Over the past month, Gonzalo and I have had weekly discussions with the Learning Team about proposed enhancements to the Journal [1]. The discussion has been mostly focused on the theme of the use of the Journal for assessment and reflection, although a few usability issues have been raised as well. The result is the compilation of a collection of Feature Requests [2]. While some of these proposals have been on the table for quite some time (e.g. Write to Journal any time) and some are only tangential to the theme of assessment (e.g. Journal volume toolbar enhancement), Gonzalo and I thought it would make sense to discuss them as a group with the Design Team.
(Note that there are other Design-related feature proposals, but we thought a meeting focusing exclusively on the Journal would be most efficient.) Gary, since your calendar is most constrained, could you propose some meeting times that might work for you? Also, any additional up-front work we might do in preparation for the discussion? A brief summary of the features: 1. Write to Journal anytime: The intent is to enable editing the description, tags or the title at any time easily from the activity, and not have to wait to close the activity. The pedagogical goal is to facilitate the use of the Journal as a lab notebook, where notes can be recorded while the user is actively doing something, not just after the fact. We've been around the block on this one but I think we are still lacking consensus on how best to do this. One POV is to have a toolbar button (and/or Frame submenu) to involve the modal Journal detail view [3]. A second POV is to add a toolbar mechanism for simply adding text to the description field much the way we already have a mechanism for updating the title (Simon had a mockup of this at one point.). (Regardless of our approach, it is proposed that we add a hot key as well, perhaps the unused Bulletin-board key.) 2a. Journal tagging private or public: A problem raised by some teachers is that student Journals (and school servers) are filled with music or games. With this proposal, a student would mark school work as "public" and personal work as "private". These tags could be used as a filter in the Journal and during the backup process. 2b. Tags in Journal: a collection of predefined tags that can be associated (dragged onto?) with a Journal entry. Teachers would like students to use tags to organize their work, bu the current mechanism is too unwieldy to use. 2c. Activity-specific metadata: The idea is to record data related to the use of activity and display it in the detail view of the Journal. These are old (and new) proposals, somewhat outside of the scope of the pedagogical discussion, but they have a big impact on the general usability of the Journal: 3. Journal volume-toolbar enhancement: The intent is to make it easier to find example programs and media objects associated with an activity. If an activity can mount a directory on the Journal volume toolbar, the files in the directory would be available to the Object Chooser. This is both an aesthetic and work-flow issue. We would be able to eliminate the GNOME file selector and, as with the $HOME/Documents enhancement we made in 0.94, we make moving back and forth between the Journal and the file system much more fluid. 4. Multi-selection in Journal: Allow selecting multiple files for operations in the Journal. 5. Thumbnail view in Journal: Several ways of approaching this, but some visualization of the contents from a list-like view would make it much easier to browse the Journal contents. [1] http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Chat_Espanol_2011#Charla_35:_Evaluaci.C3.B3n_.E2.80.93Metadatos_Actividades [2] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Features/Journal_features_for_0.96 [3] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:Detailview_20110313.pdf regards. -walter and gonzalo -- Walter Bender Sugar Labs http://www.sugarlabs.org _______________________________________________ Sugar-devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
