<div dir="ltr">On Sun, Oct 5, 2008 at 2:09 PM, Michael Stone <<a href="mailto:michael@laptop.org">michael@laptop.org</a>> wrote: <div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> Bryan Berry wholly captured my attention tonight when he said (in summary):   "Sugar offers an excellent mode for discovery but no excellent way to   manipulate narratives. Both discovery and narrative are essential for   learning." [1] This statement seems to me both indisputable and damning; if true, it strikes to the core of the claim that Sugar is appropriate for learning. Even though Bryan has already found some partial solutions to this problem [2], we should take time to debate the more primitive thesis that:  "Narrative is a basic component of much educational material which  Sugar ought to 'natively' recognize, respond to, and manipulate." so that we may decide whether this issue should receive a greater share of our limited design and implementation resources. Regards, Michael [1]: Sugar presently records actions which may occasionally be decomposed into narrative or situated within an external narrative; however, Sugar is presently blind to these relationships. [2]: Bryan is currently encoding narratives in HTML and is attempting to use Offline Moodle to make this cheaper to support. I decided to write this email because I believe that it might well be worth our time to either give him a hand with his effort or to bake support for similar use cases directly in to Sugar.</blockquote><div> bryan's ideas are explained more fully in this article on olpcnews: <a href="http://www.olpcnews.com/content/education/scaling_constructionism_with_dynabooks.html">http://www.olpcnews.com/content/education/scaling_constructionism_with_dynabooks.html</a> the comments there are worth reading too </div></div> it's hard to discuss without having the ideas spelt out "narrative is good" is not really a sufficient basis for a discussion but bryan's article has more detail </div>