[Sugar-devel] Group view proposals (was: Assessment in Karma)

[Christoph Derndorfer]

On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 1:18 AM, Gary C Martin <gary at garycmartin.com> wrote:

>
> On 29 Jul 2009, at 06:40, Christoph Derndorfer wrote:
>
>  As previously mentioned by Bryan in his "Automated Assessment is the
>> Killer App" blog post (
>> http://karmaproject.wordpress.com/2009/07/06/assessment-is-the-killer-app/)
>> student assessment is an important component of Karma.
>>
>> While toying around with the lesson UI I realized that the assessment area
>> is still very much an empty space (which kinda reminds me of the group view
>> in Sugar;-)
>
>
Gary, sorry for that but I couldn't help myself... ;-)


> Feedback most welcome (or else you may get something you don't like)! ;-b
>
>        http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Design_Team/Proposals/Groups


Thanks a lot for the link, I certainly wasn't aware of the new proposals /
mockups for groups, I guess I must have missed the announcement or
something.

Quite frankly speaking it's hard for me to make educated comments on these
proposals as I know too little about how (if at all) collaboration is being
used in schools at the moment and what the requirements really look like.

Keeping the above in mind I'd say that in general the suggestions in the
latest mockups looks very reasonable. As far as the "former design sketches"
are concerned I'm not a big fan of the overlays used for creating groups as
these overlays somehow seem to break the consistency in the Sugar UI (hence
why I'm for example also not a big fan of that "name this entry" dialogue
box when stopping an activity in 0.84).

What I really do like about those earlier mockups though is the ability to
add multiple people to a group very quickly whereas the new mockups seem
to necessitate selecting members to be added on an individual basis
(something we should strive to avoid IMHO). Related to this I think that the
feature that allows users (in most cases probably teachers) to create closed
groups makes a lot of sense.

The new mockups also don't include the icons to show what shared activities
the various members of a group are working on. I'm not sure whether this is
due to design or obmission in the mockups but I do feel that showing the
shared activities makes sense. The ability to share Journal entries with a
group and to invite a group to a shared activity (as presented in both
mockups) is something I'd definitely consider a must-have.

A somewhat related question to me is whether the available information about
groups can also be used to make the neighborhood view less random, e.g. by
placing groups (not sure how they'd be represented though) or members of
groups I belong to closer to the XO-icon representing myself.

I hope this message compensates for yesterday's snappy comment:-)

Cheers,
Christoph

-- 
Christoph Derndorfer
co-editor, olpcnews
url: www.olpcnews.com
e-mail: christoph at olpcnews.com
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