[IAEP] The User experience/interface for Printing
hello, So, talking to Tomeu, we agreed that for Write and Read using the gtkprint would be best as both support it as a printing API. Now, the current plan is: 1) We do journal printing only, albeit, the respective activity opens the file. Now here a cross road is presented: 1) Do we use a print dialog inside each activity that can save it as pdf, print or export a pdf to moodle 2) Do we use separate buttons for each of these operations? What of the user experience? The initial plan was to make Read the global printing station, how do you find this idea? ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] The User experience/interface for Printing
The usecases would be as following: The user, John, creates a document and saves it to his journal one fine day. The next day john transfers that journal item to his friend's XO the next day. His friend, Kennedy, has his XO set up in a moodle environment. Kennedy when in school decides to send that file (which is an ODF ) to the teacher for review and get it printed there. Kennedy then double clicks on the item, which results in Write opening the file, and selects the print button in the print toolbar, a dialog pops up (which is understandably similar to gtkprint dialog), he selects the print destination as moodle, and selects no of pages as 'all', after sending. (ofcourse there is an internal conversion to PDF happening, which gtkprint is doing) the teacher checks his print page in moodle, views the file (either through fancy javascript or a download) and approves/disapproves for printing. Kennedy then logs into his moodle print page and checks if the job was success or not, and if he has a comment from his teacher. But we already know John's doc was excellent. Kennedy goes to collect the printed document, which he hands over to John the evening. Use cases to note: 1) transferred docs can be printed 2) A nice graphical dialog that takes care of it all 3) exports only PDFs to moodle ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Sugar is an X that happens to have an entire learning platform and operating system included.
On Sat, May 2, 2009 at 3:10 PM, Caroline Meeks carol...@solutiongrove.com wrote: But it also makes sense to think about the easy to grasp benefits. I think one important criteria is it needs to be something that a group of people already knows they want. Anyone want to brainstorm with me? For Sugar on a Stick I've got: eBook reader that remembers the page and notes and as the child moves from the computer to computer in classrooms, after-school and at home. ePortfolio solution for K-5th grade students Lets kid use Scratch even when the school won't let them install new software. How are the collaboration and networking tools? Does it let kids collaborate without setting them loose in the whole big scary internet (many organizations and individuals are scared of anything connected to the real internet)? -- Cheers, MariaD Make math your own, to make your own math. http://www.naturalmath.com social math site http://www.phenixsolutions.com empowering our innovations ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] Logic simulator
Noticed this Flash based logic simulator: http://joshblog.net/projects/logic-gate-simulator/Logicly.html Would be quite a simple sandbox activity to make (python, gtk+, ciaro); but before I burn time (well add to my future todos list), do teachers on this list think it is more than just a geeky play-thing, or does it have educational merit? FWIW: it could do with a few more input/output and processing devices (sensors, buzzers, coloured leds, motors, counters). And, hey if time is no obstacle, perhaps make it a split screen view, holding a physics sandbox with the logic driving/animating simple little motorised constructions. Regards, --Gary ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] The User experience/interface for Printing
Vamsi Krishna Davuluri writes: So, talking to Tomeu, we agreed that for Write and Read using the gtkprint would be best as both support it as a printing API. The focus on Write and Read is short sighted and may lead to inflexible solutions. Now, the current plan is: 1) We do journal printing only, albeit, the respective activity opens the file. Eh, OK. Provide a script called /usr/bin/lpr which runs ps2pdf or directly runs gs. This lets normal software, which is already designed to output standard Postscript to lpr, work just fine. After conversion, put the PDF into the journal. Better yet, just toss the file into the journal without conversion. BTW, this can also be implemented as a filter script that the normal lpr program invokes for the default printer. Now here a cross road is presented: 1) Do we use a print dialog inside each activity that can save it as pdf, print or export a pdf to moodle 2) Do we use separate buttons for each of these operations? What of the user experience? Separate buttons provides a distinction that will be important in some environments. Some places will want immediate printing. For now, the print button can be almost the same as the other, but with