[Sugar-devel] [DESIGN] meeting proposal to discuss Journal features for 0.96

[Walter Bender]

Over the past month, Gonzalo and I have had weekly discussions
with the Learning Team about proposed enhancements to the Journal
[1]. The discussion has been mostly focused on the theme of the
use of the Journal for assessment and reflection, although a few
usability issues have been raised as well. The result is the
compilation of a collection of Feature Requests [2]. While some
of these proposals have been on the table for quite some
time (e.g. Write to Journal any time) and some are only
tangential to the theme of assessment (e.g. Journal volume
toolbar enhancement), Gonzalo and I thought it would make sense
to discuss them as a group with the Design Team.

(Note that there are other Design-related feature proposals, but
we thought a meeting focusing exclusively on the Journal would
be most efficient.)

Gary, since your calendar is most constrained, could you propose
some meeting times that might work for you? Also, any additional
up-front work we might do in preparation for the discussion?

A brief summary of the features:

1. Write to Journal anytime: The intent is to enable editing the
description, tags or the title at any time easily from the activity,
and not have to wait to close the activity. The pedagogical goal is to
facilitate the use of the Journal as a lab notebook, where notes can
be recorded while the user is actively doing something, not just after
the fact. We've been around the block on this one but I think we are
still lacking consensus on how best to do this. One POV is to have a
toolbar button (and/or Frame submenu) to involve the modal Journal
detail view [3]. A second POV is to add a toolbar mechanism for simply
adding text to the description field much the way we already have a
mechanism for updating the title (Simon had a mockup of this at one
point.). (Regardless of our approach, it is proposed that we add a hot key
as well, perhaps the unused Bulletin-board key.)

2a. Journal tagging private or public: A problem raised by some
teachers is that student Journals (and school servers) are filled with
music or games. With this proposal, a student would mark school work
as "public" and personal work as "private". These tags could be used
as a filter in the Journal and during the backup process.

2b. Tags in Journal: a collection of predefined tags that can be
associated (dragged onto?) with a Journal entry. Teachers would like
students to use tags to organize their work, bu the current mechanism
is too unwieldy to use.

2c. Activity-specific metadata: The idea is to record data
related to the use of activity and display it in the detail view
of the Journal.

These are old (and new) proposals, somewhat outside of the scope of
the pedagogical discussion, but they have a big impact on the general
usability of the Journal:

3. Journal volume-toolbar enhancement: The intent is to make it easier
to find example programs and media objects associated with an
activity. If an activity can mount a directory on the Journal volume
toolbar, the files in the directory would be available to the Object
Chooser. This is both an aesthetic and work-flow issue. We would be
able to eliminate the GNOME file selector and, as with the
$HOME/Documents enhancement we made in 0.94, we make moving
back and forth between the Journal and the file system much more fluid.

4. Multi-selection in Journal: Allow selecting multiple files for
operations in the Journal.

5. Thumbnail view in Journal: Several ways of approaching this, but
some visualization of the contents from a list-like view would make it
much easier to browse the Journal contents.

[1] http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Chat_Espanol_2011#Charla_35:_Evaluaci.C3.B3n_.E2.80.93Metadatos_Actividades
[2] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Features/Journal_features_for_0.96
[3] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:Detailview_20110313.pdf

regards.

-walter and gonzalo

--
Walter Bender
Sugar Labs
http://www.sugarlabs.org