular bits you’ve already got a node for.

Since you’re already so fluent with TiddlyWiki tricks, I suspect you come to this with plenty of insight about how to set up view templates, etc., to ensure that any tiddler is a hub, from which all important connections are automatically easy to access.

One thing I added to my teaching wikis, just this semester, is blackboard /whiteboard photos (and these are loaded via url via _canonical_uri in dedicated tiddlers, but their name gets them automatically displayed at the corresponding session notes). Many students seem to enjoy the ability to jog their memory about what our discussion was like by looking at the blackboard/whiteboard image(s). I’m actually somewhat reluctant to advertise these to students who were absent, because without my gesticulating in front of it, it could be a bit disorienting. Still, with a disclaimer about needing context from discussion, it might be useful even to them in cueing them to ask about elements of whatever ended up on the board.

Here’s a recent example of a session-notes tiddler (constructed from my teaching vantage-point, but perhaps not terribly different from what an attentive student would generate). It includes view-template elements for texts referenced, vocabulary discussed, and whiteboard image from the session, added after the fact: PHIL270 — Environmental Philosophy notes

If you’re a visual learner, harness some procrastination energy (between content-oriented study sessions) to add some of the graphic bits that help you learn: author photos, book covers, diagrams, etc.

jerojasro · May 19, 2024, 4:58pm

I’m currently majoring in pharma. chemistry, and I’ve been using TW for year and a half for taking notes for all of my courses; while I still use paper and pencil, most of the concepts, examples, diagrams, etc., are kept/eventually end up in TW.

supporting hardware/software

My setup must be offline-first, because one can’t trust wifi/mobile data while at the uni, especially since Everybody Is Watching Tiktok Everywhere All The Time.

I use an iPad + external keyboard to take notes while in the classroom, mostly because the iPad is the only device with enough battery life to last the whole day without recharging. I use the Quine2 app, which lets me edit local tiddlywiki files

At home I use a regular desktop, also editing a local version of the tiddlywiki. I keep those two versions synchronized using syncthing (vanilla syncthing on desktop, https://www.mobiussync.com/ in the iPad).

TW plugins

$:/plugins/sq/Stories, taken from Stroll — A special kind of TiddlyWiki.
Projectify, to keep track of homework; it’s kind of overkill, and I want to replace it, but, eh.
Katex
CodeMirror, and its vim plugin (you don’t really need it, but since I use vim, having this in TW makes typing more comfortable.)

I thought Refnotes would be handy, but I haven’t used it much, since importing references has been cumbersome, as well as generating bibliographies in different styles; I keep all my references in Zotero, and I use APA to put manual citations in TW when I deem it necessary.

overall setup

every semester I must take several courses, so I put together the tiddler on the left with the schedule, and one projectify project per semester, which holds all the TODOs for all the courses I’m taking

each course gets its own tiddler, and uses a template, which shows in every course: the list of sessions for that course (one tiddler per session), with a button for creating a new session with today’s date.

and, a list of things to do; both to-do, and done.

The tiddlers for each session also have an special template and their title follows a convention that allows me to sort them easily and link to the next/previous session:

I also extended the edit template for those tiddlers, to add to them a form for creating tasks; with this I can easily create a new task with its due date, without having to navigate to the Projectify project tiddler.

tags and organizing knowledge

I don’t use tags to categorize knowledge. I use them to identify different types of tiddlers; for example, any tiddler tagged “regulation” will have a “year” field, and a “URL” field, and a “issuer” field, and it will likely have a template associated to it which will use those fields.

For organizing knowledge, I mostly rely on links and backlinks; I try to be mindful of when to link (and therefore, to connect) two tiddlers, since I won’t link every place that mentions, say, the word “acid” to the “acid” tiddler. Also, I make a difference between “a tiddler links to this other tiddler”, and “a session tiddler links to this other tiddler”:

When that fails me for finding a piece of info, I use the search box, and if I deem it necessary I create a link between the tiddler where I expected the connection to be available, to the formerly disconnected tiddler.

images/tw size

all images are external; this makes it a bit cumbersome to add them, but makes the decision of adding them or not much easier, since I don’t fret about “omygosh my tw is growing so much … can I afford 200K for this?”

as of now, after 18 months of work, I have:

~4200 tiddlers
75 MB total size, including images
Total TW size: 7.2 MB

I’ve split my tiddlywiki in 3 files: one for core tiddlywiki, one for plugins, one for TW content.

I’ve of course disabled autosave, and save manually, and the difference in responsiveness shows; while saving isn’t specially slow, it’s somewhat annoying after confirming changes to every tiddler.

misc.

I keep cheatsheets for TW/plugin functionality that I haven’t learned by heart and I use somewhat frequently.

I’ve considered getting a laptop with good battery life, but decided against it because I must use ergonomic keyboards; currently I use a Keyboardio Atreus, which is portable enough for my needs, and since I use a tablet I get to put the Atreus in the space a regular laptop keyboard would use.