the output PDF marked for near-term deletion. Make PDF and Print now seem like fine names. The initial plan was to make Read the global printing station, how do you find this idea? Starting up Read just to print something is not nice. Read may even cause an out-of-memory condition. For sure, there is no need to very slowly render a big document that doesn't even need to be seen on the screen. the teacher checks his print page in moodle, views the file (either through fancy javascript or a download) and approves/disapproves for printing. Kennedy then logs into his moodle print page and checks if the job was success or not, and if he has a comment from his teacher. I can barely imagine that happening in a real classroom. Try this: The student brings his XO to the teacher's desk, with his work shown on the screen. The teacher looks at the work, then lets the student plug his XO into a printer which sits on the teacher's desk. Printing resources can be very expensive for most schools, so the system should include a way for students to submit jobs to a queue and for an administrator to preview and approve or denie them. Tux Paint can rate limit a student's printing. For example, a setting of 60 will be once per minute. Do not forget that this issue is more social than technical. In addition to any discipline, the teacher can simply turn off the printer. This is advisable in any case; many printers use excessive power in standby. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Logic simulator
On Mon, May 4, 2009 at 2:39 AM, Gary C Martin g...@garycmartin.com wrote: Noticed this Flash based logic simulator: http://joshblog.net/projects/logic-gate-simulator/Logicly.html Would be quite a simple sandbox activity to make (python, gtk+, ciaro); but before I burn time (well add to my future todos list), do teachers on this list think it is more than just a geeky play-thing, or does it have educational merit? FWIW: it could do with a few more input/output and processing devices (sensors, buzzers, coloured leds, motors, counters). And, hey if time is no obstacle, perhaps make it a split screen view, holding a physics sandbox with the logic driving/animating simple little motorised constructions. Sounds like a fun project :-) http://sourceforge.net/projects/tlogsim/ is a GTK+ based tool for this - maybe we can reuse it ? Cheers, Sayamindu -- Sayamindu Dasgupta [http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings] ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Sugar is an X that happens to have an entire learning platform and operating system included.
On Sun, May 3, 2009 at 7:56 AM, Maria Droujkova droujk...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, May 2, 2009 at 3:10 PM, Caroline Meeks carol...@solutiongrove.com wrote: But it also makes sense to think about the easy to grasp benefits. I think one important criteria is it needs to be something that a group of people already knows they want. Anyone want to brainstorm with me? For Sugar on a Stick I've got: eBook reader that remembers the page and notes and as the child moves from the computer to computer in classrooms, after-school and at home. ePortfolio solution for K-5th grade students Lets kid use Scratch even when the school won't let them install new software. How are the collaboration and networking tools? Does it let kids collaborate without setting them loose in the whole big scary internet (many organizations and individuals are scared of anything connected to the real internet)? Every school system that I am aware of anywhere in the world requires Internet content filters on the school networks. -- Cheers, MariaD Make math your own, to make your own math. http://www.naturalmath.com social math site http://www.phenixsolutions.com empowering our innovations ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep -- Silent Thunder (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) is my name And Children are my nation. The Cosmos is my dwelling place, The Truth my destination. http://earthtreasury.org/worknet (Edward Mokurai Cherlin) ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Logic simulator
It's a very neat thing. From my point of view, its pedagogical value would very much increase if you could save and share your diagrams. So that one student could build something and give it to others to improve, etc. Or make some classic diagrams, etc. On Sun, May 3, 2009 at 5:09 PM, Gary C Martin g...@garycmartin.com wrote: Noticed this Flash based logic simulator: http://joshblog.net/projects/logic-gate-simulator/Logicly.html Would be quite a simple sandbox activity to make (python, gtk+, ciaro); but before I burn time (well add to my future todos list), do teachers on this list think it is more than just a geeky play-thing, or does it have educational merit? FWIW: it could do with a few more input/output and processing devices (sensors, buzzers, coloured leds, motors, counters). And, hey if time is no obstacle, perhaps make it a split screen view, holding a physics sandbox with the logic driving/animating simple little motorised constructions. Regards, --Gary ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep -- Cheers, MariaD Make math your own, to make your own math. http://www.naturalmath.com social math site http://www.phenixsolutions.com empowering our innovations ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] Sugar Digest 2009-05-03
