Goals:

UnaMesa, in combination with Wikispaces and other partners, seeks to improve digital learning experiences and material by offering digital supplements, mixins, for textbooks and related works. Building on the example of the "Web Campaigning Digital Supplement", mixins complement printed materials in several ways:

• combine texts, multimedia, and exercises
• provide integrated facilities for personal notes and shared discussions
• provide the ability for teachers and authors to correct errors and collaboratively update texts
• provide support for localization
• encourage proper attribution of work

Through a combination of TiddlyWiki with the Wikispace's technologies, these mixins will be available for both online and offline usage. Notes and other materials may be edited off-line, for example in a classroom that is not connected to a network, and easily synchronized when an online connection is available.

This document proposes a research project to develop and test the initial prototype.
Key success criterion include:

• Outstanding ease of use for students, teachers, and authors
• Qualitatively different learning experiences
• Sustainable technology infrastructure
• Extremely low-cost or free for educational uses

Initial Prototype:

A two-prong initial prototype is suggested, using:

1. The Hesperion textbook Disabled Village Children .
   Our proposal is to offer a digital version of the textbook as a mixin. This would allow for a more feature-rich online version with possibilities for integration of related videos and discussion of the content, eventually leading to a more collaborative book writing process for the authors. The offline component would offer portability - users would be able to download and take with them the entire textbook, or any portion for which there might be a need. Users would also be able to add their own experience-based notes to the textbook, whether those are from the perspective of a health care worker helping others or that of someone documenting their own health.
2. Existing Wikispaces content and demonstrating the benefits of mixins and TiddlyWiki/Wikispaces integration to Wikispaces users.
   Wikispaces has a lot of educational content that would benefit from the portability, and other features offered by TiddlyWiki via its plugins. The content to be used for this prototype will be determined based on suggestions from the Wikispaces team.

Features:

• Online component will be provided by Wikispaces technology and offline component by TiddlyWiki.
• Ability to import content from Wikispaces to TiddlyWiki and vice versa. A filtering mechanism should be provided if a user wishes to import only a portion of the content.
• Users should be able to synchronize content between Wikispaces and TiddlyWiki.
• Users should have the possibility to use the same text formatting mark up within both TiddlyWiki and Wikispaces.
• Each Wikispace should provide a downloadable TiddlyWiki file that is pre-configured to synchronize with that space.
• Offline users should be able to partake in the discussion for each page, with the discussion items being uploaded upon synch.
• Offline users should be able to keep notes that will remain private and not be synchronized with the online version.
• Customized layouts for both the online and offline components, designed to be similar to each other and as intuitive for the user as possible.
• Step by step illustrated usage guides for creating and using mixins.

See also the TiddlyWiki Wikispaces prototype and User interface.

Roles and Responsibilities:

(To be discussed with Wikispaces)

• UnaMesa
  • TiddlyWiki development
  • 2-3 educational users for testing
  • 1-2 publishers agree to allow their text to be used for testing
  • Obtain permission to use and distribute content
  • Obtain project funding / sponsorship (if necessary)
• Wikispaces
  • Server-side component and API
  • 2-3 potential existing users that may be interested in being pilot participants
  • ease-of-use/QA testing

See:

• Digital supplements intro for background
• Open issues

Project expenses:

• Development expenses
  • UnaMesa TiddlyWiki development included as part of the existing development projects
  • Wikispaces development (are there any costs here aside from normal maintenance?)
  • Content based on initial conversations with Hesperion - we believe we can get noticed if not all of the initial content for free from existing sources. There may be some costs associated with conversion. (To be handled by UnaMesa or project sponsors.)
• Pilots
  • We hope that a few current Wikispaces users will participate in the pilot project for free in exchange for improvements to Wikispaces
  • Support costs will be handled by both UnaMesa (materials, offline usage, and TiddlyWiki features) and Wikispaces (serverside and base online usage)
  • Other expenses?

Timeline:

We would like to include these capabilities as part of the MORE project which may begin testing in classes as early as March 2008.
We would like to complete an initial prototype by the end of January 2008 so that users can experiment during February 2008.