[IAEP] [sugar] Narrative.

[Martin Langhoff]

On Sun, Oct 5, 2008 at 5:39 PM, Michael Stone <michael at laptop.org> wrote:
>   "Sugar offers an excellent mode for discovery but no excellent way to
>   manipulate narratives. Both discovery and narrative are essential for
>   learning." [1]

I am catching up with this. What Bryan writes is correct, but I am
confident we are in the right direction - Sugar supports the user
interaction - the narrative belongs elsewhere.

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

No, Sugar is a bit "lower layer" than that. Sugar supports sw that can
drive the narrative, and that is the way it should be. You would not
want a webbrowser that dictates a path through a website - some
websites have navigation optimised for 'random access' and others for
sequential access.

cheers,

> [2]: Bryan is currently encoding narratives in HTML and is attempting to
> use Offline Moodle to make this cheaper to support.

And that is a reasonable path. Moodle has _some_ support for
narratives (and then again, sanely refuses to put too much emphasis in
them).

Reading the concept of 'narrative' liberally, one possible tack would
be to suggest that Sugar could support a degree of hyperlinking inside
activities as a means of defining narratives flexibly -- that's the
strategy the web has shown to be the winner.

cheers,


m
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 martin at laptop.org -- School Server Architect
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