[IAEP] 2 design proposals: home view, discoverable shortcuts

[Jameson Quinn]

>
> We naturally want to organise our knowledge into hierarchies, its how we
> manage complexity. (I suspect it has to do with the limitations of short
> term memory  and the ability to chunk information and to bring a chunk in as
> one item.) Tagging is good, but best for information which is impractical to
> structure.


I doubt that there is consensus here on this question. Does anybody know of
any relevant empirical data?

Anyway, the Journal, as it is, is not good at handling complexity. It is
> good for beginners but rapidly imposes limits. This is because it tries to
> anticipate the user's needs, automate processes and hide its workings.
>
> It would be good if it was possible to bridge from beginning learners to
> the needs of more sophisticated users. It might be good if the saving
> behaviour could be changed from the control panel, defaulting to saving
> everything for beginners but able to be configured so that advanced users
> had more control.


What control would you recommend? Honestly, I have a hard time imagining a
system which I'd want the kids in my classroom to use which was anything but
"Autosave everything, smart and powerful tools with relatively-safe defaults
for deleting the old stuff". For instance, I'd love a "delete everything
over a month old without tags outside this set of useless tags, except the
last instance of each activity and anything in the last month" broom tool.


> Likewise, some bridge from a flat file system to a hierarchical file system
> would be good.


Have you seen http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Journal%2C_reloaded ?


> Also a bridge to making the workings more transparent, for example viewing
> and editing mime type?


This is the best, simple, idea to come out of this discussion so far. Of
course such a ability (logically in journal details view somewhere) should
have a list of known mime types, but also allow free text entry within the
mime type charset.


>
>
> Tony
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