===Sugar Digest=== I encourage you to join two threads on the Education List this week: http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2009-April/005382.html, which has boiled down to an instruction vs construction debate; and http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2009-April/005342.html, which has boiled down to a debate of catering to local culture vs the Enlightenment. I encourage you to join these discussions. Rather than commenting here, I want to discuss a third, orthogonal topic: creativity. I hosted a visit to Cambridge this week from Diego Uribe, a Chilean researcher who is currently a Fulbright scholar at the International Center for Studies in Creativity in Buffalo, NY. Diego challenged me with two questions: Can we be more deliberate in developing children's creativity skills and how can we use Sugar to better disseminate creativity heuristics? Diego is of the believe that creativity is a skill that can be taught; there has been more than 50 years of research into how to teach this skill; and yet creativity is rarely a deliberate part of mainstream education. Diego introduced me to Grace Hopper's formula for creativity that I had not previously encountered: The probability of creativity is a function of knowledge, innovation, and experience, modulated by attitude. (Historical footnote: Hopper is the one who coined the term debugging when her colleagues found a moth stuck in a relay of the Mark II computer.) In this formulation, attitude is often the weak link. Central to his own vision of teaching creativity as a skill is the ability to strike the proper balance between divergent and convergent thinking. Guidelines for divergent thinking * defer judgment * go for quantity * make connections * seek novelty Guidelines for convergent thinking * apply affirmative judgment * keep novelty alive * check your objectives * stay focused (I was reminded of David Reed's analogy to water and ice: innovation occurs in its liquid phase; consolidation in its solid phase.) Diego was preaching to the choir. When I was director of the Media Lab, I never told the students or faculty what to work on—their ideas were always much better than mine—but I did insist on a creative (learning) process that I described in a paper, The seven secrets of the Media Lab. blockquote The phases of the moon represent the cyclical process of innovation at the Media Lab. In the 1980s we used to describe the first phase of the innovation cycle as ‘demo or die’. John Maeda rephrased our mantra in the late 1990s to be ‘imagine and realize’. Indeed, it is a violation of our cultural norm to have an idea and not build a prototype — in large part because of our deeply-held belief that we learn through expressing. Building a prototype also enables us to advance to the second phase of the innovation cycle — critique. The Lab, which has its origins in architecture (the founder of the Media Lab, Nicholas Negroponte, is an architect) draws upon the tradition of studio design critique; we have daily visits from our industry partners and other practitioners with whom we engage in an authentic critical dialogue about the work. In this exchange, the work is discussed within a broader context — ideas (and prototypes) are exchanged, improvements and alternatives suggested. We then advance to the third phase of the innovation cycle — iterate. Iteration within the Lab means returning to ‘Step One’ to push our ideas further. Iteration within our partners’ organizations means taking a prototype towards real-world application. In both cases, we can learn from our mistakes (and successes). /blockquote Another secret is fire: blockquote Fire fuels the Media Lab. We invest in the passion of people, not their projects. It is the fire that burns in every student and faculty member that inspires and motivates them — love is a better master than duty. Innovation at the Lab comes from the bottom up. It is not regulated by a top-down process, but by continuous feedback from peers, the faculty, and our external collaborators. /blockquote These principles proved affective at MIT in establishing a learning community that is both collaborative and critical. These same principles were an influence on the design of Sugar; however, we can probably do more to embody them directly into Sugar itself. Diego and I spent the next two hours exploring how we might make the creative process more explicit in Sugar. He suggested that we consider two common, approachable heuristics in our deliberations—SCAMPER and PPCo. SCAMPER is a technique developed by Alex Osborn, described in his book Applied Imagination. SCAMPER is an acronym for substitute, combine, adapt, modify, put to another use, eliminate, reverse. It is used for encouraging divergent thinking. PPCo is also an acronym: positives, potentials, concerns, overcoming concerns. It was developed by Roger Firestien and Diane Foucar-Szocki; it is used for convergent thinking. What follows is a brief summary of our
