(2014-12-30) Udell Fedwiki Teaching Writing

Jon Udell sees potential for FedWiki in teaching Writing. Every page in FedWiki is backed by two data structures. The story is a sequence of paragraphs (Node Web). The journal is a sequence of actions that add, edit, move, or delete paragraphs. Because editing is paragraph-oriented, the progressive rewriting of a paragraph is recorded in the journal.

Jan12'2015 update: he's playing with a plugin to visualize paragraph-level changes over time. (Should A Wiki Have A Version Control System? This is a case in favor.) In other domains, such as music, computers have become powerful tools for studying finished compositions. Adrian Holovaty’s Soundslice, for example, makes YouTube performances accessible to study and annotation. In that case there’s nothing hidden, the tool’s job is to slow things down and provide a synchronized framework for annotation. But what if you wanted to study the process of musical composition? Then you’d want the composition to occur in an environment that records changes in chunks of varying granularity that correspond to the structure of the piece.

Most knowledge workers, with the notable exception of software developers, don’t yet use tools that take version control for granted. That will change. The artifacts produced by knowledge work are simply too valuable to be managed any other way. As versioning tools evolve for other disciplines, we have the opportunity to rethink what those tools can do. I hope we’ll do that with sensitivity to the natural granularity of the material. In many cases, whole documents aren’t the right chunks.

Even in software development, of course, we are still working with document-sized chunks. Compilers know that programs are made of modules and functions, but editing tools don’t track changes that way and as a result GitHub can’t directly show us the history of an individual function.

Tools for Structured Writing aren’t a new idea, of course. There are reasons why they haven’t caught on. But FedWiki reminds us that there are also reasons to hope they will.