[IAEP] The Children's Library On OLPC project

[Jim Simmons]

Scotty,

The Journal entry that the Activity would create would be in the
Journal proper, and would not point to or in any way require any files
on the stick.  The Activity would work like this:

1).  The child inserts one of your sticks.  Sugar mounts it.
2).  The child uses the Journal to change views from the Journal
proper to the stick.  He will see your bundled files, hopefully named
something more appealing to a child than "Conduct of Life".  He will
also see the Activity.
3).  The child will use the clipboard to copy the Activity to his
Journal (unless he already has it).  He will then Resume one of your
bundles using the Activity.
4).  The Activity will show a scrollable list of books.  The entries
in this table will be tall enough to hold the book cover thumbnail and
information on each book, at minimum title and author.  The
information about the books might be stored in a Dublin Core XML file
which the Activity reads and parses.  The child will select an entry
in this table and click a button in the toolbar of the Activity which
will copy that book to the child's Journal.  This will work somewhat
like Get Internet Archive Books does.  The child will see an
information dialog when the Journal entry is created.  He may then
choose another book to copy, as many times as he wishes, or exit the
Activity.
5).  The child unmounts the stick from the Journal and gives it back
to the teacher.
6).  The child opens one of his new books using the Read Activity.

There was some talk about making Browse work with zipped up websites.
If you had that, you could give your files meaningful names like:

The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain.djvu

and maybe Browse could download them from the zip file into the
Journal.  But if it did the Journal would have a really ugly name
starting with file:// that the child would have to clean up.  You
would not get any metadata either, just the filename as part of the
title.  Plus Browse cannot do what I have described yet, although it
has been talked about as a future feature.

The Activity I have described could be written so it would work on
Sugar .82, a big plus.  Of course you still have to verify good
support for Deja Vu in .82.  Or use PDF.

I would recommend copying these emails to the IAEP list.  I am by no
means a Sugar expert and you may find others will have something
worthwhile to add to these discussions.

James Simmons


On Wed, Jul 22, 2009 at 11:57 AM, Scotty Auble<scottymon at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Jim,
> Thanks for this input. I'm going to share our conversations with the
> team today and I'll be sure we all take a close look at this idea. We
> had already suspected that xo bundles might break something with the
> size of the data, so were considering "rebundling" in collections to
> allow for smaller size collections. One thing I know we want is to
> allow inserting the stick, browsing, then downloading and saving
> whatever looks interesting so you could take it home, etc without
> having the stick. If I understand your solution you are suggesting
> that the created Journal entry would point to a book on the stick? We
> could probably modify that download the book from the "book bundle"
> and  install it to the laptop. We'd have to provided an easy way to
> clean up, too, since as you say storage on the XO is precious.
>
> What we were thinking of doing is a web page that would allow the book
> files or "mini bundles" to be visible to the web browser as links, but
> not to the journal. Then, when you click the link it is downloaded and
> "installed" so that locally you have the book file and it's meta
> information in the Journal. I think the Journal displays an icon for
> the entries in one view? Anyway, what do you think of this? It seems
> easier than writing a new activity but then I haven't done that so I
> don't know. Looking forward to our next communication.
> Scotty Auble.
>
> On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 1:07 PM, Jim Simmons<nicestep at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Scotty,
>>
>> I've been thinking about your project and have some ideas.  These may
>> be similar to what Sayamindu has already proposed.
>>
>> You want to distribute a couple of thousand books from Internet
>> Archive without using the Internet.
>>
>> As I have said before having over a thousand files on a USB drive
>> isn't going to work.  The Journal isn't equipped to deal with that.
>> You had mentioned (I think) the idea of creating content bundles for
>> this stuff, but content bundles as they exist now aren't going to work
>> either.  With a content bundle the entire contents of the bundle get
>> unpacked and stored somewhere, and on the XO there isn't room for
>> anything that isn't going to be used.  You don't want to install 818
>> books about "conduct of life" on a kid's laptop.  You want to give him
>> something that will let him browse through all of those books and pick
>> one or two to install in his Journal.
>>
>> One way to make these files manageable would be to collect them by
>> theme or topic and put the collected books in zip files.  The zip
>> files would contain the books themselves, the GIF files showing book
>> covers, and one file containing information about the books, possibly
>> in the Dublin Core format, more likely in some subset thereof.  In the
>> Internet Archive database there are a lot of fields that would be
>> useful if filled in, but more often than not are not.
>>
>> If you had these collections prepared you could write an Activity to
>> browse their contents (using the Dublin Core file and the images).
>> The student would insert a thumb drive containing one or more of these
>> collections into his XO and fire up an Activity that would read the
>> Dublin file and create a scrolling list of the titles, including cover
>> images, title, author, etc.  The student could sort this list by
>> title, author, etc. then select a book he wants and create an entry
>> for it in the Journal.  You could prepare sticks which had the
>> collections on them as well as this Activity.  That way everything
>> could be done through sneakernet.
>>
>> The Activity would be a lot like Get Internet Archive Books except it
>> would work offline and would show the book covers.
>>
>> James Simmons