Technology update

Well, it's been a bit of a mixed week.

Firstly I got sidetracked by a technology-in-itself, called TiddlyWiki. Check out http://www.tiddlywiki.org
 for details. There's something about the building up of the wiki through fragments & the alternative associational structures (linking & tagging) that I find appealing; as is the fact that the wiki is a single file containing both the software & content, which means it's physically portable on a USB, readily backed up into the cloud by email and can actually be used to run a website, which if you're not fussy about the name, you can set up to run from home in about 30 minutes. It's really very elegant.

The other thing about it that I like is that you can adapt the software that runs it really easily, and it's all maintained in the same one file. There's a whole essay crying out to be done on what constitutes technical elegance (and to what extent it's personal), but this thing ticks lots of my boxes. OK, I have to learn javascript to exploit that, but a.) I've been meaning to for years & b.) it isn't in any way necessary to use the base product.

The only objectionable thing I've found so far is that it doesn't work as well in Chrome (for uploads & synchronisations & imports) as it does for FireFox. But that's OK, since UTS forces me to use FireFox anyway.

Another thing is that although the concept has been around for quite a while, there still seems to be a fairly active community involved in tweaking it. Plus, there is free hosting at http://tiddlyspot.com and doubleplus there is an experiment in communal wiki cross-linking happening at http://tiddlyspaces.com. I think I'll be following up the latter as I get time.

Anyway, check it out!

AS committed in my learning contract, the self-learning documentation needs to be in a public forum, and you can find it at http://tejjyid.tiddlyspot.com. At the moment there's no feedback option built in - but I'm working on that. Anyway, you can comment here if you feel the urge - very grateful for any comments, including critical  & questioning ones.

From the thematic viewpoint, I wanted to look at psychology this week, but it has been difficult to get into without being overwhelmed. (I feel overwhelmed) What I have found, which I think will be interesting is some  psychologists with a phenomenological bent, and also a group of people interested in FBFW "narrative psychology". I don't like the way they express themselves (they talk about narrative as if it exists independently of people) but the idea that story-creating and story-consuming are reflective of, or parallel with internal meaning-creation is interesting. Structure, and particularly structure-in-time, is a big part of the response to a story. Here we have time-as-pattern, a pattern created by people as narrative-(participants). It's a little tricky at this stage. But it will be profitable to ask, how do machines affect the structuring of narratives and the resultant cohesiveness of those narratives?

Then I think I can look at learning as both the acquisition of narrative ("text-producing") skills and also a narrative in itself. Technology and time are then implicated in both the content (the to-be-learned) & the delivery (basis-for-learning).