[Sugar-devel] [DESIGN TEAM] proposals for the Journal

[Walter Bender]

Alas, I will be somewhere over the Atlantic on Monday, but I wanted to
plant some seeds for the discussion at the Design Team meeting. All of
my proposed interventions are for the Journal. I've not written up
formal proposals yet, but will if/when I get some traction.

(1) Activity-specific metadata: (See
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Datos_diario)  The idea is to display
activity-specific metadata in the expanded view of a Journal entry.
The Learning Team has been working on categorizing the types of data
they are interested in capturing. The goal is both to enhance
self-reflection and teacher feedback and evaluation. The mechanism I
mocked up in Turtle Art and in the Journal itself is quite simple. A
metadata dictionary entry is used to specify any metadata fields that
the activity would like displayed in a text box (in my mockup, this
box is generated on demand and positioned just below the Tags box).
Note that most of the data that the teachers are expressing interest
in capturing are correlated with button presses, so it may be
worthwhile considering a change to the toolkit as well, but that can
be a decision made at a later time.

(2) Audio tags: I don't have a mock up for this, but adding a simple
mechanism for adding audio notes to Journal items has been something I
have discussed with numerous teachers in the past. Lots of open
questions here in terms of the UI: should the recording happen in the
Journal or in Record? should multiple recordings be saved? append or
overwrite? Any size limit?

(3) Write to Journal any time: I'd like to assign a global keyboard
shortcut (and claim the unused bulletin board key on the XO) to jump
directly to the expanded entry for whatever activity is currently
active. In addition, it would be worth considering a button on the
activity toolbar (grabbing the space opened up by the removal of the
Keep button). Rationale: make it easier to get to your "lab notebook"
to make annotations relevant to your project.

(4) Activity-specific folders mounted in the volumes toolbar: A simple
way to handle the issue of activities that use clipart, sample
code/projects, etc. We had discussed before the idea of loading these
objects directly into the Journal, but this is IMHO too difficult to
manage. By letting an activity specify a directory (or directories) to
mount on the volumes toolbar would make it possible to use the Sugar
Chooser to access activity-specific data. We could restrict it to
subdirectories of the bundle path to maintain some level of security.
We could also use it to share clipart among activities.

Happy to answer any questions by email between now and Monday.

regards.

-walter

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