Plymouth COT and writing in a TiddlyWiki

With my co-conspirator Peter Fuggle, we finished training a great team in Plymouth just recently - the COT (CAMHS Outreach Team) and wish them well. Their version of the AMBIT manual is http://imp.peermore.com/imp/recipes/plymouth/tiddlers.wiki

Some fairly late nights have resulted in a slightly cleaner feel to the AMBIT manual, I hope. We have reflected at some points that writing in the Tiddlywiki format is very different. You need (of course) to focus on the content that you provide, but AT LEAST as significant is the extent to which, and manner in which, you integrate what you write within the body of the document through links and tagging.

There is a curious analogy here; between the way the developing brain generates massively more synapses (links) than the adult brain requires, and then through late childhood and especially adolescence these start to be whittled away through use (or, more specifically, non-use). Use it or lose it. This is genuinely similar to the way in which the manual develops - an early wish to include everything, to link everything to everything else (resulting in a user experience of overwhelm - not so terribly unlike the infant's presumed experience, when a fairly simple (at least in my adult's mind's eye) experience triggers a cascade of responses (cognitive, sensory, physiological...) that overwhelm the dainty mentalizing in that new-fangled pre-frontal cortex, but instead fire up the big guns buried deep down in the amygdale, the basal ganglia - stuff that is designed to DO things!

Gradually there is the dawning recognition that certain pathways carry more social value (i.e. I use them more often!) and a simplification, and crystallization of the information flows in the manual begin to emerge. These recognitions occur particularly when the author recovers a meta-perspective - rediscovers the wiki through another's eyes - it is why feedback is such gold-dust. Genuine feedback ("I was looking at this and then I clicked here and then I was totally lost...") is truly gold-dust ... the opportunity to mentalize another reader's experience - and come o understand how they misunderstood what I had overlooked...

This human-interactive substrate, which is really the soil from which a wiki grows, quite fascinates me.