TW_Tones · May 20, 2024, 1:15am

Fantastic account and demonstration of using tiddlywiki for study notes @jerojasro

This sentence is so I can reply because I miss posted and deleted the reply, now it tells me its too similar to the deleted post

Thank you for taking the time to share this with us. It is reassuring to me because you have followed a similar approach to what I was thinking.

One key advantage of tiddlywiki is you can always incorporate a new method, solution or algorithm into your tiddlywiki as needed.

This also a risk as one can spend time “sharpening pencils” rather than studying.

I do think there are better ways to do this, perhaps we will discuss later.

I think we can make this easier for you. Just add them to your wiki as you study, with a drag and drop, then before the wiki gets to big, export them leaving behind the external image tiddler.

The advantage being you dont have to think about it while studying.

I keep loosing my reference to this favorite solution, I will return with it if I find it.

TW_Tones · May 21, 2024, 4:38am

@Springer I agree about the need for “tiddler is a Hub”, but in a twist, I had a thought, rather than the general solutions already available, that show all possible links on all possible tiddlers. It seems to me “Any tiddler is a hub” can be somewhat verbose and makes the screen complex. This is something we want to avoid. So although such features may be available on all tiddlers, perhaps we need to select a subset of tiddlers that display this by default? - if this drives a user back to specific tiddlers, to learn more this may be a good thing as it keeps things a little more structured and minimalist, but also supports the provision of specific tools where they make sense. In context.

Springer · May 21, 2024, 1:35pm

Of course, there’s such a thing as too much visual noise! We’re surely in agreement on this.

When I say “any tiddler is a hub, from which all important connections are automatically easy to access,” I mean only that the important connections — in context, for your likely interests when interacting with that tiddler — are within reach. And not in a distracting way. Tag-pills, filter-pills, and detail-unfold affordances are great for keeping relevant stuff visually manageable.

Even TiddlyWiki “off the shelf” may have noise relative to some use-cases. FOr example, it makes the modifier name appear as a link that is available in the subtitle of every tiddler. This is great for some wikis! But my wikis tend to omit the modifier name/link altogether in the subtitle area, because — even though it’s “logically” a hub-like node that could conveniently connect each tiddler to info about who modified it, and from there to other tiddlers with same modifier — that’s just noise for these wikis.

Only reflection on your needs, plus patterns of use over time, can confirm which connections deserve to be within reach. Still, I design with this ideal of minimizing demand for search: it should hardly ever happen that reading a tiddler motivates me (or whoever the intended user is) to go to the search bar (or advanced search) to type a name or concept or transcluded tiddler title or significant field value (etc.) that is related to the current tiddler.

Writing this reminds me that my current course wikis have not yet facilitated the convenient “previous” and “next” GUI buttons that allow for easy page-turning among adjacent sessions. I’ve been resorting to mousing up to the “sessions” tag -pill and using its drop-down list to navigate to other sessions. A bit clunky, if what’s most often desired is reaching forward or back just one step in the semester calendar. Of course the design challenge is to make such navigation affordances intuitive and unobtrusive — so that one hardly notices them even while using them.

TW_Tones · July 1, 2024, 5:44am

I will be starting a course soon, and as a result started building a student notes wiki for myself. A few observations.

As an experience TiddlyWiki super user, it seems I don’t actually need a template wiki, because I located all the course and lesson notes I have so far, having not even started and pasting them into a tiddler and progressively organising them with excise, tagging, view templates etc… I end up deep diving into the material. That is the process of building my course notes helps me understand the course.

Incidentally I am going to do the course here - Business Analyst Bootcamp

As I prepare for the course, I plan to prepare for each lesson well before I do it. Researching the key points and issues. The idea would be to do a lesson having learned what I can before it starts. I have the opportunity to do this, and it should make the post lesson review easier.

I also hope this prework to get my redesign procrastination down to a minimum at lesson time, with content being kings in lessons.

Algorithms and methods

I am looking into these both from an ease of use and effectiveness perspective before I start the course, however also from a pedagogical perspective, what helps us learn. At a simple level I want adopt practices that reduce the bottlenecks to learning. This includes;

Building appropriate “Advanced Organisers” as a student about the material.
Developing an easy way to generate automatic support for Spaced Repetition study of the material.

Next question for the community

Thinking about a lesson, or session

What is the possible content we need for each lesson?

Preview notes, glossary of terms to be/have being encountered
Supporting material and reading
In class notes
Notes and material research, references and links etc…
Related assessments and output you need to produce
Things you know well and need not study much, things you have difficulty with and need more spaced repetition study

Please share your ideas here !

pmario · July 1, 2024, 6:59am

It seems you prepare “cheatsheets” – Which imo is a good thing. You are prepared

Thinking about a lesson, or session

With your preparations done, I think the only thing needed for a session / lesson is a “real-time” note taking tool. So I personally would train myself on “streams” and set it up in a way I like it. So I know it’s behaviour “in and out”. In the end taking notes will be smooth.

Refactoring those “session-notes” should be done directly after the sessions or in the evening - the same day, if possible. Since “impressions” are still fresh in the brain.

