[IAEP] Journal prompts (was: Re: [support-gang] FW: [OLPC Bolivia] No logro aprender Sugar / I cannot learn Sugar)

[Walter Bender]

On Wed, Jun 15, 2011 at 10:21 PM, ana.cichero <ana.cichero at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Wed, Jun 15, 2011 at 6:58 PM, Christoph Derndorfer
> <e0425826 at student.tuwien.ac.at> wrote:
>>
>> Am 15.06.2011 18:12, schrieb Walter Bender:
>> > All of that said, let me repeat an argument I made regarding the Sugar
>> > Journal during the EduJam summit last month: we developed the Journal
>> > not because we wanted to be incompatible with the rest of the world
>> > but because we wanted to address some pedagogical needs. Specifically,
>> > we want the children to have a place to reflect upon their work. The
>> > Journal is their portfolio. Reflection requires effort and some
>> > developers consider the prompts to write in the Journal as an
>> > annoyance. But when I ask those same developers if they think adding a
>> > commit message to their commits in git, they immediately understand
>> > the value. So some of the annoyance of the Journal is because we have
>> > not completely solved the UI issues (the good news is that Simon has
>> > some patches landing that fix some of these issues) but some of the
>> > annoyance is because we want to make the path of least resistance be
>> > one where the children are prompted to be reflective-- to write in
>> > their "lab notebooks" about what they are doing and why and to make
>> > presentations to their teachers, parents, and fellow students about
>> > their work. (The latter is facilitated by the new Portfolio activity.)
>> >
>> > In any case, concrete feedback and criticism is welcome. Thanks.
>
> Not time no to follow this so!! interesting topic, would like to point some
> suggestions.

Great to get some concrete proposals!!

To give context to my feedback, please see
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Design_Team/Designs/Journal as an example
of what we have been aspiring to in terms of the Journal UI.

>
> To have visible one entrance per Activity -just the last one.

Not sure what the goal is here. In some sense, this is what you get
from the Home View by default: direct access to the most recent
instance of each activity. How would this be different?

>
> To get to the second last entrance of the same Activity, (let s say to the
> last 5) in an "older Journal" or kind of second screen, ( like facebook
> does, or a blog) .  The rest of the thing just accessibles by tags or
> conscious backup in an external media.

Again, how will this differ from the Home View hover menu? But
interesting that you bring up Facebook, because the designs I referred
to above are inspired by Facebook. There is a new tagging system under
development that may accomplish some of what you are describing, if I
understand correctly.

>
> [OT] Sell and buy pendrives and cards ( I live in uruguay where sd cards are
> not expensive, nevertheless you go to a local shop and they don t even know
> what to sell to a ceibalita and we have around 1,5 laptop per person)
>
> Let each Activity dialogue with Journal it s own way. It seems clear that an
> activity used for writing or drawing needs 10 times more space in Journal
> than one like Firefox, or any player or game.

The way I interpret this is in terms of how the activity is shown in
the Journal. (Activities currently can write whatever they want into
the datastore -- in that sense it is not one size fits all.)

I have always been a bit uncomfortable with the distinction made
between the main Journal view and the detail view. This is where I
think Facebook really shines: the details are all there.. most recent
entries and details always visible and more available in an in-situ
expanded entry. And that entry is different depending upon the
datatype. (E.g., images expand into photobooks with captions and
tags.) I'd love to see us head in that direction.

>
> Make an alternative browsing for elder people that feel uncomfortable with
> the Journal.  In other case Sugar is facing the non understanding that makes
> it look taxative and fortuite.

I think I grok your intention here, but I don't understand the
details. Are you proposing a more traditional file-browser for the
Journal as an alternative view? Not sure how we'd manage a traditional
hierarchical view, since we have no hierarchy. I suppose we could do
something where we build a hierarchy based on something such as
creation date, so you'd browse through a series of folders:
./2011/06/16

>
> ((I always thought that porfolio was the magic word for understanding
> Journal...
> It is known in Uruguay as as an "evaluation techinque" - i chose Portfolio
> for my final work in "Evaluation of Education" at the 3erd year regular
> course of the Uruguayan Professors Institute. I think primary teachers study
> exactly the same it is not difficult to find experts on that technique.))
>
>  "TÉCNICA DE PORTAFOLIO" is then the translation of the idea to our
> teacher's book and the spanish term was not  mentioned that before.
>
> My opinions:
> Kids dont care about keeping everything. The concept is to mind more about
> the doing and less about the done. You focus on the process ( nothing that
> teachers haven t read before)

But we do want kids to establish certain disciplines. But they need to
see the value as well...

> The machine is then just a place to interact with Activitys and other kids.
> It is not a PC and xo_s are not isolated from grown up or adminstrators
> machines or other kind of backup ( internet conection or cards)
> Sugar is nice, is strong and extremely simple
>
> (Collaboration is a key issue. Other is the  using the ubuntu teacher' s
> laptop as a server of the pupil' s xo_s  )

I think some of the simple extensions we are working on such as being
able to mount $HOME/Documents and perhaps some directory on the School
Server or in the Cloud will make a big difference to teachers. We'll
have to get some field testing in on this -- the patches are
by-and-large finished.

>
>
>
>

-walter

-- 
Walter Bender
Sugar Labs
http://www.sugarlabs.org