Mind The Extensions #3: Tiddly Things

There are all sorts of ways, then, that we can 'extend' our minds through the use of tools that support out thinking processes. Of course, simply writing things on paper is a wonderfully freeform way of recording ideas. The 'mind mapping' approaches mentioned in my last post here are one way of breaking away from simply writing lists, which may imply an order or hierarchy of concepts which isn't really there. Sometimes order, priority and hierarchy IS important, but sometime we just want to put ideas down, link them in the way that we recall them and then perhaps recognise the possibility of new links between clusters of concepts. Today, this crosslinking of ideas is something we are used to on the internet so, clearly, there's a possibility that we could use a kind of, 'personal internet' as a way of storing ideas in a way that may feel more natural as a 'mind extension' than just a list of information in a document or spreadsheet.

One tool which addresses this is TiddlyWiki. TiddlyWiki is an opensource 'non-linear personal web notebook'. At its simplest, TiddlyWiki lets you write chunks of information (typically a paragraph or two, these chunks are called 'tiddlers'), give your paragraph a title and tags (tags are similar to the 'labels' on this blog) and then automatically links everything together. Keywords, then, are automatically highlighted and hyperlinked to the corresponding tiddler. You can either define keywords by putting them in double square brackets [[Like This]] or you can use a convention called 'Camel Code' or 'Camel Case' which simply involves using no spaces and starting each word with a capital letter so, instead of [[Like This]] I could use LikeThis. This makes for really easy writing.

As I write this, I realise that it all sounds a little dry, try taking a look at a YouTube video to get a quick idea of what TiddlyWiki is like. Better still, hop over to http://www.tiddlywiki.com/ and get the feel of the software. There's more information at Tiddlywiki.org and there's an Aladdin's cave of importable add-ons over at TiddlyTools.

All of the functionality and data is held in your TiddlyWiki file, which is just an html file, so you can copy the whole thing to your memory stick and carry it with you. No need to install special software - it all just runs inside your browser when you open the file, so it's really portable. I'm particularly interested in it as a note-taking tool for students on the Theory of Knowledge (ToK) course I'm designing.

Now, what I'd really like is to be able to import my TiddlyWiki into Personal Brain (see my previous post) so that I can navigate over (selected) tiddlers using the Personal Brain visual tool and then jump back into the TiddlyWiki.

I've posted the idea over at the Personal Brain forums ... let's see if anyone comes up with a slick import mechanism ...