[IAEP] Narrative.

[Michael Stone]

Bryan Berry wholly captured my attention tonight when he said (in
summary):

   "Sugar offers an excellent mode for discovery but no excellent way to
   manipulate narratives. Both discovery and narrative are essential for
   learning." [1]
   
This statement seems to me both indisputable and damning; if true, it
strikes to the core of the claim that Sugar is appropriate for learning.

Even though Bryan has already found some partial solutions to this
problem [2], we should take time to debate the more primitive thesis
that:

  "Narrative is a basic component of much educational material which
  Sugar ought to 'natively' recognize, respond to, and manipulate." 

so that we may decide whether this issue should receive a greater share
of our limited design and implementation resources.

Regards,

Michael

[1]: Sugar presently records actions which may occasionally be
decomposed into narrative or situated within an external narrative;
however, Sugar is presently blind to these relationships.

[2]: Bryan is currently encoding narratives in HTML and is attempting to
use Offline Moodle to make this cheaper to support. I decided to write
this email because I believe that it might well be worth our time to
either give him a hand with his effort or to bake support for similar
use cases directly in to Sugar.