Friday 9 December 2011
V.3.0 is nearly here
The new look AMBIT manual should be available in the coming week (or two)... Keep an eye on the site (http://ambit.tiddlyspace.com)!
Lots of Trainings
We have been busy training a lot of new teams in AMBIT, and the use of the TiddlyManual. As part of our Comic Relief grant, seven voluntary sector organisations are in the middle of trainings, and we are also training two CAMH (statutory NHS Child and Adolescent Mental Health) Services.
This is exciting as we now have a wiki based manual that these teams will be able to start working on, adapting their OWN locally adapted version.
In addition, the core training is increasingly crystallising into the key components of the approach, and we have separated out an additional one day training which we call the AMBIT Leads training, focusing much more intensively on sharing an understanding of the MANUAL, and how to put the TiddlySpace 'machinery' that supports this to work:
- The ability to manualize relevant bits of team practice 'on the hoof'
- The ability to compare, share, and adapt other teams' content.
- The use of the 'Snapshot' function in supervision sessions (I can pull out a relevant page of content, and email a link to just that page to my supervisee during the session.)
This is exciting as we now have a wiki based manual that these teams will be able to start working on, adapting their OWN locally adapted version.
In addition, the core training is increasingly crystallising into the key components of the approach, and we have separated out an additional one day training which we call the AMBIT Leads training, focusing much more intensively on sharing an understanding of the MANUAL, and how to put the TiddlySpace 'machinery' that supports this to work:
- The ability to manualize relevant bits of team practice 'on the hoof'
- The ability to compare, share, and adapt other teams' content.
- The use of the 'Snapshot' function in supervision sessions (I can pull out a relevant page of content, and email a link to just that page to my supervisee during the session.)
Tuesday 15 November 2011
AMBIT and branded therapies
Our emphasis is increasingly on trying to offer AMBIT as a supportive - yet highly structured - framework for excellent local adapatation, rather than trying to force it onto the market as another "branded" therapy. Local "use-instances" of AMBIT are already directed at a range of different sub-populations, in different cultural milieux - see the signposting TiddlyManuals.com site.
In many ways AMBIT (and tiddlymanuals) is about empowering local services to clarify and build the most effective possible "Treatment as Usual", marrying evidence based practice (provided by our slowly-developing 'core' manual (here) with practice based evidence via the growing number of locally-adapted wiki treatment manuals, where teams manualize their own practice transparently, sharing and refining best practice in a collaborative network of 'open source' practitioners.
There is much emphasis on ensuring ease of implementation for AMBIT, and adaptability; this is most obviously represented in the form of tiddlywiki manuals, but is of course also one of the distinguishing features of mentalization per se; mentalization is exactly that psychological function seen as offering 'steerage' and 'navigation' through the complicated social universe which we inhabit - it is absolutely about supplying adaptability for the mentalizer!
In contrast to some other more rigidly-manualized approaches (which I could unfairly caricature as promoting a rather non-mentalizing stance that "We Know Best"), this is an alternative approach to the insistence that the rest of a service ecology should bend itself to the will of the manual-as-a-thing-in-itself. Our hypothesis is that most (if not all) well-conducted therapeutic techniques act to stimulate mentalizing, and indeed this is probably the 'curative feature' of all successful therapy; that there are many different ways to stimulate and support this most human of functions is hardly surprising!
A potential criticism of the fluid, dynamic approach to manualization that is exemplified by tiddlymanuals is that "it is impossible to perform a trial on "it" as there is no fixed or stationary "it" to test!" - Not so! It is quite possible to "freeze" a tiddlymanual by removing all the team editing capabilities for the duration of the trial. I have envisaged a sort of audit cycle that would consist of a cyclical pattern of locked-down outcomes evaluation, followed by a period of team-driven manualization, during which the lessons of the past year, and resolutions for the next, would be 'written in' to the team's manual. At present those teams just starting to try out manualizing themselves are tending to do it in "real time" - manualizing those practice issues that arise in the course of day to day work, which I am happy about. It seems to me that in this way teams develop a stronger sense of connection between "their" manual and their daily working expertise, as well as ensuring that they manualize live (rather than irrelevant) material.
