[IAEP] [Sugar-devel] ASLO Suggestion

[Sean DALY]

Looking better all the time.

For the moment, the site suffers from being ghettoized from the rest
of the Sugar Labs site; you can get in, but you can't get out -
there's no Sugar Labs navigation. Direct links coming in mean the rest
of the site is invisible. To fix this (and the other sections too,
it's not a problem specific to Activities), Christian has promised me
he will have the sitewide persistent navbar soon, he's super-occupied
with the new baby :-)

As search is local, it's good the search bar indicates in explicitly.

I agree with most of what James said. I can add: the site actually
fulfills a marketing function, unrelated to downloads: it's a quick
way for someone checking out the project to see how much and what
kinds of content are available, if the ecosystem is active, and so on.
A few years ago, from reading magazines and blogs, I was aware that
Firefox had a vibrant add-on offer months before I ever downloaded
one. So yes, there should be a count somewhere which instantly
communicates the richness.

The non US-en bug is still in effect; French users and I suspect other
locales see no content whatsoever, which to my mind is a bigger
problem than which Activities to feature. There is a language selector
which allows magically populating the empty site, but it's practically
unfindable. I would suggest disabling the language selector if that
bug can't be easily fixed (upstream).

GCompris is fine where it is; it is very well known in Europe and
elsewhere and has a five year headstart on us in word-of-mouth and
credibility with teachers. Although marketing/branding of GCompris has
been minimalist, it has a well-deserved reputation for quality. I'm
very excited GCompris is arriving in Sugar and I hope collaboration
will work in those Activities too.

I disagree that common baseline Activities should be absent; a common
scenario could be replacing an Activity removed by a Learner. Forgive
my ignorance, but is the OLPC notion of a "set" applicable? is it
possible to tag some Activities as "baseline", to have section for
them (can an Activity be in more than one section)? I agree though
that they shouldn't be featured unless a major upgrade is available.

As well, there are more than one reading Activities; the logical place
to locate them is here, but some parents or teachers on a Sugar
learning curve may believe that baseline Read "needs" to be
uninstalled to install Read eTexts. We need a short intro explaining
the install procedure (it took me days to figure out how to do it). I
had mentioned this a while back but I don't remember if someone
besides me had volunteered to look at that

thanks.

Sean


On Tue, Jun 9, 2009 at 7:57 PM, Aleksey Lim<alsroot at member.fsf.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 09, 2009 at 12:09:56PM -0500, James Simmons wrote:
>> Aleksey,
>>
>> That will teach me to open my mouth.
> :)
>
>> At the moment the only Activities
>> I'm really familiar with are my own, Read, and your Library Activity
>> which isn't finished (but would definitely be worthy otherwise).  I'll
>> have to add some more Activities to my XO and give them a try.  Any
>> suggestions on what might be worth a recommended status will be welcomed.
> well, we have not so much sugar activities on ASLO(I hope just for now)
> ..and I guess we should add some kind of filter to separate native sugar
> activities from GCompris, now we have 40 vs. 100 :)
>
>> Your other ideas sound good, but I still think we need some highly
>> visible counts in there.  As someone once said, "You gotta tell 'em to
>> sell 'em!"
> the problem is - we depend on upstream AMO code, so patching ASLO code a lot
> will mean problems while merging new AMO commits (we can suggest our changes
> directly to AMO but thats another story).
>
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> James Simmons
>>
>>
>> Aleksey Lim wrote:
>>> You are an editor now and can do the best on
>>> http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/editors/featured ;)
>>>
>>> And after fixing #948 all featured activities will appear on main page
>>> and per category main pages.
>>>
>>>
>>>> I also question the category GCompris.  I understand these Activities
>>>> are related to each other, but the relationship would not be
>>>> meaningful to a teacher or a student.
>>>>
>>> fixed
>
> --
> Aleksey
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