[IAEP] Fwd: [sugar] Narrative

[David Farning]

This takes us back to the collaboration server discussions from last week.

Rather than attempting to organizing content it may be preferable to improve
the tools which help users self organize into communities.

Last night I got into a discussion about the value of the Neighborhood view
with my 2nd grade niece:)  She was pretty befuddled as to why she had to
chose between belkin_019, linksys_1, meshview_11,....  From her perspective
it made more sense to click on 'Mrs. Kings class' if she wanted to do her
homework, or 'After school fun' if she wanted to talk with her friends.

While the idea of APs and mesh networks is important to us as geeks and
developers.  From a user point of view the idea of virtual communities or
rooms seems clearer.

Maybe it is my misunderstanding of the nature of a jabber sever.  A IRC
server is pretty useless until the users can self select into channels.

Possibly, the idea of manipulating narratives could be best handled by
helping communities develop which can discover, share, and reflect on
_their_own_ stories.

thanks
david

On Sun, Oct 5, 2008 at 11:39 AM, Walter Bender <walter.bender at gmail.com>wrote:

> We need to add an its.an.education.project alias to this list...
>
> -walter
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Walter Bender <walter.bender at gmail.com>
> Date: Sun, Oct 5, 2008 at 12:29 PM
> Subject: Re: [sugar] Narrative
> To: Sameer Verma <sverma at sfsu.edu>
> Cc: Bryan Berry <bryan.berry at gmail.com>, bens at alum.mit.edu, sugar
> <sugar at lists.laptop.org>, "its. an. education. project"
> <its.an.education.project at lists.sugarlabs.org>
>
>
> Each of us seems to have interpreted Michael's note differently, so
> perhaps some more clarity of definitions is in order. In any case, my
> focus was on the assertion that there are  "no excellent way to
> manipulate narratives" within Sugar. Excellence is the standard we
> should be striving for and I do agree we have a ways to go in terms of
> developing tools for "manipulating" "narratives" within Sugar. But it
> seems a funny dichotomy: manipulating narratives vs. modes for
> discovery.
>
> When I think about Sugar, I think about its providing a scaffolding
> for discovering, expressing, critiquing, and reflecting. Manipulating
> narrative seems to cut across all of these area (as does
> collaboration). We have a browser--the "discovery" platform du
> jour--but also an ebook reader and media player, and various tools for
> collecting and inspecting data (e.g, Measure and Distance). In terms
> of expression, we have a wide variety of tools, including word
> processing, rich media, programming, etc. Tools for critique and
> reflection seems the least developed thus far: we have chat and we
> have sharing and simple debugging tools, and we have the Journal, but
> we don't yet support (natively) much in the way of organizing data to
> make an analysis or argument. Is this the role Bryan expects Moodle to
> play? If so, I don't really see how.  There are beginnings of tools
> such as spreadsheets, mindmaps, etc. being "Sugarized". What else
> should we add to this list? There is also a powerful presentation
> toolkit built into Etoys--is it the lack of PowerPoint that Bryan is
> missing?--but it is not very easy to find. Perhaps something more
> wiki-like or HTML-based would be better. Having it available off-line
> is probably as important as accessing an on-line system, such as is
> already available in Moodle and in general on any GNU/Linux (or even
> Windows) server. In terms of organizing school itself, Moodle and its
> like certainly have an important role to play. Sugar is not intended
> to be all things, but part of a learning ecosystem.
>
> There is certainly a paucity of lesson plans developed around Sugar:
> how does one best leverage this collection of tools for learning. And
> undoubtedly, a dearth of content readily packaged and categorized. But
> I don't see these as fundamental design flaws in Sugar as much as a
> place where more effort needs to be invested. Sugar is reaching a
> point of maturity where such investments make sense.
>
> In any case, I'd love to hear Michael's "interesting ideas".
>
> -walter
>
>
>
> --
> Walter Bender
> Sugar Labs
> http://www.sugarlabs.org
> _______________________________________________
> IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!)
> IAEP at lists.sugarlabs.org
> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
>
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