In many ways AMBIT (and tiddlymanuals) is about empowering local services to clarify and build the most effective possible "Treatment as Usual", marrying evidence based practice (provided by our slowly-developing 'core' manual (here) with practice based evidence via the growing number of locally-adapted wiki treatment manuals, where teams manualize their own practice transparently, sharing and refining best practice in a collaborative network of 'open source' practitioners.
There is much emphasis on ensuring ease of implementation for AMBIT, and adaptability; this is most obviously represented in the form of tiddlywiki manuals, but is of course also one of the distinguishing features of mentalization per se; mentalization is exactly that psychological function seen as offering 'steerage' and 'navigation' through the complicated social universe which we inhabit - it is absolutely about supplying adaptability for the mentalizer!
In contrast to some other more rigidly-manualized approaches (which I could unfairly caricature as promoting a rather non-mentalizing stance that "We Know Best"), this is an alternative approach to the insistence that the rest of a service ecology should bend itself to the will of the manual-as-a-thing-in-itself. Our hypothesis is that most (if not all) well-conducted therapeutic techniques act to stimulate mentalizing, and indeed this is probably the 'curative feature' of all successful therapy; that there are many different ways to stimulate and support this most human of functions is hardly surprising!
A potential criticism of the fluid, dynamic approach to manualization that is exemplified by tiddlymanuals is that "it is impossible to perform a trial on "it" as there is no fixed or stationary "it" to test!" - Not so! It is quite possible to "freeze" a tiddlymanual by removing all the team editing capabilities for the duration of the trial. I have envisaged a sort of audit cycle that would consist of a cyclical pattern of locked-down outcomes evaluation, followed by a period of team-driven manualization, during which the lessons of the past year, and resolutions for the next, would be 'written in' to the team's manual. At present those teams just starting to try out manualizing themselves are tending to do it in "real time" - manualizing those practice issues that arise in the course of day to day work, which I am happy about. It seems to me that in this way teams develop a stronger sense of connection between "their" manual and their daily working expertise, as well as ensuring that they manualize live (rather than irrelevant) material.
Saturday 5 November 2011
Another AMBIT training - Dec 1st
We are running another AMBIT training at the AnnaFreud Centre on Dec 1st - there are some spaces left.
This is an introductory training about the nature of Mentalization, it's application for child and adolescent mental health services, and particularly its application for hard to reach and socially excluded youth, for whom conventional services are often not accessible. And yes, we talk about the tiddlymanuals - AMBIT as an Open Source therapy.
http://www.annafreud.org/courses.php/14/an-introduction-to-ambit-as-a-mentalization-based-framework-for-camhs-practitioners
This is an introductory training about the nature of Mentalization, it's application for child and adolescent mental health services, and particularly its application for hard to reach and socially excluded youth, for whom conventional services are often not accessible. And yes, we talk about the tiddlymanuals - AMBIT as an Open Source therapy.
http://www.annafreud.org/courses.php/14/an-introduction-to-ambit-as-a-mentalization-based-framework-for-camhs-practitioners
Friday 21 October 2011
Toronto - and a forthcoming v.3 new look
In a blustery rainy Toronto, speaking at the joint Canadian and American Academies of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry annual meeting. First workshop we (Efrain Bleiberg, Trudie Rossouw and I) did on mentalizing approaches to affectively unstable adolescents seemed well received. A symposium on mentalizing approaches to treatment next, on Saturday, with Peter Fonagy, Efrain, Trudie and Carla Sharp. I will be talking about AMBIT, MBT-F (Mentalization based treatment for families) and will include material on the tiddlymanual. Increasingly I like the notion of AMBIT as an 'open source therapy'... This is very much true to the nature of mentalizing in practice... Just like the programmers who throw open their source code for others to examine and help improve upon, so the mentalizing therapist takes a chance on 'throwing open' his or her thoughts, all the while marking them tentatively as 'just my best theory about what is going on here'. I love the open source 'mantra' - "Release early. Release often"... Really good match to mentalizing work, and draws a marked contrast between the stance that a mentalizing therapist takes and those of more 'knowing' or 'expert' schools of therapy, who may be perceived as withholding, or secretive, by their patients in ways that arouse emotional responses that then paradoxically block mentalizing...
