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

[Frederick Grose]

On Fri, Nov 18, 2011 at 8:54 AM, Walter Bender <walter.bender at gmail.com>wrote:

> 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


See also the discussion pages on the wiki in general, and in particular,
these have content:
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Talk:Features/Write_to_journal_anytime
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Talk:Features/Journal_data_tagged_private_or_public
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Talk:Features/Activity_specific_metadata_in_Journal

      --Fred
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