Creating “summaries” and “making connections” to the existing material would help me to remember the “new” stuff easier.

That’s basically it.
have fun!

TW_Tones · July 1, 2024, 7:47am

Yes, I like streams for that however I have had trouble with enter not creating new nodes and tab not indenting.

The Streams fusion plugin also merges them into the tiddler body

Yes, I like the idea of a refactoring step, as the first part of the Spaced Repetition process, however it needs to be tolerant if you don’t do it right away.

Springer · July 1, 2024, 6:03pm

@TW_Tones I’d love to have you as a student! Such thoughtful reflection on how to make the most of your experience in the course!

The only thing I’d add — and this may betray my academic field — is:

What assumptions or critical concerns might be raised about this material?

That is, I think your bullet points emphasize what you need for a course where your interest is in “absorbing” a whole domain of information, relatively uncritically.

But even in the most straightforward subject, I suspect that it might be useful to have a moment to articulate questions of the form: “Why is XYZ (concept, technique, taxonomy, choice of case studies) being approach this way? What alternatives could I imagine? (etc.)” Even if you’re not going to pursue the questions, being able to notice them might lead you to a Eureka moment or two.

TW_Tones · July 2, 2024, 12:00am

Love it! tickles my critical thinking/Sceptic heart

This makes me think rather than specifying specific content, for each lesson, present a set of prepared questions, including the above, that you can optionally answer in the context of the lesson/session. Answering the question then in effect creates the content section.

Thus this may become;

In relation to this Lesson/session;

Any new or relevant glossary of terms that have been encountered?
On Previewing this lesson do you have any other notes?
Do you have Supporting material and reading?
Are you taking In class notes?
- Refactor your in lesson/session notes as the first step in “spaced repetition”
Do you need to review this with spaced repetition?
Any Notes and material research, references and links etc…?
What are the related assessments and output you need to produce?
What things you know well and need not study much ?
What things you have difficulty with and need more spaced repetition study for?
What assumptions or critical concerns might be raised about this material? @Springer
Do you have some markdown to insert?
Do you have images and media to insert?

As a result of notes from @pmario it occurs to me that we could have a similar list containing items and guides to select the application of specific features against a particular tiddler such as a lesson;

Add refnotes
Add streams
Fuse stream
In context TOC
Next / previous lesson, course…

The key idea here, is this resource can grow in time, but until a specific element is selected at least once, the tiddler retains its simplicity.

Further thoughts?

Springer · July 2, 2024, 12:52am

One more further connection that I know you won’t have trouble with, but which I don’t yet see articulated above:

Relation to your own priorities and your further course-independent goals

It’s one thing to ask: What are the assignments, and how do I need to study this for the sake of doing well in the course? But as an adult learner, you’re very clear on your reasons for studying. For some concepts, methods, questions, etc., you may want to have some way of either rating something in terms of your own goals, or commenting on how/why it matters.

As with other bullet points above, I wouldn’t think of this as a “must-answer” field for any given unit, lesson, or granular tiddler. Rather, it’s a dimension that you’ll naturally have on your radar. Might as well reflect on how your wiki points beyond this semester and beyond the criteria for earning an A.

In my own comparable experience: I recently went back and took an undergraduate Japanese class (I think I recall @etardiff has also done significant Japanese study, yes?). As a 50-something in a young-adult milieu, it’s fascinating how slow I felt with certain things, but also how poised I felt about others — including what my learning priorities were — relative to other students! Even though the professor had clear expectations and grading criteria, I owned my own learning priorities where they didn’t line up exactly with the class. (For example, I wanted to orient to pitch accent and nuanced pronunciation habits, even though I had to strike out on my own to get good resources on these themes, and of course I did deeper study on vocabulary that overlapped with my broader interests. Meanwhile I budgeted less study time for fluent handwriting, even though I absolutely love studiyng kanji, since visual recognition suffices for nearly all my realistic use-scenarios.) Although I never ignored assignments and expectations set up by the syllabus, I did feel comfortable treating some skills and domains as mattering to me more than to the instructor, other stuff less so.

Since you already think about all this stuff, my question is just: what’s the easiest way to give yourself a hook to hang those priorities on?

TW_Tones · July 2, 2024, 1:15am

This is a good idea, providing a mechanism to add personal and possibly even curriculum goals, then indicate in the developing materials where the goals are related to the material, both as relevant to a goal and/or a short fall to the goal and thus allowing us to flag areas to learn outside the curriculum.

Then “the trigger question” would be,

does this tiddler/lesson relate to course or personal goals and which ones?
or falls short of one of these goals?
Have you identified desirable extra curricular activities to undertake?

I am thinking some kind of conditional display of relevant “trigger questions”, that are displayed or listed for each lesson or in a list of questions for all lessons, that can be used to inspire interest when allocating study time.

Perhaps hide once answered and reappear after n days (like spaced repetition)

This is proving very productive and is giving me the general approach I need to consider, the system needed, with the details to be applied within a given course.