Anyway, the other news is that a third generation of the user interface for tiddlymanuals is in development thanks to Jon and Josh at Withjandj and funded through the Comic Relief grant - the effort is all directed at smoothing (and soothing!) the user experience (once you adopt the frame of mentalizing it is like a benign virus that infects everything - web design is of course all about mentalizing the user!)..
The new design will aim for a crisper typeface, and will further emphasize the notion of tiddlers as paper on a desk (think wood, like the beautiful walnut2 theme for Firefox!) but we are working to make the 'meta-data' attached to each tiddler note even more intuitive, and to make it clearer for the user whether she is browsing or editing...
Should be released in a couple of weeks or less.
Anyway, the other news is that a third generation of the user interface for tiddlymanuals is in development thanks to Jon and Josh at Withjandj and funded through the Comic Relief grant - the effort is all directed at smoothing (and soothing!) the user experience (once you adopt the frame of mentalizing it is like a benign virus that infects everything - web design is of course all about mentalizing the user!)..
The new design will aim for a crisper typeface, and will further emphasize the notion of tiddlers as paper on a desk (think wood, like the beautiful walnut2 theme for Firefox!) but we are working to make the 'meta-data' attached to each tiddler note even more intuitive, and to make it clearer for the user whether she is browsing or editing...
Should be released in a couple of weeks or less.
Tuesday 4 October 2011
Manualizing Practice
A manual is where people who know how to do something write it down so that others can copy what they do and get the same results.
In a team this could just mean keeping minutes of team discussions and filing them in a place where everyone else knows to find them - so that those moments of clarity when we have met a problem, discussed and agreed how we might better manage it if were to happen again... don't get consigned to the dustbin of institutional amnesia!
Tiddlymanuals are about giving a team the opportunity to record its own ever-changing 'best estimate' of what best practice is, and to do so in a way that encourages outside scrutiny - that is radically rejecting of notions of 'intellectual property' as far as how best to help vulnerable and deprived youth.
The radical bit about Tiddlymanuals is the way that they allow a blending of centrally-curated "evidence-based" material, with locally-authored "practice-based" expertise. although what the viewer sees is a single integrated wiki, different groups of people are managing these different pools of content.
In the last weeks in my wonderful team in Cambridgeshire (CASUS) we've really started to try this out...
We had a case discussion the other day, chaired by my excellent trainee Meinou, and under her guidance, after the therapeutic case discussions were over, we talked briefly about how team meetings like this could be improved. It was one of those conversations that we have had many times before, and it could so easily have been "just another" one; this time, though, we were able to minute our discussions live, as we agreed "these are the things that would help better to shape the way we use the precious time we do have available"
As the team talked, so I minuted and checked that what I was writing fitted with other people's understanding - this is made much easier as the tiddlymanual is projected on the wall in the little room where the CASUS team meets, so that everything is transparent and explicit.
You can see the rough draft of how we shaped this ten minute discussion here - it is rough and ready, but that-in-itself will propel us to work harder to "get it right". Why? Because over time the wiki manual becomes the 'flag under which we sail' - which as a team i hope we will come to take pride in. It is just this "nimbleness" (going from discussion to publication in about 10 minutes) that wakes us up, keeps us on our toes...
Early on in my learning about wikis and open source, I was told that one othe mantras of the open source programmer is "RELEASE EARLY, RELEASE OFTEN". Why? Because there is nothing like real world exposure to (a) cull real world FEEDBACK (see here) and (b) spur one on to do better in awareness that our present efforts are short of the mark! I couldn't agree more, and this goes for ways of working therapeutically, as much as for developing computer code that others might find helpful,
In a team this could just mean keeping minutes of team discussions and filing them in a place where everyone else knows to find them - so that those moments of clarity when we have met a problem, discussed and agreed how we might better manage it if were to happen again... don't get consigned to the dustbin of institutional amnesia!
Tiddlymanuals are about giving a team the opportunity to record its own ever-changing 'best estimate' of what best practice is, and to do so in a way that encourages outside scrutiny - that is radically rejecting of notions of 'intellectual property' as far as how best to help vulnerable and deprived youth.
The radical bit about Tiddlymanuals is the way that they allow a blending of centrally-curated "evidence-based" material, with locally-authored "practice-based" expertise. although what the viewer sees is a single integrated wiki, different groups of people are managing these different pools of content.
In the last weeks in my wonderful team in Cambridgeshire (CASUS) we've really started to try this out...
