[Sugar-devel] HTML activities

[C. Scott Ananian]

On Thu, Jan 31, 2013 at 8:41 PM, Edward Mokurai Cherlin <
mokurai at sugarlabs.org> wrote:

> On Wed, January 30, 2013 4:26 pm, lionel at olpc-france.org wrote:
> >
> >> * What we are doing here is still heavily experimental. I don't think we
> > know exactly where we are going yet, just trying to find out. I posted on
> > the list so early
> >>  because I think it's important to get feedback.
>
> Quite right. Let me add a question, then, where I would like to get
> some feedback. One of the ideas at the foundation of the Sugar Labs
> program for Replacing Textbooks (with OERs) is to be able to write
> learning materials using tools such as HTML5 or EPUB3 in a way that
> would allow us to embed and script Sugar activities. This would make
> it straightforward to implement a curriculum fully integrated with
> Sugar. (We could also discuss what other Sugar activities would be
> needed for the purpose, and whether existing Sugar activities would
> need to be adapted to make all of this work.)
>
> Do we know how to do such a thing in HTML5? What other questions do we
> need to ask in order to start looking for more answers?
>

Yes, this would be (more) possible in a Sugar-web-app world.  Questions to
ask:

 1) what does the UI of this text book look like?  Are the sugar apps
running in little windows like illustrations in the text book, or are
things integrated like in the Active Essay work by vpri (
http://tinlizzie.org/jstile/#Tutorial).

 2) how are examples integrated?  One of my old UI designs was that Pippy
examples (for instance) would show up in your journal as Pippy things
shared by Chris Ball (for instance).  Do you want to mush author-generated
and user-generated content together, separate them only as having been
created by different people, or enforce a more rigid separation between
textbook example and student work?

 3) how are exercises integrated in the text?  Do you want to do an active
learning thing where the student has to work an exercise before they can
proceed to the next chapter of the book?
http://cscott.net/Publications/OLPC/idc2012.pdf describes an alternative
where the "textbook" is a story (or collection of stories) told using sugar
activities.

My Nell paper contains a pretty complete design for one way to build an
active learning system which integrates pedagogy and activities.  The
Active Essay work done by vpri is another way, more textbook-like.  There
are undoubtedly other ways as well.  But the technology is basically there,
once you figure out how you want it all to work.
  --scott

-- 
      ( http://cscott.net )
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