[Sugar-devel] Remove the naming alert in 0.86

[Simon Schampijer]

Hi Gary,

On 09/03/2009 01:21 AM, Gary C Martin wrote:
> Hi Simon,
>
> On 2 Sep 2009, at 16:35, Simon Schampijer wrote:
>
>> On 09/02/2009 01:32 PM, Christoph Derndorfer wrote:
>>> On Wed, Sep 2, 2009 at 3:36 AM, Simon
>>> Schampijer<simon at schampijer.de>wrote:
>>>
>>>> Hi,
>>>>
>>>> some of you may know, I am doing a Sugar Pilot here in Germany. I
>>>> try to
>>>> keep my blog (listed on the sugarlabs planet as well) about my findings
>>>> up to date [1]. For technical findings (how to setup nfs, ldap on
>>>> Fedora
>>>> for example) the plan is to use the wiki. 'Debatable things' I will try
>>>> to bring up on the mailing list as well.
>>>>
>>>> Regards,
>>>> Simon
>>>>
>>>> [1] http://erikos.sweettimez.de/ --- Categories: Sugar, Deployment
>>>> and Teaching
>>>> [2] http://planet.sugarlabs.org/
>>>
>>>
>>> +1 on removing the “naming alert”, this has been bugging me since the
>>> day
>>> it's been introduced.
>>>
>>> Adding “rewards” to the Journal is something that David Van Assche
>>> and Gary
>>> C Martin discussed quite a bit Paris. Unfortunately nobody had the
>>> time to
>>> really follow up on these discussions with some actual code... :-/
>>> Looking forward to the next blog posts about your experiences in the
>>> school!
>>>
>>> Christoph
>>
>> Let me post here from my blog post why I think it is important:
>>
>> As much as I am a friend of highlighting the naming, tagging and
>> description purposes, I don’t think the alert is a good way to ‘enforce’
>> this. I think those actions are not first class ones. I am happy when
>> the kids understood the concept of the Journal a bit, but they will not
>> start to make better descriptions in the first Sugar days or weeks, with
>> or without the alert. For now, it is just a confusing dialog that pops
>> up when you close an activity. And later, once the kids would know about
>> the importance they would be better served with other tools. For example
>> an option in the activity toolbar (like we have for the title already).
>> From my experience I highly recommend to remove the alert, +1 when for
>> 0.86 already.
>
> Personally I'm not keen on it either. I pretty well always skip past it
> myself and have learnt to click Stop and tap return. But, being neither
> qualified on the pedagogical needs, nor having seen actual learners of
> out target age, I didn't want to rush forward and +1 Simon's proposal.

I have seen only one kid typing in the description field over the last 3 
days. Not sure, she understood the bigger picture though. I did not 
explain the concept of the Journal too much, I must admit. I think often 
when it comes to observation-driven assessment, that the long term user 
should be in the main focus. But in this case, I think the dialog does 
help much for neither of the users, first time nor long term ones. I 
think adding the ability to add tags and a description in the activity 
toolbar would be a big step forward.

> The main goal as I remember was to try and combat the slew of un-named
> Journal entries, but a good chunk of this was likely due to the Home
> favourite view always starting new activity instances. Now that it
> resumes by default, the Journal 'spam' has been cut down quite
> significantly (for me).

Agreed.

> Perhaps we drop this dialogue and then seriously take another look at
> improving the names automatically generated for new activity entries?
>
> Regards,
> --Gary

That would be a nice addition - not sure yet how that will look like in 
detail ;D. Though, the title is not only the most important descriptor. 
If the tags support land maybe people will start to use this to order 
their Journal entries.

Regards,
    Simon