Documents and slide decks are prisons for ideas! Okay, I know this is a little dramatic, but in many ways it's true. When we write using word processors like Microsoft Word or LibreOffice Writer, and when we create presentations using presentation software like PowerPoint or Impress, we are trapping our ideas in formats that make them extremely difficult to get at. Each document or slide deck stands alone as a collection of ideas, but it's difficult to find individual ideas and put them together into different arrangements, for different audiences, or in different output formats. This has led to me having three or four Word docs open at a time, frantically clicking, copying, and pasting between them to try to find and collect the three ideas I know I wrote up last year, or maybe even giving up and just starting over from scratch with a blank document. So in my case at least, I feel like a little drama is warranted.

Don't get me wrong, word processors are great at creating formatting-rich documents and presentation software makes it easy (indeed, some have argued too easy) to create flashy presentations with animations and embedded multi-media.

But the problems start arising when I want to stop starting from scratch and reuse materials that I've already created. I have tried many different approaches to managing my lecture notes.

Why documents and presentations make it hard to re-use and re-mix ideas

The closest thing I have found to being successful was to save each day's lecture notes and/or slide deck with a file name that indicates which week of the quarter and day of the week I used it. So the first day of the quarter would be Week1Day1.docx and so on. Here are some of the reasons why this approach doesn't help me reuse lecture materials across courses:

• The file name gives no indication of what's in the file. Granted, I did try to mitigate this at times by also including the topic in the file name. But even three topics make this pretty unwieldy: Week2_Day4_Rhetorical_Situation_Rhetorical_Goals_Rhetorical_Appeals.docx
• This approach forces me to try to teach the course in the exact same order every time I teach it. But in a rhetoric course, it often makes sense to let the topics follow current events. For example, if a political candidate is speaking on campus, we might emphasize concepts like apologia and ethos a few days before they speak.
• It's nearly impossible to use topics from one course in a different course. I teach a layered advanced rhetoric class to undergrads that have the basic class as a pre-req and grad students that don't. This often puts some of the grad students in the awkward position of feeling less prepared on fundamental concepts than their undergraduate peers. If all my basic topics were not trapped in documents and slide decks, I could easily put together a review packet for the grad students that helps them get caught up early in the quarter.

What is a topic in topic-based authoring?

For teaching purposes, let's think of a topic as any self-contained unit of teaching material that you might want to re-use in different courses, modalities, or output formats.

For my own teaching, topics can take a few forms:

• One topic might be a single idea or concept that I want to cover during a given class session.
• Another topic might be the in-class activity that I want my students to do to solidify their immediate learning.
• A third might be a short homework assignment that scaffolds the concept and how it can be applied to a larger project.
• A fourth might be an actual assignment prompt that draws from all of the learning and writing they have done in a particular unit of the class.

What is topic-based authoring?

Topic-based authoring is a concept drawn from the technical communication world, specifically, documentation. When I was in my MA program in Scientific and Technical Communication at the University of Minnesota (way back in the early 2000s), I took an entire, semester-long course on topic-based authoring and the Adobe solution to this problem, FrameMaker. Although most topic-based authoring tools are highly complex in their use, the concept is simple. The folks at OxygenXML define "topic" nicely:

The term topic can be thought of as being short for topical information unit, or a topical unit of discourse. A topic-based architecture opens up the opportunity for large scale content re-use. Topics are assembled from a single pool or repository into different deliverable documents. Topics can be used in different publications, provided the topic makes sense when read in different contexts.

This definition also helps illustrate the biggest hurdle to adopting a topic-based approach to teaching materials: these processes and tools are extremely complex, often difficult to use, and in most cases priced for enterprise-level documentation teams rather than individual educators.

Why don't existing topic-based authoring tools work for teaching materials?

In fact, I have tried using traditional tech writing tools to bring a topic-based approach to my teaching materials. But the industry-standard tools are either too complex, too expensive, or both. To be fair, Oxygen XML Editor offers an academic subscription at $6 per month, but to get the basic functionality of topic-based authoring and the ability to publish your topics to useful outputs you'd need the XML Author version, which is priced at a minimum of $28 per month. And that's to say nothing of the fact that you'd be working in XML, which in my opinion is a good deal less accessible to non-experts than Markdown.

How Sheetbend frees your topics from their document prisons

Ultimately, I turned to help from AI coding agents to craft my own solution. At first I simply wrote topics in Markdown and used AI to help build custom mapping tools, which saved the maps to YAML files. This cobbled-together approach proved the concept, but also quickly became hard to manage. It was easy to lose topics in the folders on my desktop, and hard to find the topics that I wanted to reuse across different outputs.

A topic in Sheetbend

It also didn't solve the basic problem of getting topics out of documents I had already spent years writing and working from. I turned to AI again, this time to help parse my existing content and free my topics from the document-bound prisons. Thus was born Sheetbend (named for a knot that can be used to connect ropes of different sizes).

Sheetbend offers several ways to make the most of your topics:

• Use Claude to parse existing Word documents and try to find individual topics in them.
• Save topics in Markdown. Topics live in a library and can be further edited using a "What you see is what you mean" editor.
• Write new Markdown topics from scratch as needed.
• Find the topics you need with a lightning-fast search function. Since Markdown is just plain text with a very simple syntax to give structure to your topics, searching across the library of topics is simple and fast.
• Arrange topics in the order you need with a simple, drag-and-drop map editor.
• Save your maps to PDF, Word, PowerPoint, or Markdown at the click of a button.

I built Sheetbend to solve my own personal challenges with managing the content that informs my teaching. As I was building it, I thought that others might find it useful too, so I developed this website and decided to offer a free version and a paid version. The free version is designed to be robust enough that a grad student could use it to develop materials for a single class. The paid version is for those of us teaching multiple courses each term and enables the ability to save the library in a local, sync-able folder on your computer.

Give it a try

My goal with Sheetbend is to build a usable, affordable "structured authoring for educators" system. If you think that your current teaching materials might also be trapped in documents and slide decks, try it out and let me know what you think. Sheetbend is ready to use, and I'm building out more features as I learn from my users. Try it and let me know what features you would find useful. I'd love to hear what you think of it.