Re: [IAEP] Logic simulator
Noticed this Flash based logic simulator: http://joshblog.net/projects/logic-gate-simulator/Logicly.html Would be quite a simple sandbox activity to make (python, gtk+, ciaro); but before I burn time (well add to my future todos list), do teachers on this list think it is more than just a geeky play-thing, or does it have educational merit? Gary, thanks for the link, I love it. Yes, I think this simulator does have strong educational merit. It is more than a digital logic simulator, Boolean logic goes further than teaching electronics, it teaches kids to problem solve and to think mathematically. I tried it out on the XO and it works fine (except for the jumpy cursor making wiring tricky) I would question whether it would be worth remaking in Python, the Flash version works well and if internet connectivity was limited, couldn't it just run on a school server? Bill Kerr in his blog, makes the point that the future of educational computing is in thin client netbooks with the smarts at the server end. This idea is reinforced by list discussions on books and book readers, it makes more sense to tap into the world's resources of ebooks than to write books specifically for the sugar platform. Similarly, it makes more sense to tap into the world's resources of simulators and puzzles than to rewrite them for the Sugar platform. If all this is true, then perhaps the focus for Sugar should be on its browser and book reader, making it compatible with the widest range of ebooks and web based simulations as possible. Walter I think has mentioned an unzip activity as a priority, sounds like a good idea, it gives better access to the wealth of educational material already out there on the www. Some more web based simulators, I haven't tried them for Sugar compatibility: http://www.sodaplay.com/constructor/ http://www.biologic.com.au/bugbrain/ http://www.armadillorun.com/ http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/40255643/ http://www.kloonigames.com/crayon/ http://www.acc.umu.se/~emilk/index.html http://www.geogebra.org/cms/ http://mathworld.wolfram.com/topics/AnimatedGIFs.html http://www.fi.uu.nl/wisweb/ Tony ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Sugar Digest 2009-05-03
On Sun, May 3, 2009 at 6:13 PM, Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com wrote: ===Sugar Digest=== I encourage you to join two threads on the Education List this week: http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2009-April/005382.html, which has boiled down to an instruction vs construction debate; and http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2009-April/005342.html, which has boiled down to a debate of catering to local culture vs the Enlightenment. I encourage you to join these discussions. Rather than commenting here, I want to discuss a third, orthogonal topic: creativity. I hosted a visit to Cambridge this week from Diego Uribe, a Chilean researcher who is currently a Fulbright scholar at the International Center for Studies in Creativity in Buffalo, NY. Diego challenged me with two questions: Can we be more deliberate in developing children's creativity skills and how can we use Sugar to better disseminate creativity heuristics? Guidelines for divergent thinking * defer judgment * go for quantity * make connections * seek novelty Guidelines for convergent thinking * apply affirmative judgment * keep novelty alive * check your objectives * stay focused Walter, Thank you very much for this write-up. It is very, very interesting and quite helpful! Coincidentally, I am working on a proposal part about convergent and divergent actions, as applied to children's authoring in mathematics. As an aside, I find that using creativity or creating distracts people into a lot of tangents when I talk about math, so unless I have a lot of time to explain contexts, I go with authoring. Metaphors and example spaces are two relevant parts of my framework here. A metaphor can start the divergent part of the cycle, allowing kids to quickly generate a number of mathematical objects. Then particular questions or goals help kids to sort through their objects, noticing properties and observing patterns. These generalities (properties and patterns) are convergent, and a pile of objects born of a metaphor gets structured into an example space. Now objects become examples OF something - namely, of observed generalities. At which point kids are tempted to generate more and better examples, which is the divergent part of the cycle at a new level, and so on. In practice, kids need ways to make math objects within a common metaphor and to collect, share and re-make those objects. With some kids, it's as simple as providing a graffiti wall and a verbal prompt, but typically you need heuristics and scaffolds to keep the thing going. In software, the challenge is to find a balance between providing enough scaffolds, yet leaving enough space for the divergent part of the cycle, allowing kids to actually, here goes - create. -- Cheers, MariaD Make math your own, to make your own math. http://www.naturalmath.com social math site http://www.phenixsolutions.com empowering our innovations ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] The User experience/interface for Printing
