About

Wonderbits is a collaborative environment for growing ideas, bit by bit. It gives a class a shared canvas where questions, claims, evidence, sketches, and syntheses can be written, connected, revisited, and reorganized as understanding develops.

Its lineage includes knowledge-building environments like Knowledge Forum, newer tools for thought such as Obsidian and Tana, collaborative canvases like Miro, FigJam, and tldraw, and current work in human-computer interaction. The goal is to make a place where thinking together can feel natural, legible, and alive.

The design philosophy behind Wonderbits is dwelling: helping people feel at home with their ideas as they wonder, build, revise, and advance them, whether alone or with others. That means the environment should adapt to the ways people work, not force everyone into one workflow. Participants are not just users of Wonderbits; they are designers, builders, and architects of their own knowledge-building environments.

At this stage, Wonderbits includes the basics for collaborative knowledge building: private and shared spaces, pages, idea cards, links, groups, filters, saved views, semantic zoom, semantic clusters, and inspection views. It also supports more advanced work through rise-above levels and Thinking Lab, with more features under development.

Wonderbits is in beta testing. If you’re interested in using in your class, please join the waitlist.

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Tutorials

Watch short screen recordings (~1 minute each), to learn about Wonderbits. If you’re setting up a class rather than working in one, skip to For Teachers.

Part 1: Getting Started

1. First Steps — Joining a space, moving around the canvas, adding your first idea
2. Card Types — The six built-in types, and changing a card’s type as your thinking changes
3. Connecting Ideas — Building on a card, connecting two cards, and saying why
4. Synthesis — Pulling several ideas into one account of what they add up to

Part 2: Working Together

1. Your Class Space — Personal versus shared spaces, and seeing who’s working alongside you
2. Reading and Responding — Reactions, marking promising, comments, and build-ons
3. Chat Channels — Public, real-time channels beside the canvas, mentions, and topic channels from tags

Part 3: Finding What Matters

1. Filters — Narrowing a busy space by type, tag, time, author, or reaction
2. Inspect — Reading a filtered set as cards, an outline, or a sortable table
3. Views — Saving a filter combination you’ll want again, and sharing it with the class

Part 4: Moving Across Levels

1. Zooming — Engage, scan and map, and the landmarks that survive at a distance
2. Groups and Clusters — The groups you draw, and the clusters that form themselves
3. Rise Above — Distilling what the class worked out into a new level
4. Pages — Several working surfaces in one space, each with its own canvas and levels

More on the way — working with AI.

For Teachers

Setting up and configuring your class space.

1. Setting Up a Class Space — Create the space, the invite link, and make a co-teacher a manager
2. Card Types and Canvas Features — Customize the shared space to best support student thinking
3. AI Helpers — Things to consider before switching AI features on, and meeting Pip, Buzz and Shimmer

More on the way — reading a class with Insights.