We had a case discussion the other day, chaired by my excellent trainee Meinou, and under her guidance, after the therapeutic case discussions were over, we talked briefly about how team meetings like this could be improved. It was one of those conversations that we have had many times before, and it could so easily have been "just another" one; this time, though, we were able to minute our discussions live, as we agreed "these are the things that would help better to shape the way we use the precious time we do have available"
As the team talked, so I minuted and checked that what I was writing fitted with other people's understanding - this is made much easier as the tiddlymanual is projected on the wall in the little room where the CASUS team meets, so that everything is transparent and explicit.
You can see the rough draft of how we shaped this ten minute discussion here - it is rough and ready, but that-in-itself will propel us to work harder to "get it right". Why? Because over time the wiki manual becomes the 'flag under which we sail' - which as a team i hope we will come to take pride in. It is just this "nimbleness" (going from discussion to publication in about 10 minutes) that wakes us up, keeps us on our toes...
Early on in my learning about wikis and open source, I was told that one othe mantras of the open source programmer is "RELEASE EARLY, RELEASE OFTEN". Why? Because there is nothing like real world exposure to (a) cull real world FEEDBACK (see here) and (b) spur one on to do better in awareness that our present efforts are short of the mark! I couldn't agree more, and this goes for ways of working therapeutically, as much as for developing computer code that others might find helpful,
Wednesday 3 August 2011
More chance to learn about implementation
I am pleased with how things are going.
AMBIT manuals
The multiple versions of the Core content of the AMBIT manual are starting bit by bit (and it was always meant to be bit by bit!) to inch towards differentiated, customised forms, that begin to address local specifics - "how we do this stuff here, with these kids, in these streets". Far be it from me to introduce comptetition into this collaborative exercise, but Kids company and the MAC team are giving the CASUS team a run for their money in starting to introduce regular slots to MANUALIZE their own practice in their own local versions, inter-digitating their contributions alongside the pre-formed manualization content about AMBIT that is curated from the Anna Freud Centre.
MBT-F manual(s)
At last, I have managed to put the MBT-F manual into the new AMBIT-theme, so that it has the same (we think greatly improved, though FEEDBACK is still something we crave) user interface as the AMBIT manual.
This user interface is thanks to the generous support of COMIC RELIEF, which is funding improvements to the manual, as well as training for non-statutory teams (there are still a few slots for FREE TRAINING in AMBIT for non-statutory teams in the UK if you rush to the Anna Freud Centre)
Fellowship at the CLARHC
I am thrilled to have been given a one year Fellowship at the Cambridge-based CLARHC (Collaboration for Leadership and Applied Research for Health and Care), starting in September. As a CLARHC Fellow, I get to spend a day a week working with Cambridge University academics, the Judge Business School, and other experienced clinicians to look specifically at the implementation of a TiddlyManual in a clinical, "real world" setting.
We are currently looking at different ways to do this, and some of the opportunities are more than exciting, involving the possibility of formal cluster analysis of outcomes for multiple teams engaging in AMBIT and using tiddlymanuals to support themselves in this - watch this space.
AMBIT manuals
The multiple versions of the Core content of the AMBIT manual are starting bit by bit (and it was always meant to be bit by bit!) to inch towards differentiated, customised forms, that begin to address local specifics - "how we do this stuff here, with these kids, in these streets". Far be it from me to introduce comptetition into this collaborative exercise, but Kids company and the MAC team are giving the CASUS team a run for their money in starting to introduce regular slots to MANUALIZE their own practice in their own local versions, inter-digitating their contributions alongside the pre-formed manualization content about AMBIT that is curated from the Anna Freud Centre.
MBT-F manual(s)
At last, I have managed to put the MBT-F manual into the new AMBIT-theme, so that it has the same (we think greatly improved, though FEEDBACK is still something we crave) user interface as the AMBIT manual.
This user interface is thanks to the generous support of COMIC RELIEF, which is funding improvements to the manual, as well as training for non-statutory teams (there are still a few slots for FREE TRAINING in AMBIT for non-statutory teams in the UK if you rush to the Anna Freud Centre)
Fellowship at the CLARHC
I am thrilled to have been given a one year Fellowship at the Cambridge-based CLARHC (Collaboration for Leadership and Applied Research for Health and Care), starting in September. As a CLARHC Fellow, I get to spend a day a week working with Cambridge University academics, the Judge Business School, and other experienced clinicians to look specifically at the implementation of a TiddlyManual in a clinical, "real world" setting.
