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

[Sameer Verma]

On Thu, Oct 27, 2011 at 12:17 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.
>
> (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?
>

Perhaps use Speex at a low bitrate? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speex

cheers,
Sameer

> (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
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