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

[Walter Bender]

On Thu, Oct 27, 2011 at 11:26 AM, Gonzalo Odiard <gonzalo at laptop.org> wrote:
>
>
> On Thu, Oct 27, 2011 at 4:17 AM, Walter Bender <walter.bender at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> 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.
>
> +1
>
>>
>> (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?
>>
>
> Mhh, not only in the UI. Audio notes are not search friendly,
> and consume a lot of resources.

This is one reason I think we should put a severe restriction on the
size. But there are lots of requests for such functionality. But not
as pressing IMHO as the other features I have outlined.

>
>
>>
>> (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.
>>
>
> +1
>
>>
>> (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.
>>
>
> +1
>
> Would be good if we can have feedback about UI changes proposed to Journal
> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Journal_NewUI
> Martin Abente already worked in multiple file operations, a much requested
> feature,
> and the proposal want do the use of tags more useful.

Should we not take all of these ideas and put them into the wiki under
feature requests?

http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Features

regards.

-walter

>
> Gonzalo
>
>



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