We are currently looking at different ways to do this, and some of the opportunities are more than exciting, involving the possibility of formal cluster analysis of outcomes for multiple teams engaging in AMBIT and using tiddlymanuals to support themselves in this - watch this space.
Tuesday 3 May 2011
New user interface goes live
It is not yet finished, and the content probably still requires a lot more shaping.. but the new user interface is now set as the default, and you can see it at:
ambit core content manual
the list of teams starting to edit ther own local versions of the manual is held at
Tiddlymanuals.com
Please have a look, and feedback if you can.
ambit core content manual
the list of teams starting to edit ther own local versions of the manual is held at
Tiddlymanuals.com
Please have a look, and feedback if you can.
Monday 28 March 2011
2nd Version of New Look - & how do we get more feedback?
As described in my last post, we are working hard on the user interface.
There is a working version of where we have got to here, but we are now working towards a second version, which is not yet working, though you can see a mock-up here - simpler still, I think, and loses the 'floating' sidebar, which I think will be easier.
Of course designing an interface is a little like trying to mentalize another person - making sense of their actions (clicking that link there, rather than this one here - NOW WHY WOULD THEY DO THAT?!) in terms of their intentional mental state at the time: their beliefs, their wishes, their worries - which collectively drive their actions. It is hard! As a user of the site, some of my intentional state in a particular moment is, of course, pre-conscious - not in my own awareness, let alone that of the guy struggling to predict how to make a website so self-evidently obvious as to make the 'interface' practically invisible to me... Interesting how it takes expertise (Jon Lister and Joshua Bradley, and our frineds at Osmosoft supplying this) and experience/feedback (me, and the others who I can squeeze feedback out of) to get this anything like 'right'...
Feedback is the gold-dust we require, and it is very hard to get others quite as fired up as those close to the project so as to increase our data from 'ordinary users... It takes a certain head of steam to go to the bother of letting a web-designer know what annoyed me about the website, where I got lost...
I guess what I am saying is that sometimes this whole tiddlymanuals project seems a very lonely task. People will look once, but if they don't like it they'll go away. However, what we are trying to do with the AMBIT intervention (for multi-problem, complex, and "hard to reach" young people) as a whole is what Weisz and Simpson-Gray (2008) describe as a "deployment-focussed" development of a new intervention, and I guess this is very similar to the methods of open source development on the web. I love the saying of open-source programmers "Release Early, and Release Often" - as this seems to capture something of the AMBIT developmental method, too - keep showing people your ideas, keep trying them out, keep tweaking, tinkering, improving, bit by bit. Build on what we know works for whom, and keep pruning out what doesn't work...
That pruning bit is the painful one - will we really manage to persuade enough teams to actually begin actively 'manualizing' their own practice in the kind of co-constructed wiki-manual that the TiddlySpace AMBIT manual promises? If we don't, then the basic premise of the Tiddlymanuals project is challenged, but it is hard for teams to do this before the technology easily and "invisibly" supports this. How long do we give it before we have to prune that idea?!
I take heart from parallels in neurodevelopment... neural development follows a line of early (pre-birth to young childhood) massive "efflorescence" of nerve connections, generating billions of synapses (links between branches of nerves). In mid-childhood, and accelerating in adolescence, this process then goes into reverse with what is called "synaptic pruning"... Structures, or more importantly functional pathways, that have adaptive value to the individual are preserved, and strengthened, whereas unused pathways (poor adaptive value) are gradually shed. BUT... certain areas of the brain - most notably, the highest executive bits such as the pre-frontal cortex (where mentalizing occurs) tend to lag behind in their development relative to more archaic structures that deal with, say, threat and attachment. This is not because the prefrontal cortex is less useful; on the contrary, it is just that it is doing such a compex job (working out why people are behaving the way they are on the basis of empathic and imaginative intuition of their intentional mental states) that it takes a while to come on-line... let's be hoping that tiddlymanuals are a bit like that, and not just another part of the massive pluripotentiality of the developing world of effective interventions that yet fails to show adaptive value. My hope is in the fact that it is the very qualities of flexibility and adaptability that tiddlymanuals are directed towards, my fear is that the technology will be too alien to facilitate easy adoption, or that teams struggling under the burden of surviving in the current harsh economic climate will baulk at "adding" the task of manualizing their practice (though I maintain that this can more or less be done in real time, or at least in "bite-sized chunks", so that the time burden should be minimal, and a reasonable investment.) We shall see.
