[IAEP] Narrative.

[Bill Kerr]

On Sun, Oct 5, 2008 at 2:09 PM, Michael Stone <michael at laptop.org> wrote:

> 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.



bryan's ideas are explained more fully in this article on olpcnews:
http://www.olpcnews.com/content/education/scaling_constructionism_with_dynabooks.html

the comments there are worth reading too

it's hard to discuss without having the ideas spelt out
"narrative is good" is not really a sufficient basis for a discussion but
bryan's article has more detail
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