On Sunday 03 May 2009 06:29:26 pm Albert Cahalan wrote: Vamsi Krishna Davuluri writes: So, talking to Tomeu, we agreed that for Write and Read using the gtkprint would be best as both support it as a printing API. The focus on Write and Read is short sighted and may lead to inflexible solutions. Read was selected to contain the send to print code because Tomeu expressed some concerns about the maintainability of that code in the Journal. Also, we agreed that going through read is good for reviewing the pdf output and saving paper on badly formatted docs. Now, the current plan is: 1) We do journal printing only, albeit, the respective activity opens the file. Eh, OK. Provide a script called /usr/bin/lpr which runs ps2pdf or directly runs gs. This lets normal software, which is already designed to output standard Postscript to lpr, work just fine. After conversion, put the PDF into the journal. Better yet, just toss the file into the journal without conversion. BTW, this can also be implemented as a filter script that the normal lpr program invokes for the default printer. The priority is on sending the docs to cups-pdf for conversion and then talking to Moodle for teacher review. It is a good idea to have the code that sends docs for printing (to Moodle, a local printer, or one discovered by avahi) in a reusable module that a /usr/bin/lpr script can use. Now here a cross road is presented: 1) Do we use a print dialog inside each activity that can save it as pdf, print or export a pdf to moodle If we are going to keep everything inside Read for now. It'll be best to have the print button only in Read. The use case we had discussed was like this: open the file in Read, if its not ps/pdf Read converts it using cups-pdf, displays it, and then you can use the print button in its toolbar. The converted file gets added as a journal entry right after conversion. The datastore already contains code to hard link identical files, so disk space usage in multiple conversions is kept to a minimum. Read could add a pointer to the pdf in the original entry's metadata as well. Adding a print dialog to every activity (e.g. Adding some gtkprint support in sugar-toolkit) should be optional for GSoC. First we should concentrate on getting entries printed, and getting teacher review right. Then we can move code around for legacy support and nice print me buttons. 2) Do we use separate buttons for each of these operations? What of the user experience? Separate buttons provides a distinction that will be important in some environments. Some places will want immediate printing. For now, the print button can be almost the same as the other, but with the output PDF marked for near-term deletion. Make PDF and Print now seem like fine names. I agree. Just a print button for now. The PDF will be generated on startup anyway. We can have the cups-pdf local printer in the printer selection dialog when we provide other printing methods. The initial plan was to make Read the global printing station, how do you find this idea? Starting up Read just to print something is not nice. Read may even cause an out-of-memory condition. For sure, there is no need to very slowly render a big document that doesn't even need to be seen on the screen. This is to encourage review and to keep the code away from the Journal. The code can then be moved to Glucose. Also, distributing a modified Read for testing will be considerably easier than patching the Journal. the teacher checks his print page in moodle, views the file (either through fancy javascript or a download) and approves/disapproves for printing. Kennedy then logs into his moodle print page and checks if the job was success or not, and if he has a comment from his teacher. I can barely imagine that happening in a real classroom. Try this: The student brings his XO to the teacher's desk, with his work shown on the screen. The teacher looks at the work, then lets the student plug his XO into a printer which sits on the teacher's desk. Printing resources can be very expensive for most schools, so the system should include a way for students to submit jobs to a queue and for an administrator to preview and approve or denie them. Tux Paint can rate limit a student's printing. For example, a setting of 60 will be once per minute. Do not forget that this issue is more social than technical. In addition to any discipline, the teacher can simply turn off the printer. This is advisable in any case; many printers use excessive power in standby. I dont see a teacher having a printer on her desk. Most schools here in Uruguay (and I dare say in Perú) don't even have printers. If there is one, it will be where the server/administration is. And possibly locked in a cage (like we have the servers now). So that scenario is going to be priority one. Next will be of course provide local