There is a working version of where we have got to here, but we are now working towards a second version, which is not yet working, though you can see a mock-up here - simpler still, I think, and loses the 'floating' sidebar, which I think will be easier.
Of course designing an interface is a little like trying to mentalize another person - making sense of their actions (clicking that link there, rather than this one here - NOW WHY WOULD THEY DO THAT?!) in terms of their intentional mental state at the time: their beliefs, their wishes, their worries - which collectively drive their actions. It is hard! As a user of the site, some of my intentional state in a particular moment is, of course, pre-conscious - not in my own awareness, let alone that of the guy struggling to predict how to make a website so self-evidently obvious as to make the 'interface' practically invisible to me... Interesting how it takes expertise (Jon Lister and Joshua Bradley, and our frineds at Osmosoft supplying this) and experience/feedback (me, and the others who I can squeeze feedback out of) to get this anything like 'right'...
Feedback is the gold-dust we require, and it is very hard to get others quite as fired up as those close to the project so as to increase our data from 'ordinary users... It takes a certain head of steam to go to the bother of letting a web-designer know what annoyed me about the website, where I got lost...
I guess what I am saying is that sometimes this whole tiddlymanuals project seems a very lonely task. People will look once, but if they don't like it they'll go away. However, what we are trying to do with the AMBIT intervention (for multi-problem, complex, and "hard to reach" young people) as a whole is what Weisz and Simpson-Gray (2008) describe as a "deployment-focussed" development of a new intervention, and I guess this is very similar to the methods of open source development on the web. I love the saying of open-source programmers "Release Early, and Release Often" - as this seems to capture something of the AMBIT developmental method, too - keep showing people your ideas, keep trying them out, keep tweaking, tinkering, improving, bit by bit. Build on what we know works for whom, and keep pruning out what doesn't work...
That pruning bit is the painful one - will we really manage to persuade enough teams to actually begin actively 'manualizing' their own practice in the kind of co-constructed wiki-manual that the TiddlySpace AMBIT manual promises? If we don't, then the basic premise of the Tiddlymanuals project is challenged, but it is hard for teams to do this before the technology easily and "invisibly" supports this. How long do we give it before we have to prune that idea?!
I take heart from parallels in neurodevelopment... neural development follows a line of early (pre-birth to young childhood) massive "efflorescence" of nerve connections, generating billions of synapses (links between branches of nerves). In mid-childhood, and accelerating in adolescence, this process then goes into reverse with what is called "synaptic pruning"... Structures, or more importantly functional pathways, that have adaptive value to the individual are preserved, and strengthened, whereas unused pathways (poor adaptive value) are gradually shed. BUT... certain areas of the brain - most notably, the highest executive bits such as the pre-frontal cortex (where mentalizing occurs) tend to lag behind in their development relative to more archaic structures that deal with, say, threat and attachment. This is not because the prefrontal cortex is less useful; on the contrary, it is just that it is doing such a compex job (working out why people are behaving the way they are on the basis of empathic and imaginative intuition of their intentional mental states) that it takes a while to come on-line... let's be hoping that tiddlymanuals are a bit like that, and not just another part of the massive pluripotentiality of the developing world of effective interventions that yet fails to show adaptive value. My hope is in the fact that it is the very qualities of flexibility and adaptability that tiddlymanuals are directed towards, my fear is that the technology will be too alien to facilitate easy adoption, or that teams struggling under the burden of surviving in the current harsh economic climate will baulk at "adding" the task of manualizing their practice (though I maintain that this can more or less be done in real time, or at least in "bite-sized chunks", so that the time burden should be minimal, and a reasonable investment.) We shall see.
Wednesday 9 March 2011
New hosting site and new Theme for the AMBIT TiddlyManual
Some of the money from our Comic Relief grant is directed towards improving the user experience of the AMBIT manual.
