With the beginning of classes fast approaching I decided to update the note-taking system I had developed borrowed for myself during my undergrad. I had a professor in second year who used a version of TiddlyWiki, which is itself a type of wiki, to organize his lecture notes. Initially my attraction was due to its cross-platform portability, as Ubuntu was my primary operating system at the time, but I have kept the system around now that I have transitioned to OS X. This time around, I am hoping to take better advantage of its organizational and cross-referencing features, but, with classes still a week away, I will have to report back on that attempt at a later date.
What’s This Wiki Stuff Anyway?
A wiki is simply a webpage that is editable from within a browser and that uses a particular style of markup language. Originally designed back in the bad old days of 1994, ‘wiki’ was chosen as a name because it means ‘quick’ in a native Hawaiian dialect. Since then, it has been adopted by many as a collaborative tool for both internal knowledge sharing by large organizations as well as by online interest groups (such as the kinds of communities that grow around certain games). The most recognizable wiki by far, however, is Wikipedia.
What So Special About This TiddlyWiki Stuff?
TiddlyWiki obviously borrows conceptually from previous, more traditional, wikis, but it differs primarily in that it does not have to be hosted on a full-blown web server. Instead, it consists in a single HTML file that can be located anywhere: be it your hard disk, your personal web space, or a flash drive. This is, from the note-taker’s perspective, by far its most convenient feature. It not only means that you are not limited by the ways and places you can take your notes, but it also means that sharing among your peers is merely one file transfer away.
Similarly, the ability to create a link to an internal page (or tiddler, as it is called) by typing its name into an existing tiddler in a simple syntax, while not unique to TiddlyWiki, creates a powerful way to organize and cross-reference your notes. For example, say I have a note from my previous readings about the defence of necessity and I wanted to link to it from within my current Criminal Law class notes. All I would do is enter: ‘DefenceOfNecessity’ (without the quotes) and it would create a link to that tiddler (provided it was named correctly).
The alternative, if you don’t like the WikiWiki-style linking or if you only use a single word for your titles, is to enclose the title of the tiddler in double square brackets and it will have the same effect. So, for example, to link to a page called Responsibility one would simply enter ‘[[Responsibility]]’ (minus the quotes) into their notes and a link would magically appear. Or, perhaps, it would be ‘[[Defence of Necessity]]’ as the case may be.
On a final linking note, you can also create tiddlers that do not already exist by creating a link to them. So, if, in the course of my Criminal lecture I decide I need a separate entry to beef up my understanding of mens rea then I could create the tiddler there and then for later editing by entering ‘[[mens rea]]’.
While there are many other useful features of the TiddlyWiki system, the last one I will touch upon is its search function. Again, this function is found in most wiki systems, but it proves invaluable for the note-taker. Remember a key word or phrase, but not what it means? Or perhaps there is a term on an assignment that you aren’t quite comfortable with? Look no further than your search box. It conducts full-text searches, including titles, tags, and body content. Several times in my undergraduate career this made the difference between studying smart and studying hard.
Fine, Its Great, But How Should I Use It?
Personally, I have set up a TiddlyWiki for each of my seven class this fall each with its own headings for the following: Admin, Lecture, Readings, and Summaries. This, of course, is based upon my expected usage come September. While I fully expect to tweak it as I get into my classes, I also expect that anyone intrigued enough by this post to try out TiddlyWiki for themselves will also tweak it to fit their own particular approach. If you are not the type to make summaries as you go, for example, then that heading will be of limited use to you and so on. That said, let me explain a little bit about my thinking thus far.
The Admin heading is for, as it suggests, information regarding the administration of the course. So, for example, the professor’s contact information, office hours, etc. can be filled away under this heading. Similarly, if the prof has a particular style that you must follow, then this would be a good place for that information as well.
Lectures and Readings are similarly self-explanatory. Your naming convention will (undoubtedly) vary, but I like to name each tiddler after the week in question (and, if there is more than one lecture per week, by a lecture number). This helps keep me straight with regard to the syllabus and also prevents me from trying to title them myself and (undoubtedly) getting the gist wrong. A similar approach will hold for the tiddlers under Readings, though perhaps adjusted to include a chapter number, for example.
The Summaries heading is the one that stands out as it is the one I have never tried before. The idea is to create a week-by-week summary of the information from both the relevant Lectures and Readings. The goal will be to have these mini-summaries up-to-date by the time exams roll around so that I can use them to compile a more comprehensive summary in Word for printing.
I want to try this approach instead of just entering all the summary information into one Word document as I go along and which I would then print without editing. This is because I have the distinct feeling that my week-by-week summaries will be far longer than they should be to be useful during an exam. Similarly, using linking within the wiki itself, though helpful from an organisational perspective, will not make for easy printing. Most importantly, however, I think the act of forcing myself to actually review, edit, and properly compile the summary closer to the exam date will be conducive to me actual learning the material in question. The last thing I want to happen is that I end up in an exam looking back to the first week’s notes only to discover a shorthand I had since dropped and no longer remembered.
Going Forward
So, there you have my plan for my note-taking needs in the coming school year. Like any plan, however, it will not likely survive contact with the enemy. With this in mind, I fully intend to revisit this topic after my December exams. At that point I will have a better idea of how this system has fared and what tweaks I will have made or should be making to better accommodate the realities of law school.
Postscript
On a side note, and in the interests of full disclosure, I do not actually use the ‘vanilla’ version of TiddlyWiki. I use a derivative called MPTW (which is short for MonekyPirateTiddlyWiki, for those who wanted to know) whose tagline is ‘TiddlyWiki powered up.’ The main advantage of MPTW is its TagglyTagging plugin which adds a much more robust tagging system and the ability to create drop-down menus that dynamically pull any content that bear its tag. This does not mean much in the abstract, but it amounts to opening less tiddlers to access the same amount of information.
All the other commentary about TiddlyWiki will hold true for MPTW, but if something I described above does not work in TiddlyWiki by default, then it may be my mistake and perhaps you should look to MPTW instead.
