Hello all,

I wonder if anyone has thoughts about how to leverage the power and flexibility of Tinderbox 5 to create a knowledge repository. I am a University lecturer, so I have quite a few notes.

I had been creating separate files for each major project, but I now have data scattered everywhere. (I realize I will need to do the work to pull these files together and that this organization is not a fault of Tinderbox but of my own imagination.)  The problem is that I need to check several places to discover where my notes on a particular novel, for instance, are located. This is quickly growing unwieldily.

What I'd like to do is to organize all my files in a master Tinderbox document and then create links, perhaps aliases?, to Tinderbox documents for a specific course.

I realize I can do some of this quite easily, but the map view, which I find most useful soon becomes difficult to navigate--especially if I create hierarchies of notes. For example, if I have English 203-->Notes--> Beloved-->Writing Prompts--> Discussion Board, the discussion board prompts are buried, in the map--they work just fine in the outline view. However, using Tinderbox as only an outliner seems extremely silly.

What I'd like to have is a way of using the outline and the map together to navigate hierarchically structured notes. I would appreciate thoughts and perhaps an example or two.

Cheers,

~A

Roger,

Thanks for sharing some of your process with me.

I do have a few questions when you have a moment:

1) You create one big Tinderbox document with subcatagoires as appropriate?

2) You keep more polished information in other programs. Keynote makes sense, but could you elaborate on why you use Notebook? (I ask because I started doing this work in notebook but found the interface (tabs and so on) too limiting to create the sort of cross-indexing I was hoping for.)

3) Just as a matter of clarification, do you include your own thoughts in the Tinderbox document or just summaries/snippets from text?

Cheers,

~A

Stacy,

Thanks for the very detailed response.

Unfortunately, I can't see the images you posted.

Cheers,

~A

Concerning questions 1 and 3.

The big tinderbox document reflects my overall conception of a project I have been working on for six years now. It started as a book but by the time a draft was completed it was out of date. I am a psychiatrist/psychoanalyst in private practice but with a lot of experience in consultation, teaching and applied social science. Forty years ago that would be community psychiatry. Now days community psychiatry is underfunded prescription writing for the homeless.

I wanted to work in something to replace that interest and teamed up with a retired political science professor and a behavioral scientist/community administration person. They had been at an impasse on the results of a study of pharmacists. We all helped each other and found there were two basic problems that crossed all disciplinary boundaries.

Why do highly intelligent people keep repeating the same mistake over and over despite apparently adequate information?

Why do organizations hire consultants but fail to put into action changes that they agree are needed?

In very broad terms in both areas this would be labelled "resistance" but the users would mean and describe different things.

Tinderbox came along in my work about two years ago and I started the big file as a way of keeping track of my own ideas and writing, saving teaching aids (usually graphics, sometimes pages documents 3  to 10 pages with graphics and endnotes (I use the pages "report" template altered). Collected "data" are in narrative descriptions and critical incidents. These have keywords and associated references. (Eventually may try to automate transfer (export) to Circus Ponies Notebook. Now do it manually. And the final structure of these is not yet set.)
I also have in the big TBX file output containers, for example chapters of the old book are now sections where new information: my thoughts, clips from the net, references, and all be stuck or there can be aliases to things that live elsewhere but I think are relevant to that section. Other "output" containers are for "blurbs" potential brief notes like for a blog (don't have one yet) that cover a brief topic, and "essays" which are usually on one topic, e.g. "Access", "Availability" "organizational immunity". These have footnotes or endnotes and also link to "essential concepts" and "Knowledge Base" sections.

Disadvantages: this is a grand conceptual disorganized mess. Subcategories and notes are not always appropriate but things can be changed, and have been, where a data base would lock me in. Things can go to NoteBook when I know their relatively permanent structure.

Advantages: I don't have to sort thru piles of papers and handwritten notes to find stuff from a year ago I "know I have somewhere".  My bibliography is much better organized. Keywords for searching are in the process of being better organized across TBX, NoteBook and BookEnds. I can usefully use "chunks" out of the grand plan is lectures and consultations and change their structure or the graphics or the references in response to group reactions.
IMPORTANT: The whole structure of the overall project is to address the error problem at the "sharp end". One size does not fit all. Many projects fail because of top down design. We are trying to create tools that individuals or teams can use at the "front line". Count on it, the health care reform is going to kill people as  "projects" are forced upon the people doing the actual work without any serious study of what they actually "do" or what "resistances they may have to changing what they do.

Thanks Stacy for your map comments that give me some ideas!!!

Hi, A:  There's a discussion on the wiki, I think, about whether we should use Tinderbox centripetally or centrifugally.  My personal pattern is to put as much as possible in one document, but then to leverage Tinderbox's ability to have multiple windows open.  The One Big Document doesn't have a consistent organizational scheme--I'm not using TBX as an outliner.  It has some regions (e.g., a single course) which I tend to view as maps, others which are meant for Explorer, others as outlines...  And then I use searches and moving containers and links and aliases (whatever is easiest at the moment) to connect stuff in another region with the region I'm working with.

You get the idea.  It's a complex mess, and therefore a good representation of my "knowledge."

I've really enjoyed course development using TBX.  The first time or two I teach (or overhaul) a course, I tend to just archive all the notes from the previous semester and start all over again.  But once I've taught something enough for it to have stabilized into predictable units, I tend to keep last time's notes & organization, and just modify it incrementally.

Good luck!--Jean

With two exceptions, everything's in Tinderbox:  course goals, course content notes, lists of readings, stray ideas for next time, questions for discussion or essays, examples scavenged from various sources including student work, notes about powerpoint color schemes....  For me, the whole point is to "write it down!" so I can (quickly) scan everything & consider whether it's useful.  I'm lazy:  if it's somewhere else, even if it's linked it might as well not exist.  

One exception:  I've developed a fairly elaborate tinderbox set-up to organize & track 50+ student groups through a four stage final project process.  It had so many unique attributes/agents that I spun it off to avoid interference with the rest of the teaching materials.

The other exception:  multiple choice quiz questions.  In a larger class, I get so much data connected with these that thus far it's taken too much thought to get them into Tinderbox.  MarkA offered to help, though, so maybe Quiz Banks is a topic we could take up on another thread.

Another thing that I forgot to mention in my first post was that fonts on the outline can also have a big impact for organization.  Sometimes you want things on the same level, but want one item to have a little more POW! on your outline.  I use more prominent fonts for these items.  (notice the size difference between the courses and the prototypes even though they're on the same level)