We have moved it to TiddlySpace now (you can still access it and all tiddlymanuals through the central 'signposting site' www.tiddlymanuals.com). This makes it much easier for new adopters to set up their own space (wiki) at TiddlySpace and then to opt to "include" all the ambit.tiddlyspace within their own. When they add their material (local expertise, implementation protocols) this is saved in their space, but links directly to the Anna Freud Centre's curated content, so that from a user's point of view the whole wiki is seamless.
It also makes the major renovation of the theme easier to try out. You can see where we have got to here - as ever feedback is very welcome and there is a link to this in the manual.
The idea of the new theme, that is being developed by Jonathan Lister & Joshua Bradley at J&J, is to make the manual a much easier experience for the user. The original manual was very "busy" - far too many links, not enough of what I call "centripetal" force in the writing (that is, the intrinsic interst and relevance of what I am reading that holds my attention, as opposed to centrifugal forces that are sparked by relevant or interesting links.
Ideally a wiki has the perfect balance: allowing exploration in depth, that is nonetheless contextualised through links to relevant details that draw me on into material that is just 'meta' to what I originally came for.
By 'calming the typeface down' and setting links to new tiddlers (in tiddlywiki, 'tiddlers' are small chunks of content - not quite pages, more like hyper-linked and taggable notelets) to open down below, out of sight, this makes for a much more fluid reading experience. As a reader clicks and opens tiddlers, it is as though that reader is setting up their tailor-made 'chapter' up ahead of them. A menu ("you are currently reading") on the right lists all the tiddlers open at any one time, and you can flick back and forth between these, or close them from there. Best to try this out rather than have me attempt to explain it. It seems different but highly intuitive... Interested to get feedback though.
We have moved it to TiddlySpace now (you can still access it and all tiddlymanuals through the central 'signposting site' www.tiddlymanuals.com). This makes it much easier for new adopters to set up their own space (wiki) at TiddlySpace and then to opt to "include" all the ambit.tiddlyspace within their own. When they add their material (local expertise, implementation protocols) this is saved in their space, but links directly to the Anna Freud Centre's curated content, so that from a user's point of view the whole wiki is seamless.
It also makes the major renovation of the theme easier to try out. You can see where we have got to here - as ever feedback is very welcome and there is a link to this in the manual.
The idea of the new theme, that is being developed by Jonathan Lister & Joshua Bradley at J&J, is to make the manual a much easier experience for the user. The original manual was very "busy" - far too many links, not enough of what I call "centripetal" force in the writing (that is, the intrinsic interst and relevance of what I am reading that holds my attention, as opposed to centrifugal forces that are sparked by relevant or interesting links.
Ideally a wiki has the perfect balance: allowing exploration in depth, that is nonetheless contextualised through links to relevant details that draw me on into material that is just 'meta' to what I originally came for.
By 'calming the typeface down' and setting links to new tiddlers (in tiddlywiki, 'tiddlers' are small chunks of content - not quite pages, more like hyper-linked and taggable notelets) to open down below, out of sight, this makes for a much more fluid reading experience. As a reader clicks and opens tiddlers, it is as though that reader is setting up their tailor-made 'chapter' up ahead of them. A menu ("you are currently reading") on the right lists all the tiddlers open at any one time, and you can flick back and forth between these, or close them from there. Best to try this out rather than have me attempt to explain it. It seems different but highly intuitive... Interested to get feedback though.
Saturday 29 January 2011
Moving into TiddlySpace
These are exciting days as the AMBIT tiddlymanual is moved from it's second home, TiddlyWeb, into it's third one - which is it's ultimate destination, really. You can have a look at http://ambit.tiddlyspace.com, or you can see some of the local versions via the same 'signposting' site - www.tiddlymanuals.com
TiddlySpace works - albeit a bit clunkily in places so far - but with a bit of imagination you can see what this might start to look like.
TiddlySpace is a web service that allows you to open a 'Space' which is in effect a simple, self-editable wiki - a tiddlywiki, of course. But there is more. Your wiki, comprising a collection of 'notelets' (tiddlers) offers a place to curate your own content, and even to hold draft contact back from publication (every tiddler has two possible states - public or private - the latter being visible only to you when you are logged in as a member of that space), and you can invite close trusted colleagues to share any space you open (you can open as many as you want). So far so good. Being tiddlywiki, at a click you can of course download the whole wiki and run it from a USB stick, etc, without being on the web at all.
