<div dir="ltr">This takes us back to the collaboration server discussions from last week. Rather than attempting to organizing content it may be preferable to improve the tools which help users self organize into communities. Last night I got into a discussion about the value of the Neighborhood view with my 2nd grade niece:)  She was pretty befuddled as to why she had to chose between belkin_019, linksys_1, meshview_11,....  From her perspective it made more sense to click on 'Mrs. Kings class' if she wanted to do her homework, or 'After school fun' if she wanted to talk with her friends. While the idea of APs and mesh networks is important to us as geeks and developers.  From a user point of view the idea of virtual communities or  rooms seems clearer. Maybe it is my misunderstanding of the nature of a jabber sever.  A IRC server is pretty useless until the users can self select into channels. Possibly, the idea of manipulating narratives could be best handled by helping communities develop which can discover, share, and reflect on _their_own_ stories. thanks david <div class="gmail_quote"> On Sun, Oct 5, 2008 at 11:39 AM, Walter Bender <<a href="mailto:walter.bender@gmail.com" target="_blank">walter.bender@gmail.com</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">We need to add an its.an.education.project alias to this list... -walter <div><div></div><div> ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Walter Bender <<a href="mailto:walter.bender@gmail.com" target="_blank">walter.bender@gmail.com</a>> Date: Sun, Oct 5, 2008 at 12:29 PM Subject: Re: [sugar] Narrative To: Sameer Verma <<a href="mailto:sverma@sfsu.edu" target="_blank">sverma@sfsu.edu</a>> Cc: Bryan Berry <<a href="mailto:bryan.berry@gmail.com" target="_blank">bryan.berry@gmail.com</a>>, <a href="mailto:bens@alum.mit.edu" target="_blank">bens@alum.mit.edu</a>, sugar <<a href="mailto:sugar@lists.laptop.org" target="_blank">sugar@lists.laptop.org</a>>, "its. an. education. project" <<a href="mailto:its.an.education.project@lists.sugarlabs.org" target="_blank">its.an.education.project@lists.sugarlabs.org</a>> Each of us seems to have interpreted Michael's note differently, so perhaps some more clarity of definitions is in order. In any case, my focus was on the assertion that there are  "no excellent way to manipulate narratives" within Sugar. Excellence is the standard we should be striving for and I do agree we have a ways to go in terms of developing tools for "manipulating" "narratives" within Sugar. But it seems a funny dichotomy: manipulating narratives vs. modes for discovery. When I think about Sugar, I think about its providing a scaffolding for discovering, expressing, critiquing, and reflecting. Manipulating narrative seems to cut across all of these area (as does collaboration). We have a browser--the "discovery" platform du jour--but also an ebook reader and media player, and various tools for collecting and inspecting data (e.g, Measure and Distance). In terms of expression, we have a wide variety of tools, including word processing, rich media, programming, etc. Tools for critique and reflection seems the least developed thus far: we have chat and we have sharing and simple debugging tools, and we have the Journal, but we don't yet support (natively) much in the way of organizing data to make an analysis or argument. Is this the role Bryan expects Moodle to play? If so, I don't really see how.  There are beginnings of tools such as spreadsheets, mindmaps, etc. being "Sugarized". What else should we add to this list? There is also a powerful presentation toolkit built into Etoys--is it the lack of PowerPoint that Bryan is missing?--but it is not very easy to find. Perhaps something more wiki-like or HTML-based would be better. Having it available off-line is probably as important as accessing an on-line system, such as is already available in Moodle and in general on any GNU/Linux (or even Windows) server. In terms of organizing school itself, Moodle and its like certainly have an important role to play. Sugar is not intended to be all things, but part of a learning ecosystem. There is certainly a paucity of lesson plans developed around Sugar: how does one best leverage this collection of tools for learning. And undoubtedly, a dearth of content readily packaged and categorized. But I don't see these as fundamental design flaws in Sugar as much as a place where more effort needs to be invested. Sugar is reaching a point of maturity where such investments make sense. In any case, I'd love to hear Michael's "interesting ideas". -walter </div></div>-- Walter Bender Sugar Labs <a href="http://www.sugarlabs.org" target="_blank">http://www.sugarlabs.org</a> _______________________________________________ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) <a href="mailto:IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org" target="_blank">IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org</a> <a href="http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep" target="_blank">http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep</a> </blockquote></div> </div>