[IAEP] Redesigning: Library, Read, Get-Books, and Content bundles

[Lucian Branescu]

On 20 July 2010 23:54, C. Scott Ananian <cscott at cscott.net> wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 20, 2010 at 2:33 PM, Reuben K. Caron <reuben at laptop.org> wrote:
>> deployments that would like to install content bundles. They package
>> these files into .xol packages and these packages get installed into
>> the "Library," which is contained on the left hand side of the Browse
>> activity. Yes, you read that correctly..."the BROWSE activity," an
>> activity intended for online exploration is used to view offline
>> content. Every deployment that I have shown this to has found it very
>> unintuitive. Consider another example: You want to use Get-Books to
>
> The original goal was to blur the boundary between offline and online
> as much as possible.  You would have a large-ish cache of "online"
> material available "offline" -- including not only your textbooks, but
> also many other web sites or educational resources.  Updating a
> textbook would be as easy as updating the "online" source of that
> textbook, and the "offline" copy would get updated from that.  Surfing
> while "offline" to a page which was not available in the offline cache
> would create a request for that content, which would be fetched when
> you are next "online", or added to a queue for your teacher to fetch
> next time they travelled to a place with internet access.
>
> This is a pretty straightforward extension of the wwwoffle program,
> but the necessary tuits to integrate all the pieces never appeared.
>
> Anyway, that's just to say that there was justification once for
> putting library content in Browse.  Don't know if that justification
> still applies.

I understand the advantages to using a browser, but people will still
be confused.

In order to keep the advantages of a browser (blurred online-offline
boundary), an SSB like the Wikipedia activity could be made to handle
this. Users would download things to their Journal, regardless of
whether those things were offline or online to begin with.

>  --scott
>
> --
>                          ( http://cscott.net/ )
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