The really wonderful bit comes when another person, or small trusted group, decides to open their own space, to curate their own material... They can choose to "include" all of the public content from my Space inside their own. Any content thus included is still clearly marked as mine, and I still manage its content. However, by including my public content in her Space, a collaborator of mine can add her own details, local additions, or overwrite sections of my wiki where she has local material that fits her situation better, etc. She doesn't erase my own curated content, just replaces it within her own in her Space, in such a way that it is explicit that this is her over-written material, and so that the reader can toggle back and forth between the two versions - hers and mine.
As many people as want to can include someone elses' Space in their own, and they can include as many Spaces as they want to in their own Spaces... This is an extraordinarily fecund way of sharing, digesting, reworking and re-sharing ideas and expertise. Where Facebook is all surface - Face - TiddlySpace is all depth, meaning, accuracy, understanding - MindBook, if you like.
In terms of my biopsychosocial treatment manuals, you can see how this technical capacity supports the notion of a balance between a centrally-curated 'Core Template' and multiple local iterations of this methodology, with their own super-added attunements - a co-construction or collaborative authoring of content becomes simple to achieve; principles and variants of local praxis, recorded in a way that other workers can easily browse different variants and choose the most suitable local attunement for their specific needs. We are only making explicit what every team adopting a manualized treatment protocol does - and come formal (randomized controlled) trials of a method of working it is easy enough to 'switch off' the editing function...
It's is easier to see and play than to explain. AMBIT
Thanks to our Comic Relief Grant, and the support of the James Wentworth Stanley fund, we are also able to invest in programming time to iron our glitches and make huge improvements to the user interface, and navigation, which has, to date, been pretty chronic. Please check in over the coming months as things should be improving in quantum leaps before May 2011.
TiddlySpace works - albeit a bit clunkily in places so far - but with a bit of imagination you can see what this might start to look like.
TiddlySpace is a web service that allows you to open a 'Space' which is in effect a simple, self-editable wiki - a tiddlywiki, of course. But there is more. Your wiki, comprising a collection of 'notelets' (tiddlers) offers a place to curate your own content, and even to hold draft contact back from publication (every tiddler has two possible states - public or private - the latter being visible only to you when you are logged in as a member of that space), and you can invite close trusted colleagues to share any space you open (you can open as many as you want). So far so good. Being tiddlywiki, at a click you can of course download the whole wiki and run it from a USB stick, etc, without being on the web at all.
The really wonderful bit comes when another person, or small trusted group, decides to open their own space, to curate their own material... They can choose to "include" all of the public content from my Space inside their own. Any content thus included is still clearly marked as mine, and I still manage its content. However, by including my public content in her Space, a collaborator of mine can add her own details, local additions, or overwrite sections of my wiki where she has local material that fits her situation better, etc. She doesn't erase my own curated content, just replaces it within her own in her Space, in such a way that it is explicit that this is her over-written material, and so that the reader can toggle back and forth between the two versions - hers and mine.
As many people as want to can include someone elses' Space in their own, and they can include as many Spaces as they want to in their own Spaces... This is an extraordinarily fecund way of sharing, digesting, reworking and re-sharing ideas and expertise. Where Facebook is all surface - Face - TiddlySpace is all depth, meaning, accuracy, understanding - MindBook, if you like.
In terms of my biopsychosocial treatment manuals, you can see how this technical capacity supports the notion of a balance between a centrally-curated 'Core Template' and multiple local iterations of this methodology, with their own super-added attunements - a co-construction or collaborative authoring of content becomes simple to achieve; principles and variants of local praxis, recorded in a way that other workers can easily browse different variants and choose the most suitable local attunement for their specific needs. We are only making explicit what every team adopting a manualized treatment protocol does - and come formal (randomized controlled) trials of a method of working it is easy enough to 'switch off' the editing function...
It's is easier to see and play than to explain. AMBIT
Thanks to our Comic Relief Grant, and the support of the James Wentworth Stanley fund, we are also able to invest in programming time to iron our glitches and make huge improvements to the user interface, and navigation, which has, to date, been pretty chronic. Please check in over the coming months as things should be improving in quantum leaps before May 2011.
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