[sugar] [IAEP] Narrative.

[Edward Cherlin]

I posted a comment on Bryan's call for textbook/narrative creation.
http://www.olpcnews.com/content/education/scaling_constructionism_with_dynabooks.html

Let's do this, Bryan.

Where should we set up the workshop? What tools do we need? Wiki,
mailing lists, forums, repository...? I and others have plenty of
ideas for textbook replacements using Etoys, Measure, and other Sugar
Activities in pretty much every subject. What we need is a place and a
process, not only to write, program, and otherwise create learning
materials, but to get them tested in classrooms, refined, and put into
new curricula.

On Wed, Oct 8, 2008 at 6:34 AM, Bill Kerr <billkerr at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 5, 2008 at 2:09 PM, Michael Stone <michael at laptop.org> wrote:
>>
>> 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.
>
> bryan's ideas are explained more fully in this article on olpcnews:
> http://www.olpcnews.com/content/education/scaling_constructionism_with_dynabooks.html
>
> the comments there are worth reading